Richard Fairhurst Pianist & Composer
Steinway artist and BBC Jazz Award winner Richard Fairhurst is one of the UK’s leading jazz pianists. He released his first album to critical acclaim when just 19 and has worked with many of the top names in jazz today.
Richard released three albums as leader of the band ‘The Hungry Ants’ which also featured world-renowned saxophonist Iain Ballamy. He won the Pat Smythe award for young musicians of outstanding talent and won a scholarship to study jazz and improvised music at the New School University in Manhattan, New York. He has been a Steinway International Artist since 1998, had a weeks residency at Ronnie Scotts with Iain Ballamy at the age of 20 and in 2000 reached the final of the Montreux Jazz Festival’s Solo Piano Competition.
Since this early success he has gone on to perform all over the UK and at Jazz Festivals worldwide including Jerusalem, Copenhagen, Cologne, Vienna, Cheltenham Jazz festival, Bath festival and Senegal where he supported Joe Zawinul.
He has made numerous appearances on BBC radio programmes such as Jazz On 3, In Tune, Jazz Line-Up and Loose Ends and was selected as one of two artists representing the future of British jazz for a BBC documentary on jazz in the UK. ‘The Times’ newspaper also featured him in their arts column ‘Great British Hopes’.
In 2004 Richard was commissioned to write new music for the Cheltenham International Jazz Festival. He formed a new sextet and this music was released on his fourth album as leader ‘Standing Tall’ which won the prodigious BBC Jazz Award for Best New Work.
As an educator and someone who believes strongly in passing on his skills and teaching musicians to play Jazz Richard has taught at the Royal Academy of Music, the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of music in London. He also designed and set up his own jazz course for younger musicians, which was commissioned by the Richard Attenborough Centre and ran for one year in four separate schools across Leicestershire.
Richard released two highly acclaimed duet albums with Berlin based flugelhorn player Tom Arthurs, ‘Mesmer’ (2007) and ‘Postcards From Pushkin’ (2011). The duo went from strength to strength with a BBC commission for the City of London Festival and a performance at the BBC Proms in 2009. They also performed at Ronnie Scotts for Jazz on 3‘s programme celebrating Jazz in Britain.
His piano trio recording ‘Triptych’ featuring Danish bass player Jasper Hoiby and New York drummer Chris Vatalaro was released in 2009.
Richard worked in a two piano setting with the late great John Taylor. They performed at the ‘Steinway 2 Pianos Festival’ several times and John invited Richard to perform with him at his 70th birthday concert for the BBC in 2012, the concert was broadcast live on Radio 3’s Jazz Line-up programme. They released their album ‘Duets’ on Basho records in 2015.
PRESS
“Award winning pianist Richard Fairhurst is a powerful keyboard virtuoso capable of both meditation and funkiness, but he is as sophisticated a composer as he is a player. He is one of the UK’s most inventive pianists”
— The Guardian
“Fairhurst’s playing is always luminous and lyrical”
— The Times
“In Fairhurst’s originals there is an attention to detail and thematic elegance that slots him neatly into the lineage of Brad Mehldau, Keith Jarrett and Chick Corea”
— BBC Music
“An individual presence on the UK jazz scene. Piano trios are plentiful at the moment but Fairhurst and co. succeed in finding their own absorbing niche”
— The List