The last live music I heard in 2018, outside my home, was some excellent jazz in a city bar (pianist Brian Kellock and bassist Kenny Ellis). The bar was buzzing with people enjoying long lunches and toasting the end of the year. Crockery clattered and the coffee machine hissed. The music was merrily applauded, but […]

My first American review of Speaking the Piano has just appeared in American Music Teacher (December 2018/Jan 2019). It’s a relief to me to have the approval of professional teachers, for as I explain in the book my own experience of teaching has evolved slowly and organically out of my activities as a performer. I […]

In my new book Speaking the Piano, there’s a chapter about the time I went to America in the 1980s to learn jazz piano. I loved learning about jazz, but didn’t find a way into the jazz world at that time. One of the reasons was my feeling of discomfort at being a female instrumentalist […]

I was doing a radio interview the other day about my new book ‘Speaking the Piano.’ While waiting in the studio, I got chatting to the man on duty in reception. I was holding a copy of my book. He asked me what it was about, so I told him it was about learning music. […]

I was complaining last week to a fellow musician about the difficulty of getting students to reply to emails. ‘You’d think they would reply to email precisely because it’s so easy to click on ‘reply’ and write a few words’, I said. ‘I have exactly the same problem’, he said. ‘I think it’s because a […]