InMusic – the parent company of Moog Music – has donated an extensive collection of vintage synthesizers, prototype models, schematics and letters to the Bob Moog Foundation Archives.

The vast collection of 4,489 items includes a Fairlight CMI, a Synton System 3000 modular system, and a bench-model Minimoog Voyager prototype.

There are also letters and schematics from legendary synth pioneer Bob Moog's personal office files and effects, alongside rare product catalogues and industry magazines dating back decades.

The donation shines a light on Moog's personal and professional life, revealing thoughts, ideas, and providing fascinating insights into his relationships with other visionaries like Wendy Carlos and Herb Deutsch through letters of correspondence.

The Bob Moog Foundation was established in 2005 to pay tribute to the godfather of subtractive synthesis and an icon of electronic music. The collection now consists of over 15,000 materials, preserved at the so-called 'Moogseum' in Asheville, North Carolina, where Moog lived for the final 25 years of his life.

"The Bob Moog Foundation serves as an essential steward of one of the most important legacies in electronic music," said Joe Richardson, President of Moog Music and Executive Vice President of inMusic.

"We are proud to contribute these materials so they can be preserved and made accessible to researchers, educators, musicians, and fans."

The Foundation's Executive Director Michelle Moog-Koussa added: "This donation helps solidify the Bob Moog Foundation Archives as a world-class repository for Moog and electronic music history. Every donated piece helps us tell the story of Bob's complex, indelible legacy."

Visit the Moogseum's website.

A listing has appeared on music gear marketplace Reverb for a Yamaha CS-80 that the seller claims belonged to legendary Greek composer and producer Vangelis, priced at a whopping £400,000 – more than $534,000 in US dollars. (And that's with a 10% discount.)

"This is Vangelis' very first Yamaha CS-80," the product description reads. The seller Synthesizerman describes the synth as "fully functional with its original stand and lid", and says it's in "excellent condition", aside from small cosmetic blemishes and a cigarette burn on one of its keys.

"This is the real deal. Early prototype no serial number. It can demolish a whole block of flats. This is the 'Spiral' CS-80, historic. Priced accordingly."

If this is a legitimate claim — and it's important to note that there's no evidence provided that this synth actually belonged to Vangelis, other than the seller's word — then this would be a "holy grail" synth and a collectors' item of historical significance.

The CS-80 is one of the most sought-after vintage synthesizers and regularly fetches five-figure sums on the second-hand market. A well-maintained example that was verifiably owned by Vangelis (the musical figure most closely associated with the instrument) would represent a rare, museum-grade piece of musical history.

What's more, if someone forks out the asking price for this CS-80, this could well be the highest price ever paid for a celebrity-owned synth, far surpassing the $115,200 paid at auction last year for Florian Schneider of Kraftwerk's EMS Synthi A. (Interestingly, Schneider's Sennheiser VSM-201 vocoder fetched more than double that, selling for $256,000.)

Though this CS-80 has the potential to smash that record, the fact that it’s been casually listed on Reverb rather than sold through a professional auction house with independent authentication is likely to dissuade buyers from parting with their cash.

The seller claims that the CS-80 was used by Vangelis on Spiral, widely regarded as a landmark release in electronic music history, and an album that laid the groundwork for the vastly influential Blade Runner soundtrack and demonstrated the power of Yamaha’s then-innovative CS-80.

The CS-series instruments were some of the first fully integrated polyphonic synthesizers and some of the earliest commercial synths to feature preset memory. In a 1984 interview, Vangelis himself called the CS-80 “the most important synthesizer in my career", describing it as "the best analogue synthesizer design there has ever been.”

This iconic instrument was pivotal in shaping the futuristic, ethereal soundscape of Vangelis’ score for 1982 classic Blade Runner, but even if this CS-80 was indeed used on Spiral, there’s no guarantee that Vangelis – who recorded with multiple CS-80 synths – reprised it for later projects.

Whether the listing is genuine or not remains to be seen – we've reached out to the seller for comment.

Before becoming one of hip-hop's most sought-after producers, Rogét Chahayed spent years honing his craft as a conservatory-trained pianist, composer and session musician.

That technical foundation, combined with an apprenticeship under Dr. Dre and Mel-Man, has helped him develop a musical identity that's landed him credits on some of the biggest releases of the past decade.

Having contributed to tracks such as Travis Scott's Sicko Mode, Doja Cat's Kiss Me More and Drake's recent chart-topper Janice STFU, Chahayed's studio reflects a balance between classical musicianship and modern production. Packed with hardware synths though it is, he still enters studio environments with the same instruments that first sparked his love of music.

Asked which pieces of gear he simply couldn't live without, Chahayed doesn't hesitate before naming the keyboard that's central to his creative process. “My number one keyboard is definitely the Nord Stage 4, but I combine some of my favourite sounds from the Stage 3.

“If I was going away on a trip for a week and could only bring one keyboard, I’d bring that one, because I know where every sound is blindfolded. It's also a performance keyboard and when you're recording a performance in the studio it's going to resonate like that on the record.

Meanwhile, when it comes to creating depth and texture, two keyboards consistently earn a place in Chahayed's sessions. “Another one that I love is the Korg KRONOS, which is fantastic for layering and organising sound categories. There are a few sounds on there that are just brilliant and it has the perfect combination of what you might call low-quality or low-tier sounds and ones that really cut through.”

“Another keyboard that I love to use is the Prophet X, which has an unbelievable sound selection. The 8Dio sound engine is the same that the Native Instruments and Kontakt people use, so it’s very cinematic.

Though Chahayed now owns a vast collection of instruments, he fondly reminisces about lusting after gear during his early days as a musician breaking into the industry. “When I started making a little money, I'd go to Guitar Center, try the keyboards and find myself coming up with all these amazing ideas.

"I thought to myself, ‘wow, if I had a studio with all these keyboards on a wall I’d be coming up with stuff all the time.’” Fast forward a few years, and Chahayed has built that very studio, which he describes as an “amazing” space to work in.

“I finally built my home studio, which is a really amazing place,” Chahayed says. “I have two walls of keyboards with about 30 or 40 synths and a Steinway piano alongside a Fender Rhodes and a drum kit.

“Over the years, I've developed an amazing system with my engineer Julian Vasquez where I’ll just bring a Nord Stage 4 and my laptop, which has millions of sounds organised for easy access to strings, synths, brass, woodwinds, basses and guitars. It’s like I’m playing one of those games where you're in control of an army and you have access to this whole artillery of sounds.”

Hardware may form the backbone of his setup, but Chahayed says his workflow wouldn't be complete without a handful of software instruments. “I can't live without my Kontakt libraries, so my MacBook is very important and I've been finding some incredible sounds in Native Instruments’ Play Series libraries recently.”

“I began as a piano player before shifting into keyboards, but realised that there was a whole world of VSTs that I needed to get into. At first, I was just showing up to sessions with one keyboard, but then it changed to a laptop loaded with Kontakt.

But what about the instrument that started it all? “I guess the last piece of gear or equipment I need is a good piano. Wherever I am, the piano is always the thing that grounds me; it’s where I discover a lot of movement and things that work with those other sounds, so my Steinway Model B grand piano is one of the most important tools that I own.”

Being able to learn a song by ear is a great skill to have - it means that, if you give yourself a bit of time, you can get your head and fingers around pretty much anything - but Toto’s Rosanna is a tricksier song than most.

So, when Clyde Lawrence of the band Lawrence was asked by Pianote to learn the 1982 hit as quickly as possible while being filmed, he had quite the challenge on his hands.

To begin with, Lawrence is played the song without being told what it is. Surprisingly, he doesn’t immediately recognise it: “I don’t know if I know this,” he muses, but the nod of recognition comes as the vocals kick in.

Sitting at the piano, Lawrence’s first task is to work out Rosanna’s starting key (G major) and the various modulations that follow. He then sets about creating a chord chart, and learns to appreciate some of the intricacies of the arrangement.

“I've definitely sang along to this chorus many times, but I've never really thought about the fact that there's a measure of two in there,” he says.

And then, of course, there’s that synth solo, a complex beast that was cooked up by Steve Porcaro and David Paich and features multiple parts. “This has a lot of really fun twists and turns,” says Lawrence as he attempts to learn it. “You picked a great one.”

Eventually, he’s ready to go for a take, and he gives what sounds like a pretty good performance - though not one that’s completely faithful to the original. But then there’s a twist: who should appear on FaceTime but keyboard legend and (until recently) Toto touring member Greg Phillinganes, who has some words of advice.

Well, we say advice, but Phillinganes is pretty dismissive of Lawrence’s chord chart: “The chart means nothing,” he says, bluntly. “It’s not the chords - it’s the movement in the chords.”

Phillinganes goes on to explain what he means, and the penny drops. “I wasn’t doing any of that - I was just doing my own thing,” says Lawrence. “I was just kind of like comping with the melody, but that’s way better.”

“That’s called the lazy musician’s way,” quips Phillinganes. “Well, you know me,” replies Lawrence.

Armed with his new information, the young padawan goes for another take, and there’s a striking difference. Phillinganes, meanwhile, appears to be backstage at a Toto show: “In about 45 minutes, I’m going to be doing it for real,” he says. Beat that.

He might frequently be cited as one of the greatest keyboard players of all time, but on a technical level, Genesis stalwart Tony Banks doesn’t rate himself as highly as you might think.

In fact, in a new interview with the LA Times, Banks suggests that part of the reason for his success was that he was able to create workarounds in his keyboard parts so that any deficiencies in his playing weren’t exposed.

“I cheat, really,” he admits. “I’m not a great technical player at all. Because I was always writing for myself, I could avoid the things I couldn’t play.

“Rick Wakeman has a far better technique than me, but technique has never been my priority. I wanted to explore what you could do with the piano. It’s down to how you use it, what you play. And what I play is what I like.”

Banks may be being a little too modest here, but he does say that, in other areas of musicianship, he liked to push himself a bit more. Songwriting, for example.

“I avoided using regular chord sequences because I felt it was lazy,” he explains. “A lot of modern pop goes through variations of C, A minor, F and G, then wobble along on top of it. That doesn’t interest me as a writer. I was always trying weird things.”

What’s more, he has some advice for the aspiring keyboardists who like to upload videos of themselves playing one of his most famous compositions - his piano intro to 1973 Genesis track Firth of Fifth, from 1973's Selling England by the Pound.

“A lot of people play it very well on YouTube, but they go too fast,” he says. “If you play it fast it just sounds tricksy.”

Reflecting on why Genesis managed to cut through commercially, despite their ‘70s prog material being pretty challenging at times, Banks says: “We were lucky that pop music hadn’t gone very far at the time. Obviously groups like King Crimson had tried a few things, but there was still space to go places that hadn’t been explored much.”

“In those days, we sort of got away with it. We managed to carry on enough of an audience to make it practical. I don’t think people’s attention span would go for that sort of thing today.”

Banks says that he still has musical ideas floating around his head, but doesn’t seem particularly motivated to act on them. “That would involve getting the whole machinery going again, and if it’s fine weather, I’m out in the garden,” he explains.

And the possibility of any kind of Genesis reunion with Phil Collins and Mike Rutherford seems even more remote: “Don’t hold your breath for any combination involving Mike or Phil," is Banks’ view on that.

A vintage keyboard belonging to the Stranglers has been restored to something approaching its former glory by the BBC show The Repair Shop.

If you check out yesterday's edition on iplayer, you can see the story of the instrument, a rare 1950s Hohner Cembalet. It originally belonged to Dave Greenfield of the band but had passed through a number of hands and was going to be thrown on to a skip when its owner saw the words ‘The Stranglers’ stencilled on its side and decided to gift it to Greenfield’s replacement, current keyboard player, Toby Housham.

“It was in a very bad state of repair,” said Housham in an interview with BBC Radio Surrey. “The wood was all rotten, the keys didn’t work, the mechanics were all broken so I couldn’t play it! It didn’t actually make a sound.”

“It had had hundreds of gigs, it had been thrown about in the back of an ice cream van which is what they used to go to gigs in (in the band’s early days). Lots of stains and burns. It didn’t play a note.”

It’s now been renovated by the BBC show in their workshop at the Weald and Downland Living Museum in Singleton, West Sussex, which Hounsham says has kept the character of the instrument "brilliantly".

“They actually did it really quickly,” he says. “I did the drop off and then about two three weeks later we filmed the reveal. I really didn’t know how I was going to feel but I was genuinely pretty emotional.”

Housham had been a long-time Stranglers fan. “They were my favourite band growing up. Dave (Greenfield) was my hero, and this was his keyboard, his original keyboard that inspired me to play the keys. And then many years later being in the band, I’m playing his keyboard.”

“They did a beautiful job,” he insists. “One of the things I wanted to keep is all those cigarette burns and dents – they all tell a story. I wanted them to try and keep that character and they did a fantastic job. It looks lovely. It’s got that lovely warm electric piano sound, which is really unique.”

The edition of the Repair Shop that features the keyboard is available on BBC1 and BBC iplayer.

Perry Bamonte, longtime member of The Cure, has died, aged 65, the band confirmed last night on their website.

Bamonte joined the band full-time in 1990, after working as their guitar tech from 1984. He actually left in 2005, forging his own path with Love Amongst Ruin, alongside ex-members of Placebo and Julian Cope’s band, before rejoining The Cure in 2022, two years after he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with the group.

The Cure's official statement called him “Quiet, intense, intuitive, constant and hugely creative", continuing, "‘Teddy’ was a warm-hearted and vital part of the Cure story.

“Looking after the band from 1984 through 1989, he became a full-time member of The Cure in 1990, playing guitar, six-string bass and keyboard on the Wish, Wild Mood Swings, Bloodflowers, Acoustic Hits and The Cure albums, as well as performing more than 400 shows over 14 years.

“He rejoined The Cure in 2022, playing another 90 shows, some of the best in the band’s history, culminating with the Show Of A Lost World concert in London 12th November 2024.

“Our thoughts and condolences are with all his family."

Steve Porcaro, the producer and synth player who played on Thriller, has been talking about his work on that album and two unreleased tracks he co-wrote with Michael Jackson.

This was in 1982, right at the end of the project. Appearing on the Think Like A Synth podcast, which is hosted by Anthony Marinelli – who played on Thriller himself – he described how those tracks came about.

Porcaro said: “He mentioned that he had to jump straight to another project, with his brothers – the Victory album – and he was hoping that I could help him write and produce some stuff off of that album. Literally two weeks after Thriller was done, he started showing up.”

“I’d give him a tape of just a synth jam I had done and one of them he really latched onto. About a week later, I was at the studio at David Paich’s house (the Toto man also contributed to Thriller) and I actually had a bunch of technical people over doing stuff and Michael just showed up at the door – unannounced – and said he wanted to throw a vocal.”

Porcaro continued: “He knew I’d be there. I asked the people to wait out in the back yard for a little while. And it was the most unbelievable thing I’d ever seen. He did nine vocal passes, beginning to end, on this song we were working on. He did lead vocals, doubles, backgrounds, harmonies.

"All the way through I never stopped the tape once. He would just go through the whole song and he’d say ‘give me another track’. We did that nine times and then he said ‘I’m outta here’ and he left.”

That track was Chicago 1945. The synth player recalls that every vocal was perfect, although he said he had to take out some of the tics that were becoming a Jackson habit.

Then just a few days later, Jackson turned up at Porcaro’s door – again, unannounced. “It’s 9am in the morning and someone knocks at the door and I open it and it’s Michael and he says ‘let’s do something’. I hated writing nose to nose with anybody because I’m afraid of drawing a blank but we wrote this second song, Dream Away, nose to nose.

"He grabbed a book that was lying around and wrote some lyrics and started playing this thing on a Roland electric piano. He sang a lead vocal and we put it together real quick.”

Those two tracks remain in the vaults. Chicago 1945 was a contender for both the Victory album and Jackson’s own Bad album, but missed the cut both times. Dream Away was considered for the posthumous album Xscape but again was overlooked.

“I always thought they’d be plenty of time to finish these with Michael," lamented Porcaro. "But unfortunately we lost him in 2009.'

Rick Wakeman has been in the wars of late – he underwent surgery on his spinal cord earlier this year and has had further brain surgery in the last week. However, he has revealed that the latter has been successful and he is now on the mend.

Writing on his website, he shared a ‘positive health update’. He began: “As many of you may be aware, a few months ago I had to reschedule my American tour because of health issues as I was diagnosed with the neurological disorder ‘normal pressure hydrocephalus’ and following hospitalised operational tests in September, I had the necessary corrective ‘shunt’ brain surgery last week, which I am pleased to say was very successful and I am now recuperating at home being cared for by my lovely wife and our wonderful furry healing animals!”

The prog legend did say he had to take things easy for a while, but that he should be healthy enough to travel to the US for those rescheduled dates with his son Oliver in March 2026. He also confirmed that he will go ahead for two concerts for the 2 Saving Strays charity in Norwich and Ipswich on December 19 and 20.

He continued: “I am also pleased to say that it doesn't seem to have affected my piano playing in any way as I still seem to be very capable of hitting the odd wrong note here and there when I lose my concentration!!

"Once again, I'd like to thank everybody who wished me well over the last few months for a speedy recovery as it really did mean a lot to me.”

Those rescheduled dates with Oliver Wakeman run from March 11 in Ridgefield, Connecticut, through to March 29 in Red Bank, New Jersey. Oliver is, of course, an acclaimed keyboard player in his own right and has served time in Yes, though not at the same time as his old man.

It’s the first time father and son will be performing live together. Announcing the tour, Wakeman Sr said in a statement: "It's always an honour for me to share the stage with one of my wonderful children,and for the first time, it's a thrill to be actually doing a tour with my eldest son Oliver. I know it will be very special – especially if, on the odd occasion, he buys me dinner!"

Tributes have been coming in to Stephen Luscombe, the keyboard player and multi-instrumentalist who for years was one half of Blancmange.

Luscombe’s death was confirmed by his partner in the early '80s synth pop band, Neil Arthur, over the weekend. “Heartbroken. RIP Stephen. Love you forever,” Arthur wrote on Facebook.

Meanwhile, chart contemporary Boy George took to Twitter/ X and said: “Yesterday we said goodbye to Stephen Luscombe from Blancmange he was also in ‘The West India Company’ and we went to India together which was amazing.

“Stephen along with Neil Arthur made one of the most seminal electro tracks. ‘Living On The Ceiling’. I saw them do it live supporting our Erasure last year. Bye Stephen. Legend!”

Fellow synth-pop icons Soft Cell put on Facebook: “Very sad to hear of the passing of Stephen Luscombe of Blancmange, and send our condolences both to his family and friends, as well as to Neil Arthur at this time. Stephen was a unique, talented, and innovative musician, and leaves a rich back catalogue of Eastern-influenced electronica as his legacy.”

Blitzed Magazine wrote: “Very sad to learn that Stephen Luscombe has died. A founder-member of synth-pop outfit Blancmange, he had been suffering from ill health for some time. Our thoughts go out to Stephen’s family and friends at this time.”

Luscombe and Arthur formed Blancmange in 1979 though it would take a few years before they caught a break, this came when they were included on the 1981 Some Bizarre compilation album alongside The The and Soft Cell.

The duo signed to London Records and hit the Top Ten in late 1982 with Living On The Ceiling. It would be the first of seven Top 40 hits over the next three years, including a cover of Abba’s The Day Before You Came that ended up charting higher than the original.

Blancmange split in 1986 and, as Boy George alluded to, Luscombe persued his interest in Indian music in the West India Company which saw him recording with tabla master Pandit Dinesh and Asha Bhosle (she of “Brimful Of Asha’ fame). He and Arthur reunited in 2011 and released the fourth Blancmange album, Blanc Burn.

Luscombe had to depart the band soon afterwards after suffering an abdominal aortic aneurysm. It’s not clear if this was a factor in Luscombe’s passing – at the time of writing no cause of death had been confirmed.

Cradle Of Filth’s South American tour was all going smoothly until it wasn’t, when two days ago, keyboardist/vocalist Zoë Marie Federoff quit the band, her husband, guitarist Marek ‘Ashok’ Šmerda, announced he was also quitting at the end of the tour, before frontman Dani Filth decided to fire Ashok with immediate effect.

In a statement, Federoff complains of a “threatening and abusive” atmosphere in the band, low pay, and a contract that her lawyer described as “psychopathic”, revealing that she and her husband had planned to leave the band months ago.

Filth responded, pushing back against the allegations made by Federoff against the band’s management as “completely unjust and unfounded”.

Joining the English black metal stalwarts in 2014, Ashok recorded four albums with the band. Federoff joined in 2022. Both played on Cradle’s most recent album, The Screaming Of The Valkyries.

Federoff’s statement, posted to her Instagram account, was accompanied by a copy of the contract she and Ashok had received from Cradle of Filth. Federoff says her lawyer called it the “most psychopathic contract a session musician could ever be handed”.

Federoff shared a litany of complaints against the band’s management, whom she alleges are working at the behest of Filth (real name Daniel Davey).

“When I called them out on this attempted theft of album advance money from Screaming Of The Valkyries, they called me ‘cancer’ and a ‘dead horse’ and threatened to fire me,” wrote Federoff. “The frontman does nothing to stop them and hides behind them while they belittle and steal. We hold the frontman responsible for hiring this management and never advocating for his team, only himself.”

Federoff says the money she and Ashok earned from playing in Cradle Of Filth did not cover the cost of living, and complained of a “toxic” atmosphere. She lays the blame firmly at Filth’s door.

“He might not get his hands dirty, but in the end, he directs them,” says Federoff. “The atmosphere he creates is threatening and abusive, and he constantly exploits us for very low wages, yet always demands exclusivity to Cradle’s schedule. It is madness to keep people locked in poverty for the ego of one person.”

Ashok said that he fully intended to see out the tour with the band, and wished Federoff’s replacement, Kelsey Peters, good luck. But his statement was scathing.

He echoed Federoff’s sentiments, citing a low pay, high stress environment, and said that for some time they didn’t feel the band cared for its members. “It has been years of unprofessional behaviour from people above us that led to our decision,” he wrote.

He also took the opportunity to distance himself from Cradle Of Filth’s unlikely collaboration with Ed Sheeran, decrying it as “foolish clown antics”, and asked that all of his compositions to be removed from any upcoming releases, including the Sheeran track.

“First it was charity single for kids, then for profit single, then on next album, and now who knows,” he writes. “I just do not want to be involved anymore, no disrespect to Ed Sheeran.”

Just a few hours later, Ashok was out. Cradle Of Filth announced that they were going to fly in a temp, and played their show in Montevideo, Uruguay with Donny Burbage handling all guitars.

Kylie Minogue’s best records - by which we mean the pop/disco ones, of course - tend to be stuffed with big synth sounds, so getting them right for her live show is crucial. It turns out, though, that the sonic centrepiece of her current Tension tour is a pretty compact keyboard: the UDO Super 6.

Released around five years ago, this 12-voice analogue hybrid has beefy tones to burn, making it the ideal synth to handle the pads, leads, stabs and chords that feature in Kylie’s impressive roster of hits

Standing behind that synth is keyboard player Hazel Mills, who’s previously toured with the likes of Florence + The Machine, Blur’s Dave Rowntree, Goldfrapp, Birdy, and Fraser T. Smith. And in a new video that was filmed pre-show at one of Kylie’s recent dates at London’s O2 Arena, she’s revealed some of the tricks of her gigging trade.

Mills’ rig appears to be impressively small. The Super 6 runs through a couple of pedals - the Eventide H90 Harmonizer and Boss RE-202 Space Echo - and there’s a larger master keyboard below.

In the video, as well as hearing some of Mills’ Super 6 Kylie patches in action we also learn that she uses an expression pedal (mainly to open and close the filter) and has the UDO synth hooked up over MIDI for program change and CC messages that come into play when parameters need to be automated because Mills has “no free hands and feet at the time”.

There’s also MIDI clock, so delays and LFOs are nicely in sync, and the Super 6’s audio output goes through Apple’s MainStage app, which is used to generate that all-important sidechain compression for those pulsing pads.

Kylie’s Tension tour is currently in South America and will conclude in Mexico later this month.

Bobby Whitlock, the Memphis musician who came of age alongside soul legends and went on to play with Eric Clapton and George Harrrison, has died at the age of 77.

Born in Memphis, Tennessee, Whitlock was signed to Stax Records in the ‘60s, where he befriended the likes of Booker T, Steve Cropper and Albert King. His first recording is believed to be the handclaps he provided on Sam & Dave’s I Thank You, in 1967, when Whitlock was still a teenager.

Despite being given the option to record an album for a Stax subsidiary label, Whitlock chose to leave Memphis soon after, recording with husband and wife duo Delaney & Bonnie, who ended up supporting Eric Clapton’s Blind Faith supergroup.

After parting company with Delaney & Bonnie, Whitlock would go on to work with Clapton on George Harrison’s post-Beatles All Things Must Pass, a triple album, which also featured Clapton, drummer Jim Gordon and bassist Carl Radle. Together, they became Derek and the Dominos, releasing their only album - Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs - in 1970.

Whitlock played a key role on the record, writing or co-writing seven songs. He didn’t write or play the piano coda on Layla, though, and is one of those who’s supported Rita Coolidge’s claim that she co-wrote it with Jim Gordon - who did receive a writing credit - who she’d previously been in a relationship with.

“Jim took the melody from Rita’s song and didn’t give her credit for writing it,” Whitlock claimed in an interview in 2011. “Her boyfriend ripped her off. I knew but nobody would listen to or believe me. I have told this story for years.”

After Derek and the Dominos broke up, in 1971, Whitlock embarked on a solo career, and is also said to have made an uncredited appearance on the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. He later stepped back from the music business, but re-emerged at the turn of the century, and finally played with Eric Clapton again on the BBC’s Later… with Jools Holland show in 2000, performing Bell Bottom Blues.

Clapton is among those who’ve paid tribute to Whitlock since news of his death broke, writing on Facebook: “Our dear friend Bobby Whitlock, has passed away at 77, our sincere condolences to Bobby’s wife CoCo and his family on this sad day…. RIP Bobby xxx”

You might not have heard of The Hassles, a US band that formed in 1964, but you’ll almost certainly know the name of their keyboard player. A certain Billy Joel joined the outfit in 1966, staying with them until they broke up, in 1969.

Formed in Long Island, The Hassles only released a couple of albums, but made a big enough impression to be inducted into the Long Island Music & Entertainment Hall of Fame a couple of weeks ago. There to accept the honour was drummer Jon Small, who went on to become a successful music video producer and director, and during his speech, Mix reports that he discussed how Joel ended up joining.

The opening came up after original bassist and organ player Harry Weber left the band in 1966. “We had a search for a new keyboard player,” says Small. “Our managers at the time, Danny Mazur and Irwin Mazur, owned a club called My House, and we were the house band. It was a great club, and we were building a following. Danny came up with this great idea - he said, ‘We’ll put an ad in the paper that My House is looking for a new house band and all the Long Island bands will come in. You just sit there and you’ll steal the keyboard player!’”

Sounds like a decent plan, but it wasn’t one that bore immediate fruit.

“Band after band came in and there was nobody we liked - and finally Billy’s band came in, called The Lost Souls, and none of the remaining Hassles liked Billy,” Small remembers. “They thought he was too short. He wore a beret, and it was just very kind of corny; he sang on one knee! But he had ‘it’ - I saw it. I came from a family of musicians, so I could see past the dust, and I knew he had it, so I asked him to come into Danny’s office, and I made him an offer to join The Hassles.”

Small remembers that Joel was reluctant to jump ship, but was convinced when he was told that joining The Hassles would come with a very enticing sweetener for a young keyboard player.

“He said, ‘I’m not leaving my brothers. I go to school with these guys. No, I can’t. How could I do it?’” says Small. “I knew I was losing the argument - what am I going to do? All of a sudden, it came to me. I said, ‘So look, if you join The Hassles, I’ll give you this brand-new B3 Hammond [organ].’ He said, ‘Fuck those guys!’”

The Hassles’ recordings ended up being the first releases to feature Joel who, as we all know, went on to have a stellar career as a singer-songwriter. There was one further stop with Small before that, though: Attila, the short-lived drums-organ rock duo that the pair formed.

Their single, eponymous album was released in 1970 and, as Small is happy to admit, wasn’t great. It came after Irvin Mazur had secured them a deal with Epic Records that came with a $50,000 advance.

“We were so excited to get it,” says Small. “And then we went and we made the record in one day, including mixing it - and that’s why it sucked.”

Joe Armon-Jones is worried about the future of music. The London-based keyboardist, composer and producer – known as a member of Mercury winners Ezra Collective, as well as a regular collaborator of Nubya Garcia and a solo artist – spends a lot of time considering the creation, impact and importance of music, and he has some concerns.

“I think a lot about how much credence is given to music as something that people need – something as important as oxygen and food in people's lives,” he says, when we visit him in his Aquarii Studios. “It's very difficult to imagine what life is like without music.”

Armon-Jones’s attitude isn’t the same old ‘music isn’t as good as it was in my day’ rhetoric prevalent among a certain type of middle-aged keyboard warrior. More accurately, Armon-Jones is literally worried about whether music has a future – or whether the art form is heading for extinction.

This is the broad theme behind his recent two-part solo album, All The Quiet, an ambitious jazz-dub concept album featuring contributions from the likes of Greentea Peng, Wu-Lu, Yazmin Lacey, Hak Baker and Nubya Garcia.

“It might be a topic that's been done to death, but the value of music has dropped considerably since I was born,” he explains. “It's dropped from being something you have to pay for, to something that people expect to access for free. While it’s a great thing that there's a low bar for people getting into music and into production, it's not great that less people are trying to perfect their art.”

As a result, he tells us, fewer people are dedicating themselves to mastering a particular musical vocation. There are fewer dedicated producers, fewer engineers, fewer committed players.

“I feel like music has lost a little bit of its…” he trails off. “It's difficult to say this without sounding jaded, but I really care about music, and a lot of the people that I spend time around really care about music. This album is trying to stress its importance – the therapeutic effect that it has on me when I play it. And hopefully on other people when we play it to them.”

Thematically, this plays out through a science fiction narrative that runs through the two LPs. All The Quiet imagines a world in the year 3999 where music has become a lost art and creativity is suppressed. The few remaining musicians and instruments exist in a community known as The Citadel.

Part one, released in April, tracks the calm before the storm, while the recently released part two follows a final showdown as government forces attempt to squash a musical rebellion.

If that all sounds a little high-concept, rest assured that the albums work equally well if you don’t engage with its loftier themes and simply enjoy the musicality of the groove-driven jazz, funk and dub compositions. Armon-Jones is well aware of the challenges of making such an ambitious, epic release digestible for all kinds of listeners.

“In my head, it’s one album – it's all one project,” he explains “But I know how listening works, and I know how my own attention span works. Two sets of one hour, to me, makes sense in terms of listening, rather than trying to throw all this music at people at once and get them to try and hear it all at the same time.”

Despite the album conjuring images of a musical apocalypse, he doesn’t think we’re on such an irreversible path just yet.

“The takeaway, in my head, is that we need to protect music,” he says, “really look after it and not take it for granted. We need to put funding into it – fund music education, people being shown different forms of music, the radio playing a more varied set of music, not just the same songs again and again and again.”

From playing to producing

It’s perhaps unsurprising that Armon-Jones places so much value in music, given how much he was exposed to it from a young age. He grew up in a very musical family. His parents were both jazz musicians. The influence of being surrounded by music led to him playing and consuming a variety of styles in his formative years.

“From a very young age, I was hearing a lot of jazz music, a lot of funk,” he says. “I was lucky enough to have a piano in the house that my dad and mum played a lot. I just grew up around a lot of improvising. I guess it's in the genes.

“I got pretty quickly into jazz and I was learning classical because it seemed like the thing to do if you're learning an instrument,” he recalls. “Looking back, it's a strange way for things to be set up. I'm glad I learned classical technique and things like that, but I was always more drawn to jazz – more drawn to improvising and making things up myself, rather than playing sheet music that other people had written.”

He studied music at college, but the real turning point in Armon-Jones’s career came through his involvement with Tomorrow’s Warriors, the London-based artist development program that has played a significant role in invigorating the UK’s vibrant contemporary jazz scene.

It’s here that Armon-Jones first met fellow Ezra Collective members Femi Koleoso, TJ Koleoso, Ife Ogunjobi and James Mollison, as well as other regular collaborators including Nubya Garcia and Moses Boyd.

Despite the early start as a player, the producer side of Armon-Jones’ skillset developed much later. “The first eight to 10 years of me playing professionally, I wasn't really interested in that stuff,” he says. “I was more interested in the notes and the rhythm and that side of things, and less about how the sounds were treated.”

That changed when he found himself sharing a house with three producers, including another future collaborator, DJ and electronic musician Maxwell Owin.

“He taught me a lot of what I know about electronic music,” he explains. “Me and him were listening to a lot of Burial and stuff like that, you know, and trying to figure out the things that go in the background of those tracks.”

The two musicians would go on to work on a variety of projects together, including the 2023 collaborative album Archetype, which pairs Armon-Jones’s jazz influences with dark garage beats and elements of dubstep and grime.

Working with Owin gave Armon-Jones a crash course on in-the-box production. However, his current hardware-heavy setup and Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry-influenced style of dub mixing is something developed through experimentation and a process of trial and error.

“In terms of the actual hardware and physical gear – compressors and delays and things that are in the real world in front of me – I tried to learn that stuff myself, especially over lockdown,” he says. “That was when I got a proper mixing desk, got some very basic EQs and compressors. Then I tried to start learning how that stuff really works.

“I definitely didn't know what compression was back then, even though I talked about it. It took me a long time of playing with the dial and hearing the effect on the music to to really understand it. It helped to have real pieces of gear that I could do that with.”

Those initial studio experiments focused heavily on the fundamental elements of the dub sound – heavy basslines and deep kick drums. As Armon-Jones explains though, he quickly realised he needed to take a more holistic approach.

“When you start mixing, unless someone's there to tell you, you tend to just put all your energy and effort into what you think the music needs – which is bass and kick,” he tells us. “You spend all this time trying to get them perfect.

“It took me a very long time to realize that mixing is the complete sum of everything in the song. If you're ignoring parts of the song it doesn't work. You have to be listening to everything in context.”

First take, best take...

As a writer and composer, a large part of creating All The Quiet came down to Armon-Jones’s ability to trust his collaborators to improvise around his roughly sketched ideas.

“[The songs] started with seeds of ideas,” he explains. “I'll record voice notes. I’ll sit at a piano or a synth whenever I have a spare moment. I know it sounds weird, but I find I write the best tunes when I'm supposed to be doing something else, you know, at a sound check or when sound check’s finished, and everyone's going to dinner. It's like, I really want to go to dinner, but that's when the ideas come, annoyingly.”

As a band leader and producer, Armon-Jones aims to create an atmosphere of low-pressure, in order to capture his collaborators' freshest, loosest takes on the material.

“I tend to try and explain [a basic structure] before we've done a take,” he tells us. “I'll play on the piano with the bass player and the drummer. Maybe show them the idea, show them the arrangement of what we're going to do with it, roughly, but not, you know, eight bars this, eight bars of that.

“Then we’ll play, like, half a minute of it, just to make sure everyone's got it and that it’s sounding good in the engineer’s room. Then we’ll go for it and normally use what we get first time.”

A lot of the tracks that make up All The Quiet 1 and 2 are derived from these initial, first time improvisations around an idea, which Armon-Jones claims often captures the musicians at their best.

“I really like the sound of people's first explorations of stuff,” he explains, “like a drummer's first time playing a tune. They're just enjoying it, basically not overthinking. Because it's the first time, it's kind of this weird, no pressure moment.”

Beyond just capturing the best takes of his original ideas, these low-pressure recording sessions often create the right environment to generate completely fresh, unplanned ideas, some of which ended up on the final record.

“Quite often, what will happen is we'll play the song that I've written, and at the end of that recording, we'll go into something else that is spur of the moment,” he says. “A good example of this is Lavender – that wasn't written at all, that was out of the back of something else that we played that was in a different key, different vibe. There's a special kind of moment that can happen after you've done a good take of something where everyone feels really confident and happy and comfortable.”

Because much of the record was created fairly spontaneously, a certain amount of editing was required in order to tidy tracks up into their final arrangements. Armon-Jones would cut certain sections to tighten up run times and help mkae tracks progress a little quicker.

Working in such a loose manner could prove to be tricky, from a technical point of view, but, as he explains, the secret to making it work is a rock solid rhythm section.

“We don't play the click track,” he explains, “so I tend to have to make sure I'm playing with drummers that play solidly, so that I can still edit if I need to get rid of something. I'm lucky enough to play with drummers who, even without a click track, you can take four bars and put it together and it doesn't sound like they've changed speed.”

In the video at the top of this page Armon-Jones explains more about the album's themes and creation, and why he values working with Greentea Peng and Wu-Lu. You can take a tour of his Aquarii Studios in the clip below.

Joe Armon-Jones All The Quiet Parts 1 & 2 are out now via Aquarii records.

Former Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers keyboard player Benmont Tench has given us another insight into Rick Rubin’s sometimes idiosyncratic studio demands, recalling the time he worked on Johnny Cash’s American IV: The Man Comes Around, which Rubin produced.

Speaking to Vulture, Tench began by saying that Rubin’s philosophy is that “he doesn’t want anything to get in the way of the song,” and this credo came into sharp focus when he was recording his piano parts for Cash’s version of The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.

“It was hard for me to find myself on song because of its simplicity,” remembers Tench. “Rick said, ‘Have a pass on the piano.’ I did my thing. And he said, ‘That’s great. It’s just what I want, but you’re playing too many notes. You need to simplify.’ I simplified. ‘That’s great, but it’s still too much.’ I simplified again. ‘That’s great, but it’s still too much.’ In one spot, I played one note. And he said, ‘That’s great. Do that, but play less and it’ll be perfect.’”

Now, you may have worked out the issue with Rubin’s request here. Tench certainly had, and he was happy to raise it.

“I said, ‘Rick, I’m playing one note, how the hell do I play less?’ He said, ‘I know you can do it.’”

Pep talk concluded, Tench goes on to say that he finally nailed it: “Somehow, I played the note, and I was able to make it quieter. I played so little that I could barely hear myself.”

Sounds frustrating, but Tench suggests that he saw satisfying Rubin as a challenge, and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. “Boy, was it fun,” he recalls. “It was like breaking out a puzzle.”

That said, Tench also admits that not everything Rubin suggested went to plan: take the time that he came up with the idea of Johnny Cash singing a rearranged version of Robert Palmer’s Addicted To Love in the stripped-back style that he and Rubin were working in at the time.

“I remember thinking, ‘This is ridiculous,’ says Tench. “We gave it a good shot, and he was very sincere about singing it - he sang it well. But it was what you would expect if you know the song: ‘Might as well face it, you’re addicted to love.’ Johnny finally said, ‘This isn’t working.’ Nobody was bummed or embarrassed. We tried it, but it didn’t work, so let’s try something else.”

London-based keyboardist and producer Joe Armon-Jones is an artist that has made an impression right across the UK’s vibrant music scene. As a musician, Armon-Jones is a member of recent Brit-winners Ezra Collective, as well as being a prolific sideman for lauded jazz artists including Moses Boyd and Nubya Garcia.

It’s in his solo work that the purest form of Armon-Jones’ vision shines though, combining elements of jazz, dub and the more atmospheric ends of UK electronic music, via collaborations with artists such as DJ/producer Maxwell Owin and dubstep figurehead Mala.

This year sees Armon-Jones return with his first solo album in six years, which represents his most ambitious statement to date. Split across two installments, All The Quiet sees Armon-Jones collaborating with the likes of Greentea Peng, Wu Lu, Hak Baker and Yazmin Lacey, along with some of his other regular collaborators.

The two-part album is released on his own Aquarii Records imprint, and Armon-Jones has also recently completed work on Aquarii studio – a custom designed space built around his dub-influenced approach to production and mixing.

We visited Armon-Jones in his new studio to discuss the creation of the studio and album, and how a few pieces of gear define his spacious, rough-edged sound – which you can watch in action in our studio video.

"I spent quite a long time getting very frustrated in houses that I used to live in,” he tells us. “I'd set up a studio in the back of the house in a very far from adequate room, with very far from adequate treatment. Not to mention no soundproofing.

“Apart from just pissing other people off with your kick drum and bass going for hours and hours, it just wasn’t the right environment to get stuff to sound the way I like it. I’d be running from the studio to other speakers in the house, basically going insane trying to get mixes to sound correct.”

Aquarii Studios is built in a conveniently sized room at the back of the garden in Armon-Jones’ house, equipped and soundproofed with the help of Praxis Audio’s Aiden Wallwork.

"I was very impressed how fast he did it – basically on his own as well,” Armon-Jones explains. “Most of the manual labour was Aiden, with me trying to help, but not really helping – mostly making things harder.”

While the design of the studio has been built around Armon-Jones’ distinctive approach to recording and mixing, he tells us the look and feel of the space was of equal importance to the sound and layout.

"I was just trying to design it how I liked it. Things like, the wood and the colour of it, which sounds like a bit of an extra thing when you're talking about a music studio, but actually, if you're spending your whole life somewhere, it's good for it to aesthetically feel like ‘you’.”

Any musician or producer that’s spent long sessions trying to work in unpleasant or uncomfortable rooms will likely agree with that sentiment.

“There are windows and there's sunlight, and there's the atmosphere that I like,” he tells us. “There's space to record drums. I have my organ in here. I have my Rhodes in here, my synths. I have space for my mixing desk and all the gear that I want to use. It's perfect for what I need, really.”

Mixing All The Quiet

While, as he tells us, the studio space has been designed as a home for his multitude of different projects, a key driving force behind its design was a desire to finish the process of recording and mixing the two parts of new album All The Quiet.

“Part of the reason I built the studio was to finish this album, because it's something I wanted to mix myself,” Armon-Jones explains.

Key to cracking that mix was creating a space with a sound Armon-Jones could trust and rely on.

“Every time I was speaking to other mixing engineers and unloading my mixing worries on them, I was just getting the same advice the whole time,” he says. “People would just say, sort your room out and everything will get easier.

“Big shout out to Joker. He's an excellent mixing engineer. He mixed the previous album that I made with Maxwell Owin called Archetype. He was just like, ‘you can be as good as you want at mixing, but if you don't have the right room, you'll just be making bad decisions’.”

Armon-Jones’ studio approach draws heavily on the influence of Jamaican dub icons such as King Tubby. At the heart of his studio is the Soundcraft Series 400B desk, which allows Armon-Jones to physically mix using the faders and route audio to effect sends.

“I really like the EQs,” Armon-Jones says about his choice of desk. “I like the smoothness of the desk and the faders and how they work. I like the saturation that I get from it.”

The dub effects make use of two classic hardware choices – a Roland Space Echo tape delay and a physical spring reverb.

“I have the Space Echo looped into the desk, which is something that a producer friend of mine called Kabir La Amlak showed me, which really changed the way I mix,” he explains of the setup. “It was a very small thing that he showed me, but it really has completely changed the way I approach the desk and the echo.”

The simple spring reverb, meanwhile, allows Armon-Jones to place his mixes in a unified space, as well as physically manipulate the sound.

“It's a very cheap reverb,” he says. “It's a physical reverb, but you can get a spring for 30 quid or something; it's not loads of money. It’s better compared to buying a plate reverb, which is just an enormous plate that you need to keep in a corridor. Also, I think there are very good emulations of plate reverbs, but I haven't heard so many emulations of spring reverbs that really do them justice.”

While there’s a decidedly old-school and physical side to Armon-Jones’ production techniques, he’s adamant that he’s not simply leaning on classic gear for the sake of it. Rather, the physicality of the desk and effect sends actually speeds up his workflow, as opposed to drawing automation in a DAW.

“You'd have to record it in and then do a whole load of automation and do a whole load of track muting,” he explains, comparing using his hardware echo to a plugin equivalent. “It'd be a five or 10 minute job. There are some things that the desk actually speeds up in terms of production and workflow. It's not just, I like old stuff and I use old stuff instead of new stuff. I really like this workflow.”

Joe Armon-Jones’ All The Quiet Part 1 is released 28 March via Aquarii Records.

Elton John has revealed that he’s lost nearly all his sight. John told the audience at the premiere of the Devil Wears Prada musical over the weekend that he could only hear the production, not see it.

“As some of you may know, I have had issues, and now I have lost my sight. I haven’t been able to see the performance, but I have enjoyed it,” John told the audience at London’s Dominion Theatre. “To my husband, who’s been my rock because I haven’t been able to come to many of the previews… It’s hard for me to see it, but I love to hear it, and it sounded good tonight.”

The disability has come about because of a “severe” infection in his right eye. He had been hopeful that gradually his sight would return. But when he spoke to Good Morning America in November, he revealed how it was already impairing him: “It’s been a while since I’ve done anything. There’s hope and encouragement that it will be OK. But I’m kind of stuck in the moment because I can do something like this, but going into the studio and recording… I don’t know. Because I can’t see a lyric, for start.”

It appears that this may be holding up his new album – his first since 2021’s Lockdown Sessions. Earlier this year, his songwriting partner Bernie Taupin told Sky News: "It's all done, it's all in the can and ready to come out, I think, at the end of this year.” He also intimated that it wouldn’t the last album the pair would make together, saying: "It's a pretty amazing project, very cool...it tells a lot of stories and it's incredibly personal, but it's certainly not final."

The loss of sight isn’t the only health problem Elton has. At the New York premiere of the documentary Elton John: Never Too Late in October he said, albeit jokingly: “There’s not much of me left... I don’t have tonsils, adenoids, or an appendix. I don’t have a prostate. I don’t have a right hip or a left knee or a right knee. In fact, the only thing left to me is my left hip.” But despite everything he has always been able to turn to music for support.

"Even when I was in my darkest times, I still played music, I still recorded music, so I have to say thank you to music for being the most incredible inspiration to me throughout my whole life.”

If anyone knew what it was like to work with Quincy Jones, who died on 3 November at the age of 91, it was Greg Phillinganes. The renowned keyboard player first met Jones in 1973, when he was only 18 years old, and he soon became one of his go-to musicians.

Now, in a new interview with Billboard, Phillinganes has been reflecting on his relationship with Jones and what made him so special.

“The thing about Quincy is, if he invites you in, it’s assumed you are worthy of being there,” he explains. “He has a gentle way. If he’s sweating, he never lets you see it. He’s always able to bring out not only the best in you, but qualities in you that you didn’t even know you had. It’s only after the fact that you realise you’re a better musician than before you went in.”

Phillinganes goes on to provide evidence of Jones’ vision and single-mindedness with a story about I Can’t Help It, from Michael Jackson’s 1979 Quincy-produced album, Off The Wall. Written by Stevie Wonder and The Supremes' Susaye Greene, a demo version was sent to Quincy and his team so that they could consider it.

“We got the demo, we’re in the studio, we heard it,” recalls Phillinganes. “It was an uptempo Latin feeling. Quincy gave me the responsibility of handling it. I thought, ‘Great, I’m going to do the same kind of thing Stevie did, and really amp it up and make it jazzy.’”

As Phillinganes recalls, though, Jones had other ideas: “I did a demo. I had Sheila E playing on it and Michael [Jackson] sang on it. I played it for Quincy and he said, ‘No.’ Quincy said, ‘No, we have to slow it down and make it sexy.’ Quincy was trying to establish Michael as an adult. When I understood that assignment, I jumped all over it and put a beautiful Rhodes on it and sexy synth bass and these gorgeous lush synths and overdubs. That is the version that’s on the record.”

For comparison, here's the version that was released...

...And here's what we suspect is the earlier demo that Phillinganes is referring to.

Elsewhere in the interview, Phillinganes - who also played on Michael Jackson's Thriller and Bad albums, both of which were produced by Jones - reveals that the producer always called him Mouse, a nickname that was given to him when he was in junior high school. In fact, this tradition continued right up until what turned out to be their final meeting.

“The last time I saw him was 17 June,” says Phillinganes. “It took months of planning. I’d been desperately trying to contact him and it was so tough because the family were really keeping things tightly monitored, and understandably so. It was finally arranged and we talked and reminisced. He said things like, ‘Life is amazing, isn’t it, Mouse?’ He was sitting in a chair and I stood behind him and he held my hand and kissed it. Just so beautiful and intimate, and I will never forget it.”

Considered long overdue, Foreigner’s induction into Rock & Roll Hall of Fame had been actively campaigned for, and the band finally got their flowers at the 2024 ceremony over the weekend.

To mark the occasion, Al Greenwood, the band’s original keyboard player, has donated one of his synths to the Hall: his 1971 Electronic Music Laboratories (EML) 101. This featured heavily on Foreigner’s eponymous debut album, which included the hits Feels like the First Time and Cold as Ice.

Speaking to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, though, Greenwood says that, when he walked into Manny’s Music in New York to buy a synth back in the early ‘70s, this wasn’t the instrument he was originally planning to leave the shop with.

“I was going to buy a Minimoog because Keith Emerson had one,” he says. “And I was in the store and I was trying it out and I hear a voice behind me say ‘you don’t want that’. And I turn around and it’s an older gentleman.

“His name was Walter Sear, and he had worked with Robert Moog at Moog, and he said ‘you want to get this’. And he showed me a new synthesizer - it was called an EML 101. It did some remarkable things that no other synthesizer could do at the time.

“It played two notes at a time, which was unbelievable - to be able to play almost a chord with it - and it had four oscillators instead of three.”

It might be relatively unknown in comparison to the Minimoog, which is often hailed as the greatest synth of all time, but the EML 101 certainly had an impressive list of specs.

“I’ll get technical now,” says Greenwood. “It had frequency modulation, amplitude modulation, a noise generator. It had a full patchbay; it was a remarkable instrument. Just about every track on that first record is that synthesizer.”

Greenwood goes on to say that he took the 101 on Foreigner’s first tour - as the support band for the Doobie Brothers - giving it a perch on his Hammond organ.

“It’s kinda cool. I was kinda cute back then,” he chuckles as he looks at an old photo of himself on stage. And that synth looks pretty good, too.

Furthering its innovative – and education-leaning – remit, ROLI has today announced Airwave, which it describes as a "breakthrough in musical interaction for both music learners and creators."

This new hardware frame smartly re-configures any ROLI keyboard (such as its Seaboard, LUMI Keys or Piano M) into an ‘intelligent piano’, harnessing vision and voice capabilities to make music learning ultra easy, and granting an even wider range of dimensions to explore for its MPE-savvy audience.

“Music learning and playing have been far too difficult for too long: intimidating, expensive, and one-size-fits-all,” states ROLI’s CEO, Roland Lamb. “At ROLI, we are on a mission to free the music, making it possible for anyone to learn the language of music with new digital tools that open up new possibilities of human expression. 

"With recent advances in computer vision and AI, we are finally able to innovate beyond the keys, and can now bring this human-centric technology to music learners and creators alike.”

So, what exactly is Airwave? Ostensibly an aluminium stand for your keyboard, the small frame incorporates IR 170 3D infrared cameras and brand new ROLI Vision technology to map the hands of the player. It tracks each of the 27 joints in the hand, noting the subtle finger movements as they play in real-time.

It takes this data and can build personalised and responsive feedback which ROLI says "invites musicians to play in new, more intuitive ways across many more dimensions." Integration with the ROLI Piano M ($249, €229, £219) and ROLI Learn app ($99.99, €99.99, £79.99 annually) really opens up Airwave as an educational tool.

Fuelling Airwave is ROLI’s Musical Intelligence (MI) platform, which uses the principles of sound, sight and touch as its central pillars - with Airwave adding vision and voice. Future ‘intelligent’ products are set to follow.

On that ‘voice’ front, ROLI’s Piano AI technology draws on large language models to complement its hand-tracking capabilities, responding organically to natural voice commands – and providing a more human form of communication.

As ROLI states: "Ask your ROLI Piano to show you a chord, a full piece of music, or give you some time to level up your playing.”

Airwave looks to be both a unique and potentially game-changing music-learning tool, particularly when coupled with the ROLI Piano M’s light-up keys and instructional learning angle. Alternatively, creative musicians can use work with the expanded dimensions of control to concoct and explore new sonic frontiers: “With the simple raise of their hands, creators can transform a piano into a full orchestra, just as a conductor would,” states ROLI. “Or, morph mellow synth pads into searing leads with a tilt of the wrist."

Acclaim for Airwave has come from some notable names, particularly Fred Again producer Marco Parisi, who states that, “Airwave is a game-changer for creating music and in the way we perform. Every movement and gesture creates a new sound unique to them, which will make music much more expressive, and could even lead to new genres of music.”

We’re keen to see what new genres Airwave unlocks in its user-base. But for now, know that Airwave is shipping in early March 2025, and is available for preorder from ROLI, priced at $299, €299 and £249.

Tom Cruise has driven and piloted some serious machinery in his time - a stock car in Days of Thunder; an F-14 fighter jet in Top Gun - but he met his match recently when faced with the mighty Grand Organ at London’s Royal Albert Hall.

Cruise was in the big round house for a special showing of his 2022 blockbuster Top Gun: Maverick, during which the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra provided a live accompaniment. The performance was conducted by Lorne Balfe, a producer and composer on the original soundtrack.

At the end of the show, Cruise was filmed at the organ in the company of none other than organist Anna Lapwood, who previously made headlines at the Royal Albert Hall when she guested during a Bonobo gig in 2022.

In a clip captured by conductor Ben Palmer she can be seen explaining to Cruise how the organ works. “This is why I think it’s like flying a plane,” says Lapwood as she shows the star the numerous controls, with the awestruck star replying that, “that’s incredible… that is nuts.”

He might not be much of an organist - at one point he describes his playing as "appalling" - but Cruise does know a thing or two about the nuts and bolts of soundtracking a movie, and prior to the Top Gun: Maverick performance he made a surprise speech to the audience. What’s more, he took the opportunity to get a little bit technical, educating the crowd on some movie history and the importance of the leitmotif.

“Live music has been available for silent film accompaniment since moving pictures were first presented in vaudeville theatres over 120 years ago,” he explained. “But it wasn’t until 1914, around then, where a full symphony orchestra, precisely synchronised with the picture, played a live score that was conceived on the operatic composition of leitmotifs.”

Diving a little deeper, Cruise added that “Leitmotifs are, for those who don’t know, recurrent themes throughout a musical or literary composition associated with a particular person, idea, or situation. And the use of leitmotifs redefined cinematic storytelling, and large symphony orchestras became a necessity at fancy movie palaces.”

The score for Top Gun: Maverick, of course, has a few leitmotifs of its own, none more recognisable than the iconic melody from Top Gun Anthem. And who should pop up to guest on this during the Royal Albert Hall showing than Anna Lapwood, who added some “turbo organ charge.” Eat your heart out, Steve Stevens - she is good, Rooster, she’s very good.

New technology firebrand Jordan Rudess has never been one to shy away from the latest trend, applying his name and face to myriad new products over the years, while ‘always in reception’ for anyone requiring a cutting-edge comment.

Needless to say the hotbed topic of AI and its place in music is the latest contentious pie in which he has a finger and – unsurprisingly – he’s prepared to buck a trend and forge his own path one more time. AI in music? Rudess is all for it.

Speaking with Metal.It in a new video Rudess explains how he’s working with AI and why he feels that the entire field (and its potential) has been misunderstood thus far.

“I’ve had a residency at M.I.T in their media labs for the past year and in September I’m going to be doing a ‘work in progress’ performance,” he explained. 

“We’re going to be showing the result of some of the technology that we’ve been developing and this involves an AI music experimentation. 

“I look at all the stuff going on with AI in music and I think it’s really, really cool. But the problem I have with some of it is that they’re not thinking in a way to make it interactive, to make it responsive to what a person is doing.

“That’s really the field that we’re going into. Not only having AI generating music and sound, but how does it respond to what I do musically. Think of it as this interwoven process where the AI is trained on my musical information and my mind, and then it becomes this amazing human/machine connection where we can accelerate the whole process.”

When asked more directly if he fears AI in music, Rudess brings up his work with Moises, the stem separation software to better explain his stance.

"The reason I bring them up is because I love the technology but also because all the musicians around the world that use this, some of them have this idea that AI is a bad thing, but they don't even know that Moises is built on A.I. This is the technology that is the framework for everything that Moises does. I'm sorry to be the bringer of bad news to somebody who's against A.I. but now you’re learning a piece of music using it."

“I believe more and more that ‘artificial intelligence’  is a very bad name for this technology. There's a lot of other ways to think about it. There's nothing really artificial about it. We should go back in time, really, and change that. It's leading people down the wrong thought process to think about what's actually going on with the tool and how these things are put together."

"All that said, there's a lot of concern in the music business from people about their rights, how these models have been instructed or loaded with different songs and styles… And rightly so – people, musicians are concerned. They feel like this is not maybe fair. Maybe their music is being loaded into a computer without their permission. All these kinds of things are really, really important to figure out. 

“These are legal matters which need to be resolved. It's gonna take time, and honestly, even though I am aware, sympathetic and also concerned, this is not my specialty.

"My specialty is in thinking, okay, well, you have this new technology. How can we use it to make more expressive instruments? How can we use it to have more musical fun? How can we engage more people into the beauty of making music themselves? 

"And how can I use it to extend what I do in the musical world and do things that have never been possible before. And also be one of the people who kind of helps to steer it in directions that are most valuable to the future of music and music technology. 

“How you can take this technology, the technology that's available to us today, and do amazing, beneficial, cool, important, educational, entertaining things with it."

It’s clear that at least one musician will be continuing to engage with everything that new upcoming music tech has to offer. 

Rudess’s latest album Permission to Fly is out now.

Greg Phillinganes’ exploration of the electric piano tones in Spectrasonics’ Keyscape remains one of our favourite product showcase videos, and now the storied player has returned to demo a wide range of Clavinet tones using the same software.

Arguably the funkiest keyboard in history - in fact, there’s no argument - the Clavinet is an electromechanical instrument that was invented by Ernst Zacharias and manufactured (in various forms) by Hohner between 1964 and 1982.

Originally designed for playing Medieval, Baroque and classical music, the Clavinet found its true calling in the hands of the likes of Billy Preston, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea and - in particular - Stevie Wonder, who unlocked its funky potential (with the help of an effects pedal or two). It’s been emulated many times in software, including in Keyscape.

Given that he’s collaborated and toured with Wonder, it’s not surprising that Phillinganes’ Clavinet set includes several of the great man’s songs. Indeed, he demonstrates how he and Stevie share Clav duties on Higher Ground.

“There’s so many on the record but it’s now down to two for live,” he explains, before playing both his and Wonder’s parts on the song.

Tuesday Heartbreak, Maybe Your Baby and Tell Me Something Good (a song that Wonder wrote for Rufus) get an airing, too, leading Phillinganes to joke that he’s serving as a “Stevie-lite”, and giving Spectrasonics “the essence of Stevie without the expense”.

There’s also a nice anecdote regarding Michael McDonald’s I Keep Forgettin' (Every Time You're Near), with Phillinganes confirming that he used a Castlebar ‘Whammy Clavinet’ to play the song’s memorable melodic flourishes.

“A lot of people thought that was a guitar, but no no no!” he laughs.

You can find out more about Keyscape on the Spectrasonics website.

Believe it or not, there are still people out there who’ve never heard Prince’s 1999, and it turns out that pianist Jesus Molina is one of them.

This became apparent when Pianote played the Colombian Berklee graduate the song with just the drums and vocals and asked Molina to fill in the blanks. And fill them in he most certainly did.

“The drums are really old,” he says on hearing that famous Linn LM-1 pattern, which makes us feel pretty ancient, too. Molina, though, is only 27, and to him, 1999, sounds like a relic from another time.

No matter, because after just one listen through, he’s ready to perform his own arrangement, and it’s fair to say that it’s busier than the original. Molina fills the musical space with jazzy, gospel-tinged licks while respecting the song’s original groove.

“This is actually what I try to do when I practise every single day,” says Molina of the reharmonisation challenge that Pianote set him. “I just put myself on the spot all the time. That’s the most important thing - new experiences, new melodies… that’s when creativity develops really fast.”

Remarkably, there are still some people out there who’ve never seen Back To The Future, and have never heard Huey Lewis and the News’ The Power Of Love, the movie’s iconic theme song. 

It turns out that one of them is Jemma Heigis, currently keyboard player for Karol G, so Pianote did its usual thing of giving her the vocals and drums and asking her to fill in the blanks.

It was certainly a tough assignment - the key change in the middle 8 proved particularly challenging - but Heigis does a pretty good job of re-harmonising, even getting fairly close to the original in some areas.

There’s a spicy Moog synth solo to enjoy, too, though it’d probably raise a few eyebrows at the Enchantment Under The Sea Dance.

“Usually when I hear a song I’m good at playing by ear, but you guys gave me no chords so that was pretty difficult,” says Heigis after she’s heard Huey and co’s original song. “I just didn’t want to put all these ridiculous chords over it so it felt a little bit ‘oh my God, what am I doing?’ but we got through it.”

She certainly did, and Heigis also has the good fortune of being able to go away and watch Back To The Future for the very first time, which we’re actually quite jealous about.

Stevie Wonder is admirably keen to keep up with the latest developments in music technology - he never seems to miss a NAMM Show, yet we always miss him - but there’s still nothing quite like watching him playing the Clavinet, one of the vintage keyboard instruments he’s most synonymous with (think Superstition and Higher Ground).

Which brings us to a new performance that he’s given on Jimmy Kimmel Live in the company of blues guitar virtuoso Gary Clark Jr. The pair duetted on What About The Children, a track from Clark Jr’s recent album, JPEG RAW, that harks back to Wonder’s golden early-’70s recordings.

Speaking to Forbes about the genesis of the song, Clark Jr said: “Stevie reached out to me in a time where there was a lot of death and violence by police and/or angry citizens for whatever reason. So, I made a video where I was just kind of frustrated and like, ‘What the hell's going on?’”

Continuing the story, Clark Jr recalls: “He called me and said, ‘I got a song for you. We gotta do a song.’ And I said, ‘Whatever the hell you want to do, man.’ So, he sends me this demo, and it's just audio from his phone, and he's playing this little harmonium. He goes, ‘What about the children... ‘ and he mumbles through most of this thing. He's like, ‘What do you think?’ And I go, ‘Well, it's great.’ He goes, ‘Well, think you could write something? Get some words to it.’ I said, ‘I'll get right back to you.’”

Clark Jr then worked up a demo of the track and sent it to Stevie, who agreed to sing on it and invited Clark Jr out to his LA studio so that they could record together.

“We talk about the song and he's like, ‘What do you want me to do?’ It's like, ‘Well, what do you want to do?’” Clark Jr recalled to Forbes.

“He’s like, ‘I don't know, play the harmonica.’ He sits there and sings. He puts this part on it. The guy sings. He works for hours, doing this thing over again trying to get it right on. He plays harmonica on this thing, the coolest bluesy sounding harmonica.

“To top it all off, I had my three sisters come in and sing backup on this track. We used to dance around in the living room, singing to Stevie Wonder when we were kids. We have this moment where we're singing with Stevie Wonder and it's like, my dad's crying when he hears it. It was amazing.”

There’s certainly something of vintage Stevie in not only the track, but also the Kimmel Live performance, in which Wonder is in fine touch and voice. If there’s any more where that came from, we’d certainly like to hear it.

Whether as a producer, player, songwriter or performer, Raphael Saadiq’s DNA runs through the past 30 years of soul music. From his seminal collaborations with D’Angelo through to a prominent role on Beyoncé’s Renaissance and Cowboy Carter albums, his involvement in a project has become a mark of quality, and he’s also released a string of critically acclaimed solo records.

No wonder, then, that Fender recently gave Saadiq his own signature Telecaster model, and he was happy to talk about not only that but also his considerable achievements in the studio with our sister website Guitar World.

“I’ve played a Tele on every record I’ve been on; I’ve always played Teles,” he says. “It ended up being a natural fit that worked out better than the Stratocaster for me. Obviously, I think the Stratocaster is a beast of a guitar, but they also make me play a little different... I just love Teles!”

Of his guitarist inspirations, Saadiq adds that “the one player I grew up listening to was Tony Maiden from [American funk group] Rufus. He was the first person I paid attention to who was playing a Tele.

“After that it was all about Prince, because he really loved Teles,” he continues. “You can hear that twang on songs like When You Were Mine. His tones would just bite you - it almost felt like a bass to me. 

Speaking of the bass, Saadiq’s skills on this instrument were in play when he worked on Lady, a much-loved cut from D’Angelo’s definitive 1995 neo-soul album, Brown Sugar. This was their first collaboration, and the two men nailed the behind-the-beat groove right off the bat.

“Yeah, it was just me and D’Angelo, really,” Saadiq recalls. “We’d split the parts so I played drums and bass on Lady, with him on keyboards. We just fell into this groove with it, but without paying too much attention to how much we were behind.

“I guess we were sort of playing a game to see who could get the furthest behind without getting off beat. That was the game - but we never spoke about it or planned it. We were just feeling it out, laying back on the groove and the chords while staying locked in with the drums. It’s something we took from [producer/rapper] J Dilla, may he rest in peace.”

The pair made an even bigger splash in 2000, with D’Angelo’s Untitled (How Does It Feel). Saadiq co-wrote, co-produced and played bass and guitar on this occasion, and brought his talents to Bilal’s similarly sultry Soul Sista that same year. 

After which he barely seems to have drawn breath, working on records by the likes of Angie Stone, Kelis, Jill Scott, Mos Def, John Legend, Kanye West and, of course, Beyoncé. Saadiq appears on Cuff It, a standout track from Rennaisance, and 16 Carriages, one of the recent lead singles from Cowboy Carter (among others). 

“I think she’s looking for partners who are into music the same way she’s into it,” Saadiq says of the people that Beyonce works with (he’s also collaborated with Knowles’ younger sister, Solange). “There are a lot of great musicians and top-line writers in the organisation around her, working with her every day. It’s a great team.”

Prior to his recent collaborations, Saadiq had worked with Beyoncé when she and Stevie Wonder recorded a version of Luther Vandross’s So Amazing for a 2005 tribute album to the star, and it turns out that Stevie gave him some sound musical advice.

“Stevie is a legend,” says Saadiq. “He’s the guy who drops you great information about practising. He told me I needed to do five hours a day to get good at piano. You have to put the time in.

“Working with him always includes a lesson or two along the way. That’s what I love about working with him. He’s just one huge vibe - a great historian and musical mastermind. He carries so much information and he’s generous enough to share it all with somebody like me. 

You can read the full interview with Raphael Saadiq on Guitar World. 

The phrase ‘hard to pin down’ was, very possibly, invented for Brian Eno. Never has a person involved in the production of music (and by our definition, so many worlds beyond that) had so many pigeonholes built for him and then abandoned. 

He’s a synth whizz, having been the flamboyant VCS3 man for ’70s art rockers Roxy Music’s first couple of albums, then taking his electronic knowledge to Berlin to help sculpt ‘the big three’ albums for Bowie in the city, most famously on the single Heroes and track Warszawa from the b-side of Low. And more recently (although not that recently) he became something of a champion – probably one of the only champions, actually – of the Yamaha DX7, and one of the few people to wrestle with its FM synthesis and win.

Eno is also famous for bringing that word ‘ambient’ to music production throughout the 1970s and 1980s with albums like Music For Airports and On Land. And his list of contributors moves well beyond Bowie, with album releases with everyone from Talking Heads’ David Byrne (My Life in the Bush of Ghosts) to Passengers, where Eno teamed up with U2. 

Yet perhaps his finest collaborations come by way of the excellent albums The Pearl, with Daniel Lanois, and Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror with Harold Budd; both extraordinary records if ever you want to explain peak ambient/chillout music to anyone. 

Renaissance man

Speaking of U2, this would be the band with whom Eno would reach top form wearing yet another hat, that of producer. He was in the studio chair alongside Lanois for many of the superstar band’s strongest albums including The Joshua Tree, The Unforgettable Fire and Achtung Baby. Add that to productions with Ultravox! (the first incarnation), James, Talking Heads, and many more and Eno could be said to have been ‘quite busy’ over the last five decades.

But we’re not finished yet, because not only has Eno been the creative spark behind so many projects and collaborations, he’s inspiring everyone in the art of composition, with everything from iOS apps – including the generative app Bloom, and Scape that ‘makes music that thinks for itself’, both developed with Peter Chilvers – to his infamous Oblique Strategy cards. 

These were developed by Eno close to five decades ago and, while the name might sound quite artsy, are quite simply quotes on playing cards that help you out when you get stuck in a creative rut in the studio (or in any life situation, really). You get helpful nudges like ‘take a break’ and ‘what mistakes did you make last time?’, although sadly not ‘go for a pint’. 

And finally, there’s ‘Brian Eno the elusive’. Notoriously shy of interviews and dealing with banal questions with long-winded vague replies that fill the room with seemingly highbrow words – leaving the interviewer wondering what they asked in the first place, let alone whether he actually replied – an Eno interview will leave you believing that he is simultaneously avoiding the question like he knows nothing about the subject, and looking like he just knows too much to bother answering it. 

An early interview with U2’s The Edge perhaps sums him up, and says a lot about U2’s working relationship with Brian – and, also, in a rather tongue-in-cheek way tries to burst the Eno bubble that we have just spent the last few paragraphs blowing up. 

“He’s not a great keyboard player, he doesn’t write great songs really, he doesn’t have the craft that, say, Bowie has to write a song, or Paul McCartney…” The Edge said to One-Two Testing magazine in 1984. “His engineering and technical abilities are limited as well. In fact, he knows very little about an awful lot, but it’s how he applies that knowledge. I suppose it’s down to confidence, too.”

Master, master

What The Edge was hinting at – and indeed, what we are discussing here – is that the Eno confidence can be applied magnificently to a host of projects, that with every collaboration, every production, every atmospheric chord change and recorded found sound, Eno can be both the match and touch paper that gets a project started or accelerates it beyond the ordinary to extraordinary. 

So while The Edge might have been flirting with the idea that Brian is a jack of many trades, what we really have with Eno is the master of many, the pioneering magpie of electronic music production and so much more. Eno, whether you know what he’s doing or not, will transform your project, just as he has the musical landscape of the last 50 years.

Brian Eno in four tracks

1. David Bowie - Warszawa (1977)

Introducing the second side of Bowie’s long player Low – aka the greatest album b-side ever – Warszawa delivers stunning atmosphere but was inspired by the bleakness of the city in its title. Bowie’s ‘made-up word’ lyrics are perfect for the darkness, which is made even more oppressive with Eno’s synths: a Minimoog and the same EMS Synthi used on the track Heroes. 

Eno apparently gifted the EMS to Bowie in 1998 with a note saying, “Look after it. Patch it up in strange ways – it’s surprising that it can still make noises that nothing else can make.” 

2. Brian Eno - An Ending (Ascent)

Very possibly not just the best Eno track ever recorded but the finest example of electronic ambience you’ll ever be lucky enough to listen to. In a brilliant Eno-esque way, he recorded it for a documentary – For All Mankind – that didn’t see the light of day for years, and it could have been lost without trace had not both the stunning Apollo visuals and soundtrack worked so well when they joined forces. Best enjoyed late at night alongside said visuals, with what your dad used to call a ‘jazz cigarette’.

3. Passengers - Slug

Very possibly not just one of Brian Eno’s great collaborations but the best song you didn’t know by U2. In another haphazard Eno/soundtrack story, he got together with U2 to record the score to a Peter Greenaway film called The Pillow Book. 

That didn’t happen but they recorded some tracks anyway, as you do, and this one, inspired by the Tokyo/Blade Runner-esque landscape, was initially called Seibu. Deemed not good enough, it was binned before that man The Edge rescued it, thank goodness, and Eno added the unforgettable synths and chords. Magical.  

4. Brian Eno - Emerald and Lime

One from each of ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, and now this final choice bridges a couple of decades in the 21st century, which is not only neat, but proves Eno’s longevity and impact across the years. 

Here he teams up with Leo Abrahams and Jon Hopkins, surely the ultimate ambient trio, bar Richard James? It could never be three times their connected power, but it’s still a wonderfully evocative highlight from the album Small Craft On A Milk Sea.

Composer, producer, synthesist, Warp Records signee, black metal fan and touring member of Oneohtrix Point Never’s live band; Kelly Moran is many things, but first and foremost, she is a pianist. 

Imaginatively exploring the sonic potential of her chosen instrument through technological transformation, Moran’s previous work has made use of prepared piano, extended techniques and electronics to take her prodigious instrumental talent to new worlds.

Moran’s latest project, Moves in the Field, shifts the focus of her experimentation from the timbre of the piano to the mechanism of its performance. Working with the Yamaha Disklavier, a MIDI-equipped grand piano capable of playing itself, Moran improvised, programmed and recorded a series of duets for herself and the instrument, joining forces with the Disklavier to achieve pianistic feats inaccessible to a human player.

Merging her own performances with the instrument’s self-playing abilities, Moran layered intricately intersecting melodies and harmonies, surgically editing their MIDI data in Logic before routing them back to the piano to be recorded, processed and carefully mixed. “My imagination exploded at all the possibilities this instrument allowed me to create,” she tells us. 

Moves in the Field isn’t merely an exercise in technicality, though; suffused with melancholy and grandeur, these pieces possess an emotional depth that stretches fathoms. Moran’s serpentine melodies and complex arrangements confound and realign our expectations of piano music, and the project as a whole - like the rest of her output - boldly reimagines what a pianist can be in the 21st century.

We sat down with Kelly Moran to find out more about the making of Moves in the Field. 

You’ve been playing piano from quite a young age, but when did electronics and production became a part of your creative process? 

“Around the time I was 15 I started to experiment with electronic music software. I started listening to this band called Telefon Tel Aviv, and I heard this song called Fahrenheit Fair Enough. It's an electronic piece of music but it had some acoustic elements in it. I really just wanted to make something that could balance both of those things. 

“This was 2005, so this was a long time ago, and it was novel for me to hear a techno song that had an acoustic guitar in it - something that felt like it was blurring the genres. I wanted to try to emulate that. So I started messing around with Logic when I was 15 and basically trying to make pieces that sounded like them.”

Have you stuck with Logic since then?

“I have. I’m very familiar with it. Honestly, whatever you are trained on becomes second nature to you. I’ve become so attached to it, it’s like muscle memory. It’s like learning an instrument. When I tried to use Ableton everything was on the other side of the screen, and it felt completely counterintuitive.”

Was it always your plan to combine that interest in production and technology with your piano playing, or did that come later on?

“I've always been interested in merging technology and piano in some way. When I first got to college and I started to really get better at using software, one of the first things I did was build a digital instrument that I could use in Kontakt where I sampled myself plucking every note of the piano and mapped it to a controller, so I could play it. 

“It’s an extended technique that if I tried to do in person, I would have to lean into the piano and pluck these notes individually. But I realized that if I mapped them to a keyboard, I could play it as though I was playing a piano. So very early on, I started getting excited about the way I could manipulate the timbre of the piano or use the sounds in different ways that went beyond how I could use them in real time.”

Moving on to the new project - talk us through your experience with the Disklavier. When did you first begin using the instrument?

“The first time I ever used a Disklavier was in grad school, because my university had one. I worked with it a little then, but I didn't have access to it again until almost a decade later when I became a Yamaha Artist. 

“Yamaha loaned me a Disklavier initially because I was writing a duet for myself and another pianist, and I wanted to be able to hear in real-time how the piece was sounding with two pianos. Having a piano that played itself was just like having another duet partner there. That was how I started working with it, but when the pandemic hit, it became a very obvious collaborator, because I didn't have anyone else to work with.”

When did you begin to think about building a whole project around the instrument?

“It was shortly after the pandemic began. I had become bored with writing for prepared piano. I was going to make another album of prepared piano music, but once I was trapped at home, I felt like the world I was creating that record for didn't exist anymore. I had to find fresh motivation that wasn't rooted in the desire to make another album that I could tour, to keep the momentum going.

“I had to stop and figure out what would make me feel inspired. Initially, the purpose of having the Disklavier was to write a duet with someone else. But then I had the instrument in my house, and when I was feeling uninspired by the prepared piano, I thought: let's see how the songs I've been working on sound if I arrange them for the Disklavier.

“I had been writing these very multi-layered prepared piano tracks that were all very loop-based and groove-oriented. So I dissected them and rearranged them for Disklavier, and once I started working on the music in this way, it provided a completely new perspective and a way of working that inspired me a lot. Then I just went full on into that world.”

How has the ability to record, layer and manipulate multiple parts shaped your approach to composition on this project?

“The most impactful part has been getting to hear myself as a pianist from the perspective of the listener. Being able to record into the piano, step back and go to the other side of the room, and hear the piano replay what I had just played. Then I can judge my playing as a listener and not just as a performer. I’m able to go back and shape those performances.

“Say I've just recorded a take, maybe every note in the chord sounded great, except for the top note was a little quiet, so I can go back and make that chord sound perfect. It made me a much more sensitive listener because I was able to hear myself from another perspective.”

That’s interesting. It’s so true that you don’t hear your work the same way when you’re performing it as opposed to listening objectively. 

“Something that I realised about myself is that when I'm playing solo piano, it's so easy to let myself get carried away. When there’s no accompaniment, and it's just you on the piano, it's so easy to let yourself play really loudly or play super-passionately, and be more controlled by your feelings than the sounds you're making. It can be more of a cathartic experience than one where you’re listening and thinking about how it sounds for the listener. 

“Sometimes I would sit at the Disklavier, I would play something and it would feel really good to play, it would feel very cathartic and full of emotion. But then I would listen to it and I’d be banging the crap out of the piano; it felt good for me to play, but it might not sound good as a listener.

“It made me want to explore, how do I find a middle ground between being too self-indulgent and just letting myself rip at the piano and do what feels good, but also playing in a way that sounds good for the listener? What’s the effect that I'm creating? That was something that was really interesting to explore. I had never really thought about trying to reign in my performance for the sake of the listener before.”

Is all the material on the record actually played into the Disklavier or were you programming any MIDI to send out to the instrument?

“A lot of the record is me playing the Disklavier and the instrument playing it back. A lot of the time, I’d use my synth to generate an arpeggiated pattern and send that to the Disklavier. Once I realised I could do that it opened up the means for me to explore all these inhuman possibilities. Because I would record my own playing in to the piano, but it was also really fun to kind of take my synth and set the arpeggiator to a random pattern and see what crazy patterns the Disklavier would play. 

“It would spit out something that would be very unpianistic, or something that I would never play. Sometimes I would record an arpeggiated pattern into it then I would go in and record a melody over it or rearrange the notes to bring out a new melody. It opened up a new way of writing and coming up with material.” 

Did you use any MIDI generation tools?

“I wouldn’t really generate anything cold turkey. When I say I would use my synth for that, I would be playing a chord on the synth and choosing which notes would be arpeggiated or what kind of content was being generated. It was never random, or something that I wouldn’t be coming up with myself. 

“So I would play my synth and come up with these patterns and then I would use the MIDI editing tools in Logic to edit or alter the MIDI that I had recorded. Sometimes I would use Logic to speed it up or to change the key. But that was the extent of what I would do. It was really just me, the piano, and Logic, and then sometimes my Prophet-12. It was a pretty simple set-up.”

You’ve said that the project explores the different ways you could utilize the instrument to “merge its inhuman capabilities with my own playing”. Could you talk us through some more ways that the Disklavier has allowed you to do that?

“One of the first things I would do is record a chord progression on the keyboard, then I would double the bass notes, so that I would have an extra octave going. The piano would be playing chords that would be so stretched out that my hands could never play all the notes at once. Even though that’s technically inhuman, it doesn't sound impossible, it just sounds like there's another pair of hands on the keys. So sometimes I would use it just to add extra notes and harmonies that I wouldn't be able to reach. 

“But then sometimes, it was really fun to record a pattern and crank up the tempo in Logic to 250bpm or something crazy and have the piano play it back at a pace that I would never be able to play. Or I’d have the piano play a pattern that was really, really fast, but also incredibly soft. Things like that would be very challenging physically to play, but the computer makes it possible.”

It’s an interesting concept to duet with a machine. When you’re playing with the Disklavier, does that still feel as if you’re duetting with another performer?

“It does! Because the parts are intersecting a lot, I’ll have my hands on the keys and I’ll feel the keys around me moving, or I’ll have to choreograph my part so that I’m getting out of the way for a key that’s going to be hit after I play it. So it feels very interactive; you’re feeling the vibrations of the instrument and the keys are moving underneath you.”

What's the story behind the title of the record?

“Moves in the Field refers to this series of figure skating exercises that you learn when you start to skate. These very basic exercises help you get control over your blades so that you can build them into larger, more complicated patterns. 

“When I initially started working with the Disklavier, I was making music that was very loop- and cell-based. I would have a loop playing on the piano and then I would build another loop on top of it and have all these layers intersecting. It was around the same time I was learning skating, and I thought, this is kind of a similar process - using this very small fragmented pattern to lay the foundation of what I'm doing, before I build something more intricate on top of it. I saw a parallel between the process of complicating these patterns in skating and complicating these patterns on the piano.”

You’ve talked before about improvisation becoming central to your compositional process for the Ultraviolet project. Is that a method you’ve been continuing to follow since then?

“Definitely. Although one thing that's been so nice about the Disklavier is that it gives me the ability to record my improvisation and listen to it back immediately, then shape it and structure it afterwards. It’s given me a tool that makes it so much more efficient to arrange the music I'm working on. 

“The music on Ultraviolet was very improvisatory - the pieces are all unfolding gradually. They're not very structured, because they're just following the structure of my improvisation. But the benefit of the Disklavier is that it allows you to dissect everything you've recorded and edit it, so I took a more structured approach to crafting these pieces, because I could repeat things and find patterns that I really liked in the MIDI and shape them. 

“There’s definitely a lot of improvisation in this project, but I did a lot more surgical editing and looping. There was a much more intricate editing process for this record.”

What led you to focus on more of a natural piano sound on this release, as opposed to the prepared piano and electronics that you’ve worked with previously?

“It felt like a fun challenge to limit myself to the acoustic sound of the piano. So much of my practice as a composer has been about exploiting new and exciting ways to make sounds with this instrument. So whether I'm preparing the piano, or I'm sampling it, or I'm building a digital instrument that can play the piano in a way that I can't in real life, I've done all these things that have been about squeezing different sounds out of it. 

“It felt like a good time for me to say, I've done all that exploration, but now I have a tool that allows me to play the instrument differently - everything about the approach is different, except I'm not altering the timbre. It's just about how I use the instrument to create the music.”

In terms of pianists or composers that influenced you, are there any specific reference points for this record?

“Honestly, not really, I wasn't listening to a lot of classical music, or even a lot of piano music. Initially, when I started writing this record, it was in 2019, when I had been touring a lot, and I was playing a lot of music festivals, where I would play early on in the day and then I would get to hang out at the festival and party and dance for the rest of the day. 

“I went to so many techno, clubby type performances, and I realised that I wanted to make something that's dance-oriented, or something that makes me want to move, because as I mentioned, Ultraviolet was very improvisatory - there wasn't really a sense of rhythm or a beat that you could move or dance to. 

“That was originally the idea for the new project; I wanted to use prepared piano but in a more dance-y groove-based way. But once the pandemic hit, the world that I thought I was making music for, where I’m touring and going to these clubby festivals, didn’t exist anymore. I had to find a different motivation for making music, because that inspiration wasn't real for me anymore.“

To my ears, there’s a real sense of melancholy across the record. Were you deliberately honing in on any specific emotions in your writing? 

“This record in particular was pretty melancholy for me. The circumstances under which I was creating the music were definitely the most challenging circumstances I've had in my life. The pandemic had just hit after I put out my last record, and it felt like my life was just getting started, in a way; I had just gotten signed to this record label, I was finally touring and living this life that I had always dreamed of as a musician. I got to experience it for a year and a half before it all came crashing down. 

“I went from being really confident about how my career was going to thinking, 'oh, shit, am I even going to have a career now? Does this world even exist anymore?' Also, at that time, my parents got a divorce, which was really hard for me; even though I'm an adult, divorce is traumatic, no matter what age you go through it. No one wants their family to split up.

“All those anxieties are definitely reflected in this album. I was trying to use music as a way to process all of that and to give myself some sense of hope. Working with the Disklavier, it gave me so much fresh inspiration, because I lost so much motivation. To have an instrument that would help me play, and help me to do the work so that I wasn't doing it all of it myself, was such a big help for me during that time. To be able to turn on the piano and have it play for me, on days that I didn't feel like playing myself, gave me that motivation and inspiration to keep going.”

We’re told that you collaborated with Dan Bora, Philip Glass’ sound engineer, on the mixing and recording for this project?

“I wanted to work with a classical engineer who had mixed a lot of piano records. In my previous projects, I've mixed the piano sound with electronics and with other elements. But for this one, I wanted to really keep the piano sounding as pure and as clean as I possibly could. 

“I recorded a lot of the piano parts separately because a lot of these tracks were very layered, so I could have some more control over mixing. So I wanted to have an engineer who was just really good at working with the pure sound of the piano and had a lot of experience doing that. 

“Philip Glass is one of my heroes, one of my idols. I'm not the same exact kind of composer as him, but he's a big inspiration for me. So when I'm really inspired, I’m thinking, who are they working with? Philip Glass lives in New York City, and I live in New York City now, and I saw that Dan had also worked on my friend Vicky Chow’s album, and he had worked on some music that I really liked. That was my motivation for seeking him out.”

I imagine layering multiple piano parts was quite a challenge in the mixing process. Were you aiming to preserve separation between each part or create a coherent whole made up of the individual layers?

“I need coffee for this question! [laughs] When I was writing these pieces, I would start out with one MIDI layer in Logic. I would have one MIDI track and I would record into it. Let's say I would record like a chord progression or something. So I would have one track that had the chord progression, I would make another MIDI track, and then I would record the melody on top of that. I would have separate MIDI tracks for all of the layers, so that I could have a lot of control. Let's say I recorded the melody a little bit too loud compared to how I recorded the chord progression, I could go in and edit the velocity of those MIDI notes so that it would match. 

“I was mixing the MIDI layers the same way that you would mix discrete tracks of any song, I was just doing it in real time. So in working on these tracks, even though all of the parts were happening on the piano simultaneously, they were all separated out in Logic, so that I could go in and edit these different layers and make sure that everything sounded balanced. 

“Initially when I set out to record the project, my engineer suggested that I record them all separately, so that I would have more control over mixing the parts. I tried it that way and it became an extremely, extremely tedious mixing process, because I had multiple mic pairs of multiple piano layers. Some of the songs had 60 tracks, just for a few piano layers, and it was a very complicated mixing process. Dan had to do a lot of math to make sure there was no phase cancellation between all the mic pairs. 

“This gave me a lot of control in spatializing a lot of the different parts. So from a mixing perspective, it was a fun exercise, and it was very interesting to be able to treat all these parts discretely; mapping an arpeggio to the right channel and putting a little reverb on it and spatializing things differently, for example. 

“It was fun from a spatialization perspective to match all the layers perfectly, but there were some tracks that I felt like didn't quite work the same way, because it was missing that resonance and that blur of all of the tracks happening simultaneously on the same instrument. Because you get more harmonic information when everything is happening and everything is resonating together. So I went back and re-recorded some tracks with all the layers happening on the piano simultaneously. For some of the tracks, the layers are recorded individually, and some of them aren’t.

“When I'm working on these songs, it looks like how you work on any other project in a DAW, but the only difference is that instead of an audio signal, you're listening to a piano play it in real time. It’s cool being able to sit in the producer’s chair and hear the piano doing all the work for you.”

Let's talk about a few specific moments from the record. I can hear a granular type of effect going on in Leitmotif. What did you use to create that sound?

“I used a ton of different delays on the tremolos. I remember using this patch on the synth that would send these super, super-fast clusters of notes to the piano, with tiny short attacks. Almost like a granular cloud of MIDI information. I had a track of all these fast-moving tremolo piano parts; felt like the keys on the piano were shaking and trembling. 

“I recorded a bunch of those layers and added all these different delays and reverbs to them, so it has this beautiful cloudy granular effect. The keys are moving so rapidly, so once you add a delay to those keys it becomes this amazing effect that sounds very granular.”

In Don’t Trust Mirrors, is that a delay effect on the opening melody or is the Disklavier being used to play a delayed part? 

“Both! That piece initially was a duet for myself and another piano, so there are two piano parts. There’s a Disklavier and there’s me playing on another piano. When I was initially working on that piece, I had a whole separate part on the Disklavier and I was playing another instrument. So in the beginning, I have this naturally occurring phasing effect where I’m playing the same arpeggio on another piano, but I’m playing it an eighth-note delayed. I did some natural phasing but I did some artificial phasing as well, and I used a lot of delay.”

The use of space and reverb on It’s Okay to Disappear is beautiful. Could you talk us through the techniques used on that track?

“When I wrote that piece, it was with electronics at first. All of the melodies and all the parts had different sounds. So when I wanted to combine it all on one piano, I still wanted to give each of the parts its own little sonic space. So I wanted the chord progression to sound very muffled and distant and I wanted the melody to sound like it was very airy and soaring on top of it. That whole piece was just a really fun exercise in spatialization for me, trying to make room for all of the parts on the piano. 

“What's so fun about the Disklavier is that you can really fill out every single dynamic range of the piano, but then it becomes a challenge to figure out how you're actually going to make space for all of that in the frequency spectrum. Using different effects and really working hard on giving every part its own carved-out space was really, really important for that track.”

The press release for the new project references the dichotomy of humanity vs technology. That seems like a theme that’s present across your discography; are you trying to break down the division between those two worlds?

“I've always tried to use technology as a way to execute ideas that I have. I try not to lean too hard on technology for generating the ideas. It's funny, when I was working on this project, I was showing people that I have discrete tracks for the melodies and chords and bass progressions, and that everything is labelled and categorised. So many people said, ‘wow, you have all these MIDI files that are your melodies and your chord progressions. You can easily teach an AI to write melodies and chord progressions like you, and it could be a great tool for you to generate new pieces!’

“That doesn't interest me. I don't want a machine to spit something out at me. I'm much more interested as an artist in mining what's happening in my head and then trying to make sense of it through technology. I like to use technology to help me but I don't like relying on it to generate the material. 

“That's why I like working with the Disklavier so much, is that it helps me achieve something without doing too much of it for me. I still like having my own playing be the basis for these pieces and not having it be something that I generated that has nothing to do with my playing. A very important aspect of my work is trying to preserve my own humanity, even if I'm using technology to help me do it.”

Kelly Moran’s Moves in the Field is out March 29th on Warp Records.

If you were a budding pianist back in 1986, there was one song on the radio that you wanted to play. Bruce Hornsby and The Range’s The Way It Is became a global hit and inspired countless people to jump on the keys and learn its distinctive riff.

Now, Hornsby has provided further evidence of The Way It Is’ timeless qualities by performing it in BBC Radio 2’s Piano Room alongside the BBC Concert Orchestra. It’s a stripped-back, sensitive rendition that, in light of the song’s subject matter and current world events, comes loaded with pathos.

An ode to the US Civil Rights Act of 1964 and, more broadly, a criticism of a thoroughly iniquitious society, The Way It Is reminds us not to simply accept the status quo and accept that “some things will never change”. And, as Hornsby told Radio 2 host Vernon Kay, the lyric is born out of personal experience. 

“I wrote it in my garage, in my house in California, based on growing up in a smaller Southern town where narrow-minded attitudes did prevail,” he explains. “Remembering that, ruminating on that led me to write this song, so I guess my memories, the memories that inspired it, were not particularly fond memories.

“I was the only white guy in the high school basketball team, so I had serious soul brother friends, and still do in my town, where I live again. It was a charged environment, quite often. But look, it led to this song, which led to Tupac Shakur recording it and having, in a sense, in certain worlds, a way bigger record than it was for me.”

The Tupac version that Hornsby refers to, Changes, uses The Way It Is' musical backing to highlight what the rapper perceived as the ongoing racism in American society. On a rather more trite note, the song was also interpolated by Don Diablo in his 2019 hit Never Change.

Prior to Hornsby’s own orchestral take on The Way It Is, Cory Wong also gave it the big ensemble treatment in the company of Cody Fry and Metrople Orkest.

“It’s amazing how much impact one song can have,” Bruce Hornsby told MusicRadar when discussing The Way It Is in 2020. “More people know about you, so more people buy your records. Your face is on TV. Suddenly, this unknown guy from Williamsburg, Virginia is getting invited to the Netherlands, Germany and the UK. Overnight, my life was completely turned upside down.”

The success of The Way It Is, it turns out, also led to one unusual celebrity interaction when Bruce Hornsby and The Range appeared on Terry Wogan’s UK chat show.

“I was sitting in my dressing room and I heard this voice coming down the corridor. ‘Bruce Hornsby. Where the fuck is Bruce Hornsby? I want to see him.’ It was the most surreal moment of my life. Elton John burst into the room wearing a Tina Turner wig. He threw his arms around me and told me how much he liked my music. Elton John is a fan! I couldn’t believe it.”

You can check out Hornsby’s new performance of The Way It Is above. During his set he also played Cast-Off, a 2019 song that was co-written and performed with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, and The End Of The Innocence, Don Henley’s 1989 single, which Hornsby co-wrote and played on.

Hornsby is also part of of BrhyM, a collaboration with experimental chamber ensemble yMusic. Their new album, Deep Sea Vents, will be released on 1 March.

Toto have confirmed the return of Greg Phillinganes on keyboards and vocals ahead of a 44-date North American tour. Drummer Shannon Forrest is also back in the band, and will join founding member Steve Lukather (guitar, vocals), Joseph Williams (vocals), John Pierce (bass), Warren Ham (horns, percussion, vocals), and Steve Maggiora (keyboards, vocals) for this run of shows.

“Barely two days into the new year, I get a call from Steve Lukather about joining Toto’s upcoming tour,” wrote Phillinganes on Instagram. “Next thing I know, I’m rehearsing, doing a photo shoot and back in Toto!”

Phillinganes is also celebrating winning his second Emmy, this one for Oustanding Musical Directon on last year’s Library Of Congress Gershwin Prize tribute to Joni Mitchell. “My last week has been bananas!,” says Phillinganes, who describes Mitchell as “an artist I never imagined even working with.”

Phillinganes first stint with Toto began in 2003, and he was asked to become a full member of the band in 2005. He left in 2008, but returned briefly in 2022, replacing Dominique Xavier Taplin on the band’s European tour. Shannon Forrest was previously Toto’s touring drummer between 2014 and 2019.

Despite numerous line-up changes (Steve Lukather is the only original member still performing with the band) Toto remain a significant draw on the live circuit, and have also racked up big numbers on streaming services. They have more than 3.4 billion streams on Spotify alone, more than one billion of which have been of their 1982 megahit, Africa, a perennial favourite. Just this week, in fact, US comedian Tom McGovern was pleased to be able to report that he’s finally learned how to play the keyboard solo from the song.

Toto’s North American tour includes 30 dates in support of Journey and 14 headline shows. A European tour will follow in the summer, with additional performances - including a run of UK shows - to be announced in the coming weeks.

A full list of tour dates can be found on the Toto website.

Les McCann, the American jazz pianist and singer whose music went on to reach a new audience when it was sampled by numerous hip-hop artists, has died at the age of 88.

Largely self-taught, McCann rose to prominence in the 1960s when he performed at the Montreux Jazz Festival with saxophonist Eddie Harris and trumpeter Benny Bailey. A recording of their set was turned into a live album, Swiss Movement, which became a crossover hit.

The record was notable for the inclusion of McCann’s cover of Compared To What, a protest song against the Vietnam War, which was later sampled by Cypress Hill on their 1991 track, Break It Up.

Other hip-hop artists to have sampled McCann’s work include Snoop Dogg, Dr Dre, Nas, J Dilla, Eric B & Rakim, De La Soul and Notorious B.I.G.

Following the success of Swiss Movement, McCann became known as much as a singer as a pianist, but will also be remembered for being one of the first jazz musicians to embrace the use of synthesizers, notably on his 1972 album, Layers. The opening track of the record, Sometimes I Cry, would later be sampled by Massive Attack on their 1998 hit, Teardrop.

McCann suffered a stroke in the ‘90s but returned to music in 2002 with a new album, Pump It Up. It’s reported that he died from pneumonia in Los Angeles on 29 December.

Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies might well have been around since 1975, but nearly 50 years on we think they might be as relevant as ever, and not just for music production. So what are they and, most importantly, how can you use them in your music making (or, indeed, life)?

Coldplay have used them, as have Talking Heads and Bowie. That's because Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies have become something of a legend in studio circles, a set of cards with ideas for you to follow should you ever become stuck for inspiration while composing or producing. What you might not know is that a) the cards actually do exist, and b) they might well help you with your music making, five decades after they were conceived.

Eno developed the Oblique Strategies idea along with the artist Peter Schmidt, apparently inspired by Edward De Bono and his Lateral Thinking books.

Oblique Strategies eventually became a set of over 100 cards, each with an idea, phrase or direction. The concept was that whenever Eno needed some kind of inspiration or a new way of thinking in the studio, he could literally just pick a card with the answer. It was born at a time when studios costs were high and the pressure was always on to keep working. No time to waste, just pick a card.

The cards might say 'repetition is a form of change' or 'cut a vital connection' or even, according to one Oblique Strategy source, 'get a neck massage'. Some are clearly easier to understand than others – we like 'what mistakes did you make last time?' , and 'take a break'.

Others can be interpreted in different ways – which is probably the idea – so make what you will of the likes of 'balance the consistency principle with the inconsistency principle' and 'go slowly all the way round the outside'.

Others still are frankly bonkers – again probably the point. What to make of 'you can only make one dot at a time', for example?

Eno first used the idea while recording the 1975 album Discreet Music when he realised that constraints could be better than freedom. In a 1981 interview he discussed the "assumption that if you remove all constraints from people they will behave in some especially inspired manner. This doesn't seem to be true in any sense at all – not socially, and certainly not artistically."

Instead, Eno started adding constraints, some of which became cards in the 115 Oblique Strategies.

In October 1994, Eno summed up the idea behind the cards to The Mix magazine: "Imagine you're working, things are getting difficult and the situation reaches an impasse. You keep trying things but they don't work, so it's you should ask yourself: 'What wouldn't I do?' 'What are the things I wouldn't think of doing?' You've already thought of the things you thought would work, but they didn't.

"It's a little bit like when you've lost something and you go around the flat looking in all the obvious places where you might normally leave something. Clearly it isn't in any of those, so you then think about all the places you wouldn't usually think of looking. Chances are you'll probably find the object."

Eno then gave some examples: "Change instrument roles. Do something boring. Consult other sources, either promising or unpromising. Cut a vital connection - that's a very interesting thing to do because most pieces of music are based around some centre, like a drum track or a drone, which really holds everything together. 

"Just try taking that element out of the music and see what happens. Suddenly, when you take it out you start to hear everything else that's there, and you may realise that some of it is redundant, obsolete or, even more interesting, that it stands completely alone and is in fact another new piece of music to develop."

Eno would successfully use the prompts on albums such as Another Green World and Before And After Science, although he would later stop referring to the physical cards as he claimed to have them all imprinted in his brain anyway.

"Oblique Strategies were really a way of getting past panic by reminding myself that there were broader considerations than the ones I could remember in the studio", Eno told Music Technology magazine in 1988. "So when I got into a panic, thinking, 'where is this going? It's not going anywhere', I'd pull out one of those strategies and it would tell me something, and I was quite religious about them.

"I used to absolutely drop everything and follow that course of action, so I didn't pull them out lightly because I knew it could mean jettisoning whatever I was doing at the time to do something completely bizarre, like take a long walk or something - the last thing you want to do if you're panicking about not doing anything that day."


Eno also warns in the same interview that your chosen random strategy might not always appear to offer the correct solution at the time. The track Spirits Drifting on Another Green World was shaped by an Oblique Strategy… eventually, anyway.

"When I started making that piece I was really at the end of my tether. I'd been working on it for the whole day; we had almost nothing on tape and it sounded like a piece of crap. I was standing at the synthesizer crying as I was playing it because I thought 'I don't know what I'm doing'

"I took out an Oblique Strategy and it said 'Just carry on'. And I pissed myself laughing because it was such a low level answer to what I was expecting. So I just carried on. In the next half hour or so that piece suddenly gelled into something, and in fact it gelled into something that I still like very much."

Eno wasn't by any means the first composer to dabble in randomly generated processes for composition. His strategies could also be seen to be loosely based on the ancient Chinese text, I-Ching, which is a similar 'decision helping' set of 64 ideas, and one used by avant-garde composer John Cage. Even Mozart employed Musikalisches Würfelspiel, a random dice idea to put pieces of music together.

However, Eno's cards are more aimed at music producers so still hold relevance even today. And there's a great school of thought that you can generate your own Oblique Strategies, depending on the kind of music you make. 'Go bassier', 'Duck off', that kind of thing. 

You could even create a set for life. Got relationship issues? Try 'don't argue', 'discuss it now', or (more likely) 'just do as you're told'. 

Whatever, if you ever get stuck for ideas in the studio, and we all do, have a dabble with some Oblique Eno. You wouldn't be the only music producer to have used them as, over the years, everyone from Bowie (with Eno on the Berlin trilogy) to Coldplay (on the album Viva la Vida) have employed them.

You can purchase a set of cards via the Eno Shop website should you wish – paying £50 for the privilege, but very much buying from the horse's mouth. There's also a cheaper iPhone app, or simply visit a website like this to randomly generate a strategy for you to use.

Jordan Rudess doesn't listen to pop music - "you can’t actually get to that on the dial on my radio," he jokes - so when he sat down to improvise some new keyboard parts for Jay-Z and Alicia Keys' Empire State Of Mind, a song he claims never to have heard before, the results were always going to be… interesting.

This situation was set up by the piano learning people at Pianote. “Let’s play a game,” they tell Rudess.

With ‘the wizard of the keys’ behind his trusty Korg Kronos, the team then play him Empire State Of Mind with the piano part removed, leaving him to fill in the blanks.

With just the drums, bass and Jay-Z’s rap in play, Rudess appears to struggle to locate the song’s key, but finds it when Keys’ vocal kicks in during the chorus. 

After that, he’s off and running, jamming along to the second verse using an electric piano patch before dialling in a synth lead and getting busy with the pitchbend wheel. 

After that first run through, Rudess confirms that the song initially left him confused - “I have perfect pitch and I didn’t even know what notes it was playing” - but that he soon worked out what’s going on. Next, it’s time for him to hear the track with the original piano part restored.

With that back in play, the Dream Theater man decides to add his own flourishes over the top, seemingly keen to fill out every inch of space in the arrangement. 

And his verdict on Empire State Of Mind? “I thought it was actually… clever. It was not what I expected at all… I obviously have not been listening to pop radio enough, I’m definitely guilty of that. Shall we send it to Alicia and tell her she needs to go back in the studio and add some tracks?”

Hmmm. Maybe. Rudess’s playing certainly puts a different spin on the song, but does it improve it? Take a listen and decide for yourself.

When James Blake sat down with Brian Eno recently, it was ostensibly so that he could play the legendary producer some choice cuts from his new album, Playing Robots Into Heaven, and get his feedback. However, as their conversation developed, it became clear that something else had been playing on Blake’s mind.

“You once accused me of using the ‘arsehole chord,’” says Blake at one point, somewhat out of the blue. A slightly taken aback Eno then begins to chuckle, as Blake goes on to ask to explain what the ‘arsehole chord’ actually is.

“There’s a way of resolving things in songs which always disappoints me,” replies Eno. “You have a sort of ‘setup’, and then you’re thinking ‘don’t go to that one, don’t go to that one’, and it goes to that one and you think ‘Oh, God.’”

Providing a little more context, Blake adds: “It was in my most popular song - in Retrograde. I played it to you and you went [points] ‘that chord, that’s the arsehole chord’. And I thought, ‘have I done something heinous?’”

Probably not, James, but let’s take a step back and work out what the chord in question actually is. Discussing the relevant bit in Retrograde, Blake says, “So it starts with a G major chord,” before Eno interrupts. “We like that, we like G major,” 

Determined not to lose his thread, Blake then continues: “And the bottom G in the right hand I moved it up to an Ab, and that made it a kind of diminished over a G bass, and that was when your head cocked, like a dog listening to a high pitch, and you said ‘that’s the arsehole chord.’” 

More chuckling from Eno, but Blake isn’t finished. “The song doesn’t work without it!” he argues, seeking Eno’s forgiveness. “I’ve tried it without it - because obviously it impacted me, that moment - and it didn’t work.”

Even more chuckling from Eno, who manages to stifle the laughter for a moment to apologise (though he doesn’t sound that sorry).

“Years of pain,” replies Blake, in mock fury. “Therapist’s office.”

“How much did it cost you in therapy?” asks Eno, playing along. “20 grand?” says Blake, running with the gag.

“I”m sorry about that - I’ll make it up to you one day,” replies Eno, but he clearly believes he has a point.

“For songwriters, I really think they often think ‘oh, it’s all majors, I’d better put in a minor’,” Eno argues. “You think ‘fucking why?!’ You don’t have to put sugar in everything you cook, or salt or whatever. I used to say ‘ban all minor chords’ just to annoy people. Just to make them think differently about what they were doing.” 

To be fair, this is one of the few strident opinions that Eno voices during the conversation. Listening to Blake’s new record, he describes album opener Asking To Break as “so nice” and “a lovely song”, for example.

He has a stronger view on Tell Me, though: “That is disturbing,” is his instant reaction. “Disturbingly brilliant. I think that’s the modernist piece of music I’ve heard for a long time.” Elsewhere in the chat, Eno reveals that, when listening to a song, lyrics are “usually the last thing I pay any attention to”. 

It’s that ‘arsehole chord’ ineraction that sticks in the memory, though. In fact, Eno feels the need to apologise again for his comment as the conversation draws to a close (“It really made me laugh, honestly,” smiles Blake).

It’s Eno who has the final word, though, and there’s one final barb. “There’ll now be somebody who’ll base their whole career on using only arsehole chords. Is that called jazz?”

Acclaimed American musician and synth aficionado Gary Wright has died at the age of 80, it’s been confirmed.

Best known for his ‘70s hits Love Is Alive and Dream Weaver - the latter of which he re-recorded for use in 1992 movie Wayne’s World - Wright began his career in ‘60s British blues-rock band Spooky Tooth, before releasing his debut solo album, Extraction, in 1970.

Wright was also a close collaborator of George Harrison, playing piano on the ex-Beatle’s All Things Must Pass album in 1970 and all of his subsequent releases for the next decade.

Spooky Tooth reformed in 1972, but it was three years later, after the band had split again, that Wright scored his biggest success. The Dream Weaver, his third album, was created almost entirely with keyboards and a drum machine, and yielded big US hits in the form of the (almost) title track and Love Is Alive.

More solo albums followed, and Wright also turned his hand to film soundtracks in the ‘80s. A spot in Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band put another Beatle-shaped feather in his cap, and his Wayne’s World contribution helped to introduce Wright’s music to a new generation of listeners..

Justin Wright, Gary’s son, told TMZ that his father died on Monday morning at his home in California. He had been suffering from Parkinson’s and Lewy body dementia for several years.

KEYS WEEK 2023: Jan Hammer might well be known to many as the film and TV score writer – and, yes, his score to Miami Vice is certainly a standout work – but he should also be credited with so much more when it comes to the history of keyboard playing and performance.  

Hammer defined how the synthesizer became a lead instrument in jazz-rock, rock, funk and other styles of music. He single-handedly defined the technique and vocabulary of pitch-bending, and as a performer, he stood toe-to-toe with many of the greatest guitar players of our age. And, yes, he's a pretty successful score composer too!

Eastern European Roots

Jan is a native of Czechoslovakia, now known as the Czech Republic or Czechia. Coming from a musical family, he studied classical piano as a youth, until the jazz bug bit him in his teens. He immersed himself in that music, both on piano, organ and drums. An early recording called Maliny Maliny finds him playing very progressive jazz on the B3. 

When Russia invaded his country in 1968 he fled to the United States, enrolling in the Berklee School Of Music and becoming a US citizen. He toured with jazz vocalist Sarah Vaughan as her pianist and musical director after leaving school,
and then settled in New York City to develop his career. There he met a lot of musicians who, like himself, were exploring Indian and Eastern European elements combined with the rhythmic power of rock, all with a highly improvisatory approach.

Hammer points to his work with Jeremy Steig as an example of these early creative efforts [check out Jeremy Steig's Energy album here]. He speaks of hearing the Tony Williams Lifetime band while in Boston as a huge influence, one that introduced him to the playing of John McLaughlin on guitar. The explorations of Miles Davis (who he jammed with), and then Jimi Hendrix became further catalysts for his progressive development.

Searching For Relentless Energy

Hammer was breaking away from the confines of bebop and post-bop playing, chasing what he defined as the relentless energy he found in artists like John Coltrane and Hendrix, and he also recognized in McLaughlin’s playing. 

So when John asked him to jam and explore forming a new group he jumped at the chance, and the Mahavishnu Orchestra was soon formed. The group quickly rose to fame on the heels of their incendiary live performances. They soon found themselves touring as a rock band would, playing to large crowds and leaving audiences in disbelief, and roaring the loudest approval.

Jan was looking for a way to expand his sound, and break away from the restrictions of the keyboard. He wanted the freedom to slide notes around, bend pitches and have a sound that could stand up to the volume and tonal aggression of a guitar player. In the spring of 1972 he bought a Minimoog, and after locking himself away in his loft for a few weeks, he found his voice, and brought the instrument into his performances with the band. 

There is no precedent for the approach and language Jan developed on the synth from previous synthesizer recordings. Eastern European vocal and stringed instrument music, and the language of blues and rock guitarists informed his use of pitch bend. His timbral choices were his own, and suited the highly rhythmic and aggressive way he attacked the complex music the band played. 

Here is his first recorded use of the Minimoog, from the band’s second album Birds Of Fire. 

You can see him tear it up on the synth in this live performance in August of 1972. 

And this section of the tune Awakening from their live third album, Between Nothingness and Eternity (Bonus Disc), showcases Hammer playing along to a sequenced riff in a style that no one was doing at the time.

Setting The Standard

Jan became an in-demand player for the artists who were defining the jazz-rock movement, and was featured on many of the top recordings of that era. His intro on Billy Cobham’s Quadrant 4 from the album Spectrum is a classic example of how he developed his lines and his powerful style on the instrument. 

Hammer played electric piano and synth on the tune Lopsy Lu from Stanley Clarke’s second album. Jeff Beck reached out to Jan to work with him on the follow-up to his hugely successful Blow By Blow album, and Hammer contributed two songs to that album, Wired, including the now-classic Blue Wind. 

The two musicians found themselves kindred spirits and recorded and toured together many times. This live performance shows Hammer taking the dominant role onstage from Beck as a now-rocking front man, playing a strap-on keyboard commonly called a keytar. Beck and Hammer last reunited in 2016 to perform the tune Star Cycle, which Hammer wrote for Jeff’s 1980 album There and Back.

Plenty of artists enlisted Hammer’s signature playing, including Al DiMeola, Carlos Santana, Neal Schon, Tony Williams and others. He made many recordings under his own name, and with his own group: standouts include Oh Yeah, Melodies and the classic The First Seven Days.

Scoring Success

Jan began composing for film and TV in 1984. He was approached by director Michael Mann to get involved in a show about detectives fighting crime and the drug trade in Miami. Jan played him a piece he was working on using the Fairlight CMI to develop techniques for creating driving, pulsating grooves, and that became the theme for Miami Vice. 

The show was an instant success, and Jan’s theme song ended up reaching number one on the Billboard Hot 100 Singles chart, was a top 5 international hit, and nabbed him two Grammys (Best Pop Instrumental Performance and Best Instrumental Composition). The show’s soundtrack album sold over four million in the U.S., reached quadruple-platinum sales, and is reported at over seven million unit sales worldwide to date. Jan has gathered much of the music he wrote for the show and released it as Miami Vice: The Complete Collection.

Jan has a huge CV of film and TV work that followed and also got involved early on in the world of computer animation, scoring the ground- breaking BEYOND The Mind’s Eye video album, a project that spent 112 weeks on the Billboard Top Music video charts, and was certified triple-platinum.

Hammer continued scoring; making albums and more throughout the end of the decade, and then his career went quiet. So it was a most welcome return when in 2006 Hammer scored the film Cocaine Cowboys and then made a rare live appearance at the Moogfest in NYC.

Jan finally returned to original music in 2018, releasing an album of musical sketches called Seasons Pt. 1. This was followed in 2020 by Sketches In Jazz, and again in 2022 with Seasons Pt. 2. All recorded by himself in his home studio, these releases span many musical styles and moods, and were welcomed by his legions of fans, and to critical acclaim.

Looking for more great keyboard gear and technique articles? Get all our reviews, news, features, tutorials, tips and more at our Keys Week 2023 hub page.

In March this year, the music world lost one of its most influential figures. Ryuichi Sakamoto passed away from cancer at the age of 71, leaving behind a legacy that marks him out as one of the most innovative composers and producers in contemporary music. 

Across a career that spanned more than five decades, Sakamoto bridged the divide between the accessible and the avant-garde, inspiring countless artists from all corners of the musical map, from hip-hop to techno to contemporary classical.

Sakamoto was born in 1952, the very same year that John Cage composed the entirely silent piece 4’33, a fact that the experimentally-inclined Sakamoto was often keen to remind interviewers. His affinity for electronic instruments was sparked while studying ethnomusicology in Tokyo, as he tested the boundaries of early synths from Moog, ARP and Buchla. Not long after his studies, Sakamoto formed Yellow Magic Orchestra alongside Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi.

YMO were a pioneering group: one of the earliest pop acts to incorporate synths, sequencers, samplers, and drum machines into their work, they fused influences from Japanese, Chinese and Indian music with new sounds arriving from the West, like Kraftwerk, Giorgio Moroder and early hip-hop. The group were on the cutting edge of musical technology, often picking up and utilizing state-of-the-art gear as soon as it hit the market. 

They were also lightyears ahead of their time in their approach to sampling, chopping up ‘50s exotica and arcade game sounds on their first international hit, Computer Game. Alongside Kraftwerk over in Berlin, YMO played a pivotal role in popularising the sound of electronic instruments around the world and ushering in the synth-pop era in the United Kingdom.

Sakamoto’s debut solo album Thousand Knives arrived in 1978, the same year the group formed, while B-2 Unit, perhaps his most well-known solo release, came out two years later. Making liberal use of the recently released Roland TR-808 drum machine, the future-facing record sounded like nothing else at the time, and still sounds fresh and experimental four decades later. 

Its most influential cut was undoubtedly Riot in Lagos, a visionary synth jam that influenced Afrika Bambataa and Kurtis Mantronik, helping to lay the groundwork for the birth of electro and hip-hop in the United States. Sakamoto continued working on solo material throughout his life, recording over twenty solo studio albums and culminating with the understated but powerful 12, released just two months before his death. 

Not only a prolific solo writer, Sakamoto was a natural collaborator, and worked with a variety of artists throughout his career. Perhaps his most notable collaboration was with David Sylvian, of the new wave group Japan, a partnership forged after Sakamoto joined Japan on the 1980 cut Taking Islands In Africa. The pair would go on to form a lifelong friendship, linking up once more for Forbidden Colours, the theme to Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, and Bamboo Houses/Bamboo Music, a 1982 single that charted in the UK.

He later worked with everyone from pop stars (Iggy Pop, David Byrne, Brian Wilson and Peter Gabriel) to cutting-edge electronic artists such as Christian Fennesz, Taylor Deupree, and Carsten Nicolai. Nicolai, who records as Alva Noto, struck up a fruitful creative alliance with Sakamoto after Japanese magazine Code Unfinished commissioned him to remix his material. 

The duo went on to score Alejandro González Iñárritu's Oscar-winning The Revenant and record over a dozen collaborative releases, their individual approaches to composition coming together to produce taut, minimal electronic music that stands as a highlight in both artist's discographies. 

Though YMO, Sakamoto’s solo work and collaborations garnered a devoted and international following, his musical talents would find their widest audience through his work as a composer for film and television. 

Winning an Oscar, a BAFTA, a Grammy and two Golden Globe Awards over the course of his career, Sakamoto made a name for himself as one of the pre-eminent film composers of his generation, scoring pictures from some of the most respected directors in modern filmmaking. His first film was 1983’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, in which he also starred alongside David Bowie; his final film was Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster, which premieres at the Cannes Film Festival later this month. 

Influenced by Impressionist composers like Satie and Debussy, Sakamoto had a gift for crafting chords and melodies that slip a hand inside your chest and grab your beating heart. Artists that combine this kind of raw talent for pure composition with a mastery of music technology are rare, but this breadth of capability was key to Sakamoto’s quiet genius. 

A lover of both acoustic and electronic instruments, he was equally adept at coaxing breathless beauty from a piano or dialling in jittery synth-funk with a Prophet-5, a synth he named as one of his all-time favourites, along with the ARP Odyssey and EMS Synthi. 

While we’ve outlined some highlights here, it’s impossible to stuff more than a sliver of Sakamoto’s illustrious career into just a few paragraphs. If you’re not yet acquainted with the work of this visionary and innovative musician, composer and producer, the tracks we’ve listed below would make an excellent place to start. 

1. Yellow Magic Orchestra - Behind The Mask (1979)

One of YMO’s most recognizable tunes, Behind The Mask was originally penned by Sakamoto for a Seiko television ad, only to be re-recorded a year later for Solid State Survivor, the group’s second album. 

An electro-pop classic, it runs poet Chris Mosdell’s dystopian lyrics (sung by Sakamoto) through a vocoder, most likely the Roland VP-330. Such was the track’s appeal that both Eric Clapton and Michael Jackson recorded cover versions, the latter almost making it on to Thriller. 

2. Ryuichi Sakamoto - Riot in Lagos (1980)

Riot in Lagos is a seminal track in electronic music’s history: its dynamic, mid-tempo groove and wonky synth lines influenced early hip-hop and electro producers in the US. Featuring prominently on Sakamoto’s boldly experimental second album, B-2 Unit, the track was loosely inspired by Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti’s kaleidoscopic polyrhythms. 

Sakamoto made heavy use of the Sequential Circuits Prophet-10 on Riot in Lagos, co-producing the track with legendary dub producer Dennis Bovell in London. 

3. Ryuichi Sakamoto - Bibo No Aozora (1996)

We can’t help but shed a little tear every time we hear this one. Bibo No Aozora first appeared on Sakamoto’s 1995 album Smoochy as a dreamy trip-hop number, but the version we love the most can be found on the album 1996. 

Distilling the original into a touching arrangement for piano trio, its gorgeous, melancholic, deceptively simple theme does so much with so little. Check out Jay Electronica’s Better In Tune With The Infinite for an inspired sampling of the track’s central motif. 

4. Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto - Duoon (2002)

Sakamoto's collaboration with Carsten Nicolai has to be one of the most phenomenal link-ups in modern electronic music. Nicolai's subdued, abstract sonics are given a tender brush of colour and emotion by Sakamoto's piano, making for a heart-stopping masterclass in conjuring beauty from the subtlest of elements. 

Duoon is a great example of how genius inspires genius, having been sampled by Burial for In McDonalds, an ethereal cut from 2007's Untrue.

5. Ryuichi Sakamoto - andata (2017)

Elegiac and experimental, majestic and austere, andata perfectly captures the essence of the style Sakamoto settled upon in his final decade. Taken from the album async, his first solo record following a 2014 diagnosis of throat cancer, andata is the sound of Sakamoto grappling with his own mortality: the title means ‘gone’ in Italian, and he believed at the time of writing that it might be his final release. 

"That’s why I tried to forget all the rules and forms,” he told the New York Times in 2017. “I thought this could be my last one, so I thought I should do everything that I wanted to do.”

6. Ryuichi Sakamoto - Playing the Piano 2022 (2022)

After his initial diagnosis, Sakamoto bravely battled cancer while continuing to work at an astonishing pace. When illness returned in 2021, he remained admirably dedicated to practicing his craft despite the challenges cancer presented. 

This solo piano concert, streamed on December 11 2022 from Tokyo's 509 Studio, was his last performance: the stream comprised footage of Sakamoto performing a few pieces each day over the course of a week, in order to preserve his energy. It's an inspiring final glimpse of an artist that was resolutely committed to writing, recording, and performing until the very end. 

Formula 1 driver Charles Leclerc is certainly comfortable with his feet on the pedals, but these usually deal with accelerating and braking rather than sostenuto or sustain. Or so we thought, because the Monégasque Ferrari ace has just released AUS23 (1:1), a piano-led piece inspired by his experiences at this year’s Australian Grand Prix.

This was a race that you’d think Leclerc would be happy to forget - he qualified down in seventh and crashed out on the first lap. However, he’s channelled his feelings about it into four minutes of melancholic music that are now available to hear on streaming services. Not so much Nils Frahm as Nils Vroom.

Writing about the track on his Spotify profile page, Leclerc said: “I’m excited to share with you a piano song that I’ve been working on, born out of my passion for music and created as a way to disconnect from racing and relax in between races.

“I’ve created this song around the Australian Formula 1 Grand Prix which is why I called it ‘AUS23 (1:1)’. This is the way we call the Australian Grand Prix in my Formula One team and thought it would be a nice connection to the racing world.

“After posting a story on Instagram of me playing that piano piece that I had composed, I had a lot of positive feedback from the fans that inspired me to record it, making it easier for my fans to enjoy my music.

“My love for music has always been there, but it wasn’t until the pandemic that I started playing the piano. With more time at home, I decided to buy a piano and learnt to play. Since then, I’ve fallen in love with the instrument and find myself playing it whenever I’m at home.”

It seems that Leclerc has also furnished his house with a studio setup (we’re guessing he’s comfortable with his hands on the mod wheel). In his Instagram stories he’s shown recording the track - which comprises just piano and some synth strings - in Ableton Live with his Roland Fantom keyboard. Maybe he should get Focusrite's FAST plugins involved as well...

Leclerc has had a slow start to the 2023 Formula 1 season, accruing just six points and lying 10th in the standings after three races. He’s just qualified on pole in Azerbaijan, though, so maybe his fortunes are on the up.

And if he wins the race, perhaps his we can look forward to his next track being an upbeat EDM banger.

The running time of his last album was set to last the length of a ketamine trip, and now ambient electronic entrepreneur Jon Hopkins is maintaining the mind-altering mood with the launch of a new craft beer.

Of course, this being Hopkins, there’s a cerebral, musical flavour to the ale, which is a collaboration with the Verdant Brewing Co known as Light Through The Veins. This is the name of a track that featured on Hopkins’ 2009 album Insides, and it turns out that it represented a significant moment in the producer’s career.

“When I was 26, I was working on Insides, and kept hitting serious creative blocks,” Hopkins explained on Instagram. “In those days I often felt like I had too many options, too many potential routes to follow. I had been working with [Brian] Eno a lot around that time, and one of the many things I learnt from him was the importance of limitation, and how imposing seemingly random factors on the music you are making can create things that are more interesting than your conscious mind could conceive of.”

Inspired by Eno, Hopkins came up with a plan: “I picked the number 9, which resonated with me that day. I decided to apply this number to as many aspects of the music as possible. I wrote a 9-note riff, which cycled for 9 minutes and 18 seconds over a 36-step sequence. The number 9 and multiples of 9 were applied to as many parameters in the sound design as possible.”

The track, says Hopkins, “went on to change my life in various ways, and be a big part of my live shows at Glastonbury over the years.”

How does this relate to the new beer, though? Because of that number again: “When I started talking to my friends at Verdant about making a collab beer, the brewing team were into working this 9s idea into the recipe, so they used the number 9 at as many levels as possible,” Hopkins explains.

This means that the beer comes in at a pokey 9%, and has three hop(kins) varieties (three times three equalling nine, of course). The brewing process involves a 63-minute mash rest and a 63-minute boil (six plus three equals nine) and uses 1800kg of malt and 27gpl dry hop (1800 and 27 both being multiples of nine).

Does any of this make the beer taste any better? You can find out by ordering it from the Verdant Brewing Co website, though at £30 for four 440ml cans, it’s probably not going to become your session ale of choice. At least it’s not quite £9 a can, though…

To celebrate the launch of the beer, Hopkins will be DJing at the Verdant Taproom in Penryn, Cornwall, this Friday (21 April). Sadly, the show is sold out, but the good news is that all proceeds raised from the ticket sales will go to the Cabilla Cornwall Rewilding Project.

As all Scouts (and Scar from The Lion King) know, it pays to be prepared, so we have to applaud the lengths that Brian Eno went to to ensure that his 2021 Acropolis gig with brother Roger went off without a hitch.

In an interview with The Independent, the ambient legend confirmed that, because the show took place during a heatwave, he kept a backup for his backup computer (a third laptop, basically) in a fridge to ensure that it wouldn’t overheat.

“Here we are in the oldest theatre in the world and the world outside is on fire - the climate crisis worsening,” explains Eno, with Roger reporting that ash was falling on his piano.

The show took place in August 2021, and was the first time that the Enos had performed live together. It was staged in the Odeon of Herodes Atticus amphitheatre at the Acropolis in Athens, and featured both performances of tracks from the brothers’ 2020 album, Mixing Colours, and songs from their respective solo catalogues.

Among these was material from Brian Eno’s ‘70s albums, Before and After Science and Another Green World, which required him to go back and study their lyrics. “Embarrassingly I couldn’t remember any of the words,” he told The Independent. “Those songs have never been played live before, not even during the recording, because they were made bit-by-bit through collage and dubbing. It was a thrill seeing what good musicians could do with those songs.” 

Those musicians included Cecily Eno, Roger’s daughter and Brian’s niece, who sang and played ukulele and mandolin, along with Leo Abrahams on guitar and Peter Chilvers on keyboards.

Can we expect any repeat performances, then? “I would hate, more than driving nails into my scrotum, to actually go on tour,” says Brian Eno, so we’re guessing not.

However, a film of the Acropolis concert has been made and is set to premiere at cinemas across the UK on 2 March. Head to CinemaLive for tickets.

Despite having worked together on several projects down the years - starting with their 1983 collaboration with Daniel Lanois on the soundtrack to For All Mankind, a documentary about the Apollo moon landings - it was only in August 2021 that brothers Brian and Roger Eno finally took to the stage together.

Their special performance took place at a pretty special venue, too: the Odeon of Herodes Atticus amphitheatre, which is part of the UNESCO World heritage site of the Acropolis in Athens. The full concert is set to premiere at cinemas across the UK on 2 March, but you can now get your first taste of it with the release of the Enos’ performance of Celeste, a track from their 2020 album, Mixing Colours.

The concert also featured other songs from said album, alongside solo pieces, fan favourites and new music that eventually appeared on Brian Eno’s FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE and Roger Eno’s Deutsche Grammophon solo debut, The Turning Year, both of which were released in 2022.

Other members of the band include Cecily Eno, Roger’s daughter and Brian’s niece, who sang and played ukulele and mandolin, as well as Leo Abrahams on guitar and Peter Chilvers on keyboards.

"I don’t perform live very often, but I couldn’t miss the chance to perform in what may be the world’s oldest theatre, located at the birthplace of Western Civilisation,” says Brian Eno. “I’m grateful to Roger, Cecily, Leo and Peter who made this rare appearance memorable for me, and to the great film-maker Tilo Krause who managed to make a beautiful documentation of the whole event.”

"The performers had quite a different view to the members of the audience - they saw Brian’s stunning visuals on the ancient walls of Odeon of Herodes Atticus, whilst we saw, above our heads, the illuminated Parthenon as though floating in the blackness of night,” recalls Roger Eno.

“It was an exceptional honour to perform in such a place. This film, I think, captures the moment accurately and sensitively. But it is more than a mere momento or a document - it is a work of beauty in itself that can now be shared worldwide.”

For tickets to screenings of the full film - Brian Eno and Roger Eno Live At The Acropolis - head to CinemaLive.

Join us for our traditional look back at the stories and features that hit the spot in 2022

Best of 2022: Keith Emerson died on 11 March 2016, bringing down the curtain on a career that saw him recognised as one of the greatest keyboard/synth players of all time.

In the days after his death, Keyboard Magazine's Jerry Kovarsky assembled a collection of tributes to the great man - memories from friends, family, colleagues and musicians. Six years on, we bring a selection of them to you below...

The impact that Keith Emerson had on musicians and fans around the world is immeasurable. It could be argued that Keyboard magazine would have had a hard time launching and surviving had Keith not brought keyboards to the forefront of the band. He graced our cover eight times and was reported on many more times as well.

We felt the best way to honour his memory was to hear from many of the musicians and people who worked closely with him and knew him the best. To them he was Emo, Fingers, Keith... but mostly he was a dear friend. 

Thanks to them all for sharing, and to Ellie Schwartz and Jack Hotop for helping to coordinate our talks.

Keith: may your music and influence continue to be heard and felt for generations to come. Thank you for sharing your humble brilliance with us all. 

Carl Palmer (ELP, Asia, The Carl Palmer Band/ELP Legacy Band)

"I first met Keith in 1967; I was playing at Battersea Park College with Fleetwood Mac, depping for Mick Fleetwood. Top of the bill was The Nice. I had heard of them but never saw the band live, and I got to say hi to Keith after the show.

"He was a phenomenal player and I became an instant fan. So, when I was contacted a few years later to audition for a new band he was forming I had to go, although I was doing very well with Atomic Rooster at the time.

"There were very few keyboard players of that calibre: he was incredibly inventive and his musical direction playing classical adaptations was pretty much what I always wanted to do. So there was an immediate synergy. You all know the rest of the story…

"Keith was the greatest musician I’ve ever played with. We had a total of 16 years together making music and it was a fantastic experience. Keith was an individual who took his music seriously, and tried to push everything he did to new heights."

Brian Auger (Trinity, Oblivion Express)

“I first heard Keith and the Nice play at a show we both did in Croydon. He played America”and I thought he was just unbelievable.

"Our paths didn’t cross much back then, but years later he told me that he saw me playing at the Marquee Club and I was playing Rock Candy, by Jack McDuff, which was one of his favourite tunes. We shared a love for pianists like Hampton Hawes, Dave Brubeck, and Oscar Peterson as well. So we both had many of the same influences, but took them into different directions. His technique was unbelievable, and his sense of orchestration within a rock context was something to behold.

"Fast-forward a few decades and we find out we’re living only a few miles from each other in California. We hit it off fabulously and became tight friends. I liked his gentle sense of humour, and we shared so much in common, being of the same vintage.

"He was such a huge star around the world, but had no real sense of ego. We would call each other and go to dinner, and especially go out to hear music. I will miss those evenings and his company very much.”

Jeff “Skunk” Baxter (Guitarist - The Best, Steely Dan, Doobie Bros)

"I first met Keith at the China Club in LA back in the ‘90’s. I was in the house band, and Keith would come in and play all the time. The band would include John Entwistle on bass, and various guitar players, like Joe Walsh - lots of studio guys. We had great fun seriously playing, not just jamming.

"One night John and I were talking and thinking, 'this is too good, we should do something more serious'. A well-known publicist, Michael Jensen, offered to arrange a couple of shows in Japan so we solidified the band: Keith, John, Joe, Simon Phillips, and a singer buddy of mine Rick Livingstone. We didn’t know what to call ourselves, and being such shy wallflowers, we decided on The Best [laughs]. 

"We started rehearsing, and the great thing was that everyone was a fan of each other’s work, and did their homework to make it sound right. Everyone brought their unique style to the band, and you might not think it would work, but it did.

"As an example of what Keith brought to the project, we were covering one of John’s tunes, Boris The Spider. It’s not very complicated, but while we were playing, for fun, I started playing a bit of the music cue from Jaws and Keith jumps right on it, with the right French horn sound and everything.

"I look over at John, who was a classically trained French horn player, and start playing the intro to Mussorgsky’s Night On Bald Mountain. He knew it, and again Keith was right on it. From there we started quoting Stravinsky’s Rite Of Spring and Keith could cover it all. When we got to Japan and whipped out that arrangement the audience was dumbfounded - they had no idea this group of people could go to those places.

"I took my parents on that trip; my Dad was a historian, and was in WWII, and Keith was into those things so they really hit it off. We were making good money for the gigs so I asked Michael if he could find a bunch of kids from an orphanage and we’d take them to Disneyland, Tokyo, to give something back.

"I have two favourite images from that day. One was the 'Ox', John Entwistle, standing there with six kids crawling all over him, and loving it. And the same about Keith: he really spent time with the kids and you could see how much he was into making them happy.

"After that tour Keith and I would hang out, and we did some recording. He did a brilliant arrangement of People Are Strange for a Doors tribute CD, that he had me play some Django-ish guitar on. I really loved the man: he was unique: a tremendous talent, with a lot of emotional depth. He was constantly thinking about music, and I think composing in his mind. I remember looking at him one day and saying, 'man your brain is loud today!' And Keith just smiled back and said, 'yeah, I know'."

Marc Andre Berthiaume (tour tech, stage manager):

"We first met in 1978. I was in the nosebleed section of the Olympic Stadium concert, not toking, but still getting a contact high from the 58,000+ fans in attendance. Later, I would tell Keith I was at that show, 5th from left, seat 503 - remember me? And he’d respond, 'Of course, I even looked straight at you,' the same line he gave everyone that would ask that same question.

"Flash-forward to 1997. ELP is gearing up for another world tour. Through a series of events, I ended up being the monitor engineer. Hundreds of shows with him, and he never lost it. You gave him his mix, and that was pretty much it, with a few tweaks here and there.

"In 2005, I get a call: 'Hey, it’s Keith Emerson. Want to be my keyboard tech?' I gratefully accepted. 'Hey Keith, remember me? I was the guy in seat 503 at the Olympic Stadium.' 'Of course I do, you were wearing that thing,' came the reply.

"I worked with Keith from 2005 to the 2012 final ELP show at the High Voltage festival in London. A fitting end to ELP. I suggested he throw knives at the stack of Marshalls: he liked that idea, but was worried because Carl may be too close. And he told me the story of how they were on tour with the Jimi Hendrix Experience. As he looked to his Leslies to throw his knives, he spotted a guy crouched down and filming with a Super 8 camera. And how this guy’s eyes opened wide when he saw the knives fly in his direction. The guy was Hendrix.

"I became the band tech on the Keith Emerson Band tours. Some great shows, and a few transcendental ones. I’d sit stage right, handling patch changes making white wine spritzers, and watch this genius work.

"My favourite memories are whenever there was an acoustic piano around: Keith would gravitate to it, and really play. Mostly blues and jazz. He was in the moment. 

"Now I am left here looking back at fond memories of the Keith NOT on stage. That smile and the quick puns. And his great laugh. Sitting on his terraced deck, watching the sunset over a couple of glasses of Pinot Grigio. We’d talk of life, women, music, women, new keyboard equipment, women, Robert Moog, and… women. I’m sitting here writing this, looking up at a limited edition LP of the first Keith Emerson Band album, with his inscription: 'To Kirky, a man who dares go where no man has gone before.'

Well, I did, and I enjoyed the ride. I’m going to miss you, my brother.

Marc Bonilla (Guitarist, Producer - Keith Emerson Band)

"My first encounter with Keith was in 1973 at the Oakland Civic Center during ELP’s Brain Salad Surgery tour. He leapt off the stage with his Moog ribbon controller during Tarkus and landed right in front of me. He gave me this curious look and smiled as if to say, 'See you in 16 years, mate, maybe we’ll do something.'

"In 1989 I was playing at a pub in San Jose, CA when in comes this person who proceeds to study us. I thought, 'That guy looks like Keith Emerson', but I quickly shrugged it off, finished the tune and took a break.

"As he’s walking up to me, I said to myself, 'That IS Keith Emerson!' He introduces himself and asks me the name of the last tune we played, and if we were planning on recording it. I said yes. He says, 'Do you mind if I play piano on it?' All I could think to say in my state of shock and bewilderment was, 'Well, what have you done?' And without a flinch he starts to calmly list his resume, starting with The Nice and moving into ELP before I could stop him and confess that it was just a joke.

"We began touring in 1998 with The Boys Club (with Glenn Hughes and Ronnie Montrose) and then as The Keith Emerson Band in 2006. He enjoyed reworking ELP tunes to exploit guitar, and was always open to whatever ideas came down the creative pike. He was also very keen on improvisation during the show and would pick up stakes and turn left at a moment’s notice, which kept us all on our toes, and would give the audience something special and unique.

"When Keith suggested I produce the Keith Emerson Band album, I was honoured and a bit apprehensive at the prospect. Here was a hero of mine and I was going to tell HIM what to do and how to play? It was a difficult hurdle to get past, but once we did, it was well worth the effort.

"The first time this occurred was during the Hammond solo in Marche Train. Keith had shaved off a handful of passes and I could tell he was getting a little frustrated at not giving me what this 'producer' wanted. Then he says, 'Right, run it again'. And he carved off five or six amazing takes,of keyboard gymnastics! After that, we knew that there was a hump we needed to get over before all the ideas accelerated into ‘flow mode’, and we always found ourselves with an embarrassment of riches.

"Keith’s ambition always was to conduct his own compositions. The opportunity presented itself with Maestro Terje Mikkelsen in 2010. We went to Munich, Germany, to record the Three Fates Project, which was a pinnacle for Keith as well as the rest of us. We had re-orchestrated some of his ELP compositions and when heard in that context, you realise that he was a composer of the highest stature.

"When the orchestra was in rehearsals, Keith was at the back of the hall, sitting by himself. I walked back to see him and he had tears in his eyes. He said that this was a dream come true for him - finally having Tarkus performed the way he had always heard it.

"The last concert we played together was at Barbican Hall in London with the BBC Orchestra in July of 2015. It was the first time much of this music had been heard. Keith was in high spirits and performed flawlessly. He was finally in his element. It seemed befitting and proper that his last gig was his best gig. I have no doubt he will take his place among the musical greats that this world has gifted us with. As it should be.

Al Goff (Hammond organ technician)

"My first encounter with Keith was in 1972: I was working for my Dad in his Hammond organ dealership in Hartford, CT, unboxing and prepping new organs and Leslie speakers. He asked me to prepare a new L-100 for a show rental.

"A few days later we delivered it to the ELP show at the Coliseum. I watched ELP play from side-stage directly across from Keith and realised this band was unlike anything I had ever seen or heard before. 

"Late in the show, Keith slid the L-100 toward the audience, and began rocking it back and forth so the reverberation springs crashed loudly. He removed a large knife from his belt, showed it to the audience, and stabbed the upper keyboard, wedging two playing keys down. Keith stabbed the upper manual again with a second knife and turned the L-100 off-and-on several times in succession, which produced a sound as if the organ was screaming for help.

"My Dad heard the wailing from back stage, saw the knives in the organ, and was as angry as I had ever seen him. One of the crew told him not to worry, this was part of the show, and that the organ would be OK.

"Keith broke a dozen or so keys with his knives and threw them into to the audience, who went absolutely wild, and so did my Dad! He called the Hammond Organ Company the next day to complain. Keith told me years later that Hammond sent him a letter telling him they did not want to sell him L-100’s but, in reality, the factory sales manager told me they knew this was a huge marketing plus for them, as L-100 sales increased significantly. I never realised that would be the start of a long series of Emerson encounters through the next 40 years. 

"As with so many pro Hammond players, Keith became a friend as well as a client, and we talked over the years about his life and upcoming events. We always reached out when one of the players we knew died. I remember talking to him when Billy Preston, Jimmy Smith, Jimmy McGriff, Jack McDuff, and Charles Earland died, as well as Jon Lord and Ray Manzarek.

"I also called Keith as soon as I heard Bob Moog died, and again when Lemmy died, and in both cases, he was particularly upset. We talked about the difficulty of losing our friends and he would always say something positive like 'yet, we keep moving on', or 'tomorrow is another day'. Keith called me when my daughter died suddenly, and talked to me for two hours. He told me life wasn’t going to be the same, but to always think about the good times as they get us through the bad. I thought about that particular conversation right after Keith died.

"Whenever anyone asked me about Keith Emerson, I always said he was the gentleman Statesman of the industry. He constantly encouraged others to play music that makes them happy. He was an amazing individual who never had a bad word to say about anyone, was the first to make a joke, and never really accepted the fact he was the best of the best.

"I will miss Keith as the world lost a truly gifted musician, who was a compassionate and caring man. Some of us lost an amazing friend who cannot be replaced."

Dave Kilminster (Guitarist - Keith Emerson Band, Roger Waters)

"My times playing with The Keith Emerson Band are undoubtedly some of my favourite moments, musical or otherwise. Sometimes during a gig (for example after singing the Stones of Years part of Tarkus) I would just lay out, and listen to the incredible interplay going on. Keith was totally fearless on stage, never afraid to take chances, and his improvisational skills were second to none. Sometimes he’d just stretch out and take a piece of music in a totally different direction, or start re-harmonising the chord progression: he was always creating, and constantly trying new ideas. I think he knew that wherever he took the music we’d be right there with him, and that confidence freed him up to be as crazy as he wanted to be.

"He also loved our little musical 'battles': those Jeff Beck/Jan Hammer type exchanges we had were some of my highlights of the live shows. Occasionally we’d just abandon musical phrases and have silly conversations by trying to sound like the The Clangers [a British children’s TV series in the '70s], or just resort to making stupid noises at each other. He had such a wonderful sense of humour. 

"The last time Keith and I played together was in 2009. Keith called me up out of the blue, and told me that his Mother had just passed away. He asked me to play with him at her funeral, so the two of us (along with a string quartet) played a new piece that Keith had written. Even though it was a very sad occasion, it was such a joy to play together again.

Keith last called me in January 2016, and I so wish we could still do that. Apart from being a musical genius, Keith had such a warm spirit and a beautiful soul, and I’ll miss him more than I can ever express in words."

Dominic Milano (Technical Editor, Editor - Keyboard Magazine)

"Keith’s long relationship with Keyboard started in 1977. Works Vol. 1 had just come out and (pinch me) I was invited to spend a week with Keith in Montreal. ELP were prepping for a tour complete with a full orchestra. When I got there, the orchestra hadn’t joined the band for rehearsals, so I got to stand a few feet from Keith while my favourite trio ran through Fanfare, Pirates, Tarkus... 

"During breaks, Keith would sit at the Steinway in a flimsy plastic chair - the kind you find in cafeterias - and play barrelhouse blues and jazz. He wasn’t practising and he wasn’t showing off. He was just playing for the sheer joy of it.

"I was surprised at how low he sat relative to the keyboard. Not quite as low as, say, Glen Gould would’ve sat, but Keith sat much lower than I expected.

"Another aspect of his technique that struck me was how Keith held his elbows out and away from his body, so he was playing from his fingers - a position he admitted was causing him trouble. Repetitive stress injury trouble. That was my first brush with such injuries. Alas, it wouldn’t be the last. We did a feature story some time later on carpal tunnel and other ills that can befall a keyboardist. The story was inspired in large part by Keith’s experiences.

"I don’t remember how much tape we burned through doing that first Keyboard interview, but I remember talking during nearly every moment he was free. For example, when we were riding in the back seat of a car on the way to the hockey rink where ELP was rehearsing, walking around his keyboard rig, sitting someplace quiet, flying to NYC together while he picked out a Steinway for the Works tour.

"ELP were one of the most popular bands in the world at the time, so it wasn’t surprising one of the guards at the border crossing recognised the name on Keith’s passport. 'Keith… as in Emerson, Lake & Palmer?' Keith nodded shyly and graciously thanked the guy, taking his fame in stride, but not wearing it on his sleeve.

"I took for granted how willing Keith was to talk about anything I asked, and I asked everything I’d been wondering about since I first heard him with the Nice in the late '60s: Drawbar settings, what and who inspired him, why he jettisoned his massive Leslie/Hiwatt setup in favour of a single, mic’d 122 and a DI feed, and a zillion other questions. When I wondered if The Three Fates, like The Barbarian”and Knife Edge, was an adaptation of something classical, the look on his face made me think of a kid who’d been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. He answered earnestly, 'No.' Paused to think, and then asked, 'Why? Does it remind you of something?'

"In late February 2016, I was sitting at my computer when the phone rang. 'Dominic. It’s Keith … as in Emerson.' Ever the gentleman, he called because he’d spent the day doing interviews, but the next one was about something he’d heard I was researching. He didn’t want to help anyone who was competing with me. Flattered by the unexpected loyalty, I thanked him and said him he should do the interview, which was about his relationship with a mutual friend. Bob Moog.

Three weeks later, my favourite organist was gone. His impact on my life and the lives of so many keyboard players is immeasurable. He left us too soon, but he left us with so much.

Tony Ortiz (friend, archivist for ELP)

"One time after a show, I brought my motorcycle back to the hotel. I had it on the kickstand running, and Keith sat on it so I could take a photo. Then I sat behind him for a photo, and he took off for a quick ride around the parking lot with me on the back.

"The next day backstage Greg [Lake] gave me a 15-minute lecture on how the tour could have been canceled lf he had gotten hurt. I walked out of his room and Keith was standing there with a huge grin on his face.

"To explain what type of person Keith was is easy. He sent me a gift on his birthday. When I told Keith I had ALS he said, 'You have to go to Switzerland - they have great doctors.' I told him there is no cure and it’s terminal. I could see on his face he was very concerned. He would call me ever so often to see how I was. One time I told him I was nervous about how I was going to die and he told me something that still helps me till this day. 'Fuck it, man - life itself is a terminal illness!'

"The best time I ever had was at ELP’s last show at the High Voltage Festival in London on July 25, 2010. A friend of mine and I got them a cake with figures of them playing their instruments. They loved it. All four of us stood behind the cake for a photo, which would become the last photo of them all together. I knew they would never play again, and my eyes got a little watery. Thank you Keith for raising the bar to an untouchable level."

CJ Vanston

"It was backstage at Royal Albert Hall in 1992. We [Spinal Tap] were all getting spandexed up for our show when the manager came in and said, 'Some keyboard player wants to sit in'. I asked if she had gotten their name. 'Ummm... Keith something.' I froze. 'K... Keith Em… Emerson?' I asked warily. 'Yeah, that’s it,' the manager replied unknowingly. I braced myself, and five minutes later in walked THE MAN, looking like James f*&^ing Bond. Little did I know, but that was the beginning of what would become a long friendship.

"His almost childlike sense of wacky humour jibed with my Dennis the Menace-like attitude. Somehow I discovered that Keith was into airplanes. Well, I’ve been an aviation buff since I was a kid. We started talking about planes, and the stories of the brave pilots that flew the Spitfires and P-51s, and I saw another side of Keith.

"It got deeper. One time I visited him at a studio and I started playing Strange Meadowlark by Dave Brubeck. Suddenly he came sprinting around the corner yelling 'THAT’S BRUBECK!' Yep, both huge fans. We also loved the songs and the stories of Jimmy Van Heusen. Jimmy was secretly a test pilot for Lockheed, by the way. I used to leave Keith messages late at night, playing different Van Heusen songs like Darn That Dream. He loved that stuff.

"We even shared a little fetish for writing pencils and erasers. We both carried pencil boxes with different drafting and drawing pencils for writing charts/scores/notes. One of his erasers was in the shape of an ear. It was his EAR-ASER. Says it all. 

"The kicker for me was reading his book, Pictures of an Exhibitionist. This amazing man, on top of being the god of the keyboards and one of the greatest composers of the last 100 years, could write his ASS off! His book has a beautiful arc to it, like a great composition. I called and told him 'I read your book…and I HATE YOU! You’re good at EVERYTHING!' 

"The juxtaposition of the most fearsome keyboard player and showman ever to strike the keys, combined with the incredible thousand-year-old yet futuristic (and underrated) composer that he was was perfectly balanced by his impish sense of humour and love of laughter. That’s who Keith was to me. And I think that balance is a huge part of why he was one of the most incredible musicians who ever lived. He LIVED life. As he wrote to me on his 66th birthday: “66… er… 99… 66… 99… still on the spinning piano of life...”

Aaron Emerson (son)

"Keith Emerson, my dad, was a talented composer. He loved jazz, classical and contemporary music, and music would always be played around the house, be it in Chiddingly or elsewhere over the years. Here are a couple of my favourite childhood memories:

"The first time I ever heard the John Williams track from Jaws was when Dad took me into the middle of the ocean to teach me to water ski. As I bobbed up and down, head just above the waves, he decided to play the theme music off the back of the boat! '****,' I screamed! But Dad had already slammed the boat into gear and we were off!

"The earliest memory I have of ELP is from the Olympic Stadium in Montreal. I must have been around seven years old. As we were leaving the concert in what I remember was quite a big car, from out of nowhere strange faces ran towards us and started banging on the car windows and screaming. My first thoughts were, 'Dad - you really must’ve sucked tonight!' to which he replied, 'No, Aaron, everything is OK, this is how they are showing their appreciation!'

"It’s a funny thing to see at seven years old; I wish I was a little older then, or could go back in time to live it how he lived it. Carl, Greg and my Dad had a magical bond. They are, and always will be, my extended family.”

Jeffrey Biegel (pianist, composer)

"As a classically trained pianist, it took me until my 40th birthday to be exposed to Keith’s piano concerto in 2001, and I fell in love with it instantly. Keith inspired me to go ‘out of the box’ and fearlessly offer it to orchestras, pairing his concerto with works by Liszt and Chopin.

"Seeing him in the audiences for my performances was a gift. Those concerts surely gave him a sense of approval from classical orchestras, conductors and audiences, who rewarded him with tremendous ovations for his contributions to music. I miss my friend, and will keep his piano concerto out there for audiences to enjoy and remember him by.

"The one time I spent with him alone was at the piano in the hotel lobby in Kentucky, and when he asked me how I avoid tension in the hands and loose playing, I showed him the stretching exercises I do for the fingers and the loose and supple wrists to accomplish this void of tension. He was able to do them, and liked doing them. Of course, this came far too late in his life as a player, but he did enjoy that time with me. Here I was, showing the great Keith Emerson technical exercises. But it meant so much to me that he wanted to always learn more about his craft."

Ken Dashow (Radio personality, playwright)

"I am a keyboard player, and Keith and ELP opened my eyes and ears to so much. I saw them every time they came to New York. I’ve spent 35 years in rock radio so I had plenty of opportunity to play their music and to support the band. When I would meet him backstage I was surprised that he was so self-effacing and shy. I remember thanking him for the music and he replied, 'Was it OK; did you like it?' I’ve met so many rock stars and no one ever replied with such innocence and honesty. He would visit me at the radio station, or we’d dine together and he always wanted to know what I was listening to, and we’d discuss classical, rock, jazz… he loved and lived music. He was never really into the music business, only the music.”

Geoff Downes (The Buggles, Asia, Yes)

"Keith was the main influence in getting me started playing keyboards in a rock/prog context. I saw the Isle Of Wight festival in 1969 and I was just blown away. Not just his musicality but his showmanship as well. There’s never been another like him since then. 

"I first got to meet him in 1989 when a bunch of musicians got together to help raise money for the victims of the Armenian earthquake. We did a remake of Smoke On The Water with Roger Taylor on drums, Chris Squire on bass, Keith and I on keyboards, and a whole host of guitar players (Ritchie Blackmore, Tony Iommi, David Gilmour, Brian May, Alex Lifeson), and vocalists (Ian Gillian, Bryan Adams, Bruce Dickinson, and Paul Rodgers). I was co-producer on the session, and it did quite well, raising a lot of money to support the victims. We got along quite well and had some fun during the breaks. Somewhere there’s a video clip of Keith and I jamming, four hands on one piano - that was a lot of fun.

"Keyboard players rarely get to share the stage with each other, so we didn’t get to work together much beyond that. Obviously, I worked a lot with his mates; with Carl Palmer in Asia and I did a record with Greg Lake. I would see Keith often whenever one of my tours with Asia or Yes came to LA, and he would always show up, and he had more people around him than anyone in the band did! 

I went to his funeral; Rick Wakeman was there and said to me, 'Why don’t we celebrate people’s lives when they’re still alive?' Indeed, why don’t we?"

Keith Wechsler (Producer/engineer/programmer - ELP and Keith Emerson Band)

"Late one night, after a very gruelling series of KEB shows, I remember dragging my butt to our hotel where I was hoping to get maybe three hours of sleep before travelling to the next gig. It was a particularly nice hotel in a great part of Italy. As I crossed the tiled courtyard toward the magnificent hotel entrance, I heard my name called and looked up in time to see Emo’s naked backside hanging out of a second floor window!

"When we were recording the Ocean Born Mary Suite, Keith had a great name for a part of the Finale where the ascending chord progression naturally circles back before repeating. The part (about one minute into the song) is called the 'Escher' bit.

"Emo’s insistence on pushing the envelope until the rollercoaster wheels are nearly coming off the rails made his music exhilarating, and his silly humour kept us doubled up almost to tears. I miss my friend!"

David Woodford (childhood friend, documentary producer)

"Keith and I went to what you would call elementary school together. He came from humble beginnings; his family never had much money. His father worked for the post office as a telephone engineer. His Mom worked some part-time jobs; I remember she was a cook at a local school. Lovely lady. She and Keith were very close. I remember Keith used to bring his first Hammond back home after a gig, and she would polish it up before he took it out again.

"When we were at school we had a music master, a Welshman, I think his name was Morton. He used to teach music classes, exposing us to classical music, which we weren’t very fond of. He got to hear Keith play and he used to give Keith 10-15 minutes to play for the class. Keith would entertain us playing some boogie-woogie and things like that. Now we knew what he was really up to: he used to keep a flask in his hip pocket, and he would sneak off to have a few drinks while Keith played!" 

The wooden balls that you can see dangling between Mick Fleetwood’s legs on the cover of seminal 1976 Fleetwood Mac album Rumours have sold for $128,000 at auction in Beverly Hills, California.

The ornamental orbs were auctioned off by Julien’s over the weekend as part of a sale of property owned by Fleetwood, the late Christine McVie and John McVie.

Speaking to Maui Time Weekly in 2009, Fleetwood confirmed that the balls in question were actually lavatory chains: “I came out - and I must admit I had a couple of glasses of English ale - and came out of the toilet with these, I ripped them off the - you know, I was very destructive - I ripped them off the toilet and had them hanging down between my legs.”

Fleetwood also said that the balls were a nod to his band’s past: "In truth, I started off as a blues player,” he explained. “The whole ethic of a lot of blues music is slightly suggestive, might I say. And suitably, I walked out on stage with these two lavatory chains with these wooden balls hanging down, and after that it just stuck."

According to Julien’s Auctions' description, both balls feature a dark finish that has been worn away in a band around the circumference, exposing the lighter wood beneath. They’re attached to leather cords and come supplied in a soft maroon cloth drawstring case with the words ‘Open Sesame’ embroidered in gold-tone thread.

Another highlight of the sale was a one-of-a-kind Alembic Series 1 custom fretless electric bass guitar owned by John McVie, which sold for $100,000. This features a stainless steel fingerboard and was made specifically for McVie, who used it both in the studio and on stage between 1976 and 1980. In fact, it was the instrument used to record The Chain, which features one of the most famous and recognisable bass breaks in rock music history.

Another lot with a Rumours connection was the vintage maxi dress worn by Christine McVie on the album’s back cover. This sold for $56,250. McVie’s Yamaha E3 Series Diskclavier electric piano was also up for grabs, eventually selling for $22,400. This features a custom cover with the words ‘Christine Fucking McVie’ embroided across it.

You can check out the full selection of lots on the Julien’s Auctions website.

Christine McVie, singer, songwriter and keyboard player with Fleetwood Mac, has died at the age of 79, her family have confirmed.

A statement on her Facebook page reads: “On behalf of Christine McVie’s family, it is with a heavy heart we are informing you of Christine’s death. 

"She passed away peacefully at hospital this morning, Wednesday, November 30th 2022, following a short illness. She was in the company of her family.

"We kindly ask that you respect the family’s privacy at this extremely painful time, and we would like everyone to keep Christine in their hearts and remember the life of an incredible human being, and revered musician who was loved universally. RIP Christine McVie.”

This statement was quickly followed by one from her bandmates, who said: "There are no words to describe our sadness at the passing of Christine McVie. She was truly one-of-a-kind, special and talented beyond measure. 

"She was the best musician anyone could have in their band and the best friend anyone could have in their life. 

"We were so lucky to have a life with her. Individually and together, we cherished Christine deeply and are thankful for the amazing memories we have. She will be so very missed.”

McVie joined Fleetwood Mac in 1970. She went on to write some of their biggest hits, including Don't Stop, You Make Loving Fun, Everywhere and Little Lies. She also penned Songbird, one of the band's signature ballads.

She left Fleetwood Mac in 1998, but rejoined in 2014.

He’s known for his big orchestral scores and lavish studios, but composer Hans Zimmer has confirmed that he’s also a fan of a rather long-in-the-tooth soft synth.

“So, my favourite soft synth is Zebra, and I'll tell you why,” Zimmer revealed to KVR. “The underlying quality of the sound is not going to let me down. The code in each module is really well written. The oscillators are great, and the circuits are great, and there's one module that's a bit dodgy, but they're all of an equal quality.

“And I like a GUI that is intended for a soft synth as opposed to an emulation.”

Zimmer’s love of Zebra should actually come as no surprise, as he worked with the synth’s creator, Urs Heckmann, on a Batman-themed ‘Dark Knight’ version of the synth - ZebraHZ - back in 2012. 

Another more bizarre revelation to come out of the KVR interview is that, at one point - a long time ago, we assume - Zimmer believes that he and fellow composers Harold Faltermeyer and Giorgio Moroder were all living in the same house, though at the time, he didn’t know them.

“Harold Faltermeyer and I are both from the same neighbourhood, literally,” Zimmer explains. “I think there was a time where [movie producer] Jerry Bruckheimer only hired composers out of that house, which I think was a complete coincidence, but there you go.”

As he looked back on his career, Zimmer also took time to praise MIDI, calling it “one of the most stable computer protocols ever written”.

“MIDI saved my life,” he confirms. “I come from the days of the Roland MicroComposer, typing numbers, and dealing with Control Voltages. I was really happy when I managed to have eight tracks of sequencer going. From the word go, I thought MIDI was fabulous.”

Zimmer went on to recall how he had an early encounter with Propellerhead Software (now Reason Studios) when it was developing its now legendary ReBirth software.

“I remember the Propellerhead guys coming by my studio one day and they had this little bit of software which was two modelled Roland 808s and a 303, and leaving that with me and saying, ‘Hey, this is something we just cooked up. What do you think of this virtual instrument?’ And of course, I thought all of that stuff was fabulous.”

As did we, but there’s one final payoff from Zimmer as he adds: “of course, I still have the hardware.”

A 60-minute documentary celebrating the life and work of Hans Zimmer is available now on BBC player (UK only). Speaking about the film, Zimmer said: “I’m honoured to be sharing this insight into my career and life with the BBC audience. My hope is that this documentary inspires and emboldens you to unapologetically pursue your passions and find a deeper understanding for my scores and above all, music.”

A new double album - Hans Zimmer Live - that reimagines some of his classic scores will be released on 3 March 2023.

The BBC is to release a 60-minute documentary celebrating the life and work of prolific cinematic composer Hans Zimmer. The film, which will air on BBC 2 on 16 October, will look back across Zimmer’s 40-year career.

Promising unprecedented access, Hans Zimmer - Hollywood Rebel is billed as an in-depth and personal profile of the man who’s become the dominant force in the world of movie soundtracks. His film credits include The Lion King, Rain Man, Pirates of The Caribbean, Gladiator, The Dark Knight, Batman Begins, 12 Year A Slave, The Thin Red Line, The Da Vinci Code and Dune.

Zimmer also created the music for several BBC Studios Natural History documentaries, including Planet Earth II, Blue Planet II and Frozen Planet II. He’s known for his ability to blend electronic and orchestral sounds into his arrangements.

Hollywood Rebel will feature contributions from not only many of the big-name directors that Zimmer has collaborated with (including Ron Howard, Denis Villeneuve and Christopher Nolan) but also three of the composers who he’s mentored: John Powell, Henry Jackman and Harry Gregson-Williams.

Of the new documentary, Zimmer said: “I’m honoured to be sharing this insight into my career and life with the BBC audience. My hope is that this documentary inspires and emboldens you to unapologetically pursue your passions and find a deeper understanding for my scores and above all, music.”

Francis Hanly, Hollywood Rebel’s director, added: “The sheer number of standout movies Hans Zimmer has scored over the past 40 years is incredible. It was a dream job to sit and film him at the keyboard in his studio as he gave us an intimate and exclusive demonstration of the techniques and sounds he's created and the ideas that lie behind some of his most famous scores.”

When it comes to Brian Eno, we’ve learned to expect the unexpected, so it seems fitting that a new documentary that attempts to encapsulate the great man’s career is set to arrive with an unconventional twist.

Produced and directed by Gary Hustwit, who previously collaborated with Eno on his 2017 film Rams, the film will be released in multiple versions and use “groundbreaking generative technology” in both its creation and exhibition, so you’ll get a different viewing experience depending on whether you’re watching in a digital format, at a cinema or at a site-specific installation.

Eno, of course, is known as one of the godfathers of generative music.

“You can’t make a conventional, by-the-numbers bio doc about Brian Eno,” says Hustwit. “That would be antithetical and a missed opportunity. What I’m trying to do is to create a cinematic experience that’s as innovative as Brian’s approach to music and art.”

In making the film, Hustwit has had access to 100s of hours of never-before-seen footage and unreleased music from Eno’s archive. In fact, he and his team have digitised and restored approximately 400 hours of material spanning 50 years. This includes interviews, early video art projects, lectures, performances, behind-the-scenes documentation of recording sessions and more.

“Much of Brian’s career has been about enabling creativity in himself and others, through his role as a producer but also through his collaborations on projects like the Oblique Strategies cards or the music app Bloom,” says Hustwit. “I think of Eno as an art film about creativity, with the output of Brian’s 50-year career as its raw material.”

Brian Eno began his career as a member of Roxy Music, before leaving the band and pioneering the ambient music genre with his 1978 album Ambient 1: Music For Airports. He’s produced artists such as David Bowie, U2, Talking Heads and Coldplay and was famously commissioned by Microsoft to compose the Windows 95 startup sound.

Eno is expected to be released in 2023.

“It’s amazing how much impact one song can have,” says Bruce Hornsby. “More people know about you, so more people buy your records. Your face is on TV. Suddenly, this unknown guy from Williamsburg, Virginia is getting invited to the Netherlands, Germany and the UK. Overnight, my life was completely turned upside down.”

Hornsby is, of course, talking about his worldwide hit, The Way It Is. Charting first in the UK in 1986, it was a number one in the US and became the most played song on American radio the following year.

During that first visit to the UK, Hornsby and his band, The Range, appeared on Wogan - Terry Wogan’s hugely popular TV chat show. To his surprise, one of the other guests was very keen to meet him.

“I was sitting in my dressing room and I heard this voice coming down the corridor. ‘Bruce Hornsby. Where the fuck is Bruce Hornsby? I want to see him.’ It was the most surreal moment of my life. Elton John burst into the room wearing a Tina Turner wig. He threw his arms around me and told me how much he liked my music. Elton John is a fan! I couldn’t believe it.”

Bruce Hornsby’s early years were filled with music. His grandfather was a professional musician; his older brother, Bobby, introduced him to underground grooves like Count Five’s Psychotic Reaction; and the local Virginia radio stations were playing everything from Stevie Wonder to Peter, Paul and Mary.

“I realised very early on that I wasn’t just interested in one type of music,” explains 65-year-old Hornsby. “Didn’t matter if it was jazz, soul, rock, folk, country, schmaltzy pop. My appetite was voracious, and I loved the fact that music didn’t seem to have any boundaries. If you wanted to listen to Led Zeppelin, Miles Davis and Glen Campbell… hey, no problem.

“And that became even more important when I started writing my own songs. Let’s take a bit of this, a bit of this, some of that. My own songs were a sum total of all the music that I listened to.”

After graduating from college, Hornsby shuttled between Virginia and LA, joining various bands, offering his services as a session player and scoring soundtracks for 20th Century Fox. But his own songs started drawing ever-larger crowds and eventually landed him a record deal in 1985.

“Late starter, eh?” he laughs. “I was 30 when I finally got a record deal. Then we released The Way It Is and everything went crazy. What still intrigues me today is that the song wasn’t a typical Top 40 hit. It was about racism and homelessness, and it featured two improvised solos. Apart from maybe Mark Knopfler, you didn’t hear much improvisation on daytime radio.”

With a hit under his belt and some cash in the bank, it would have been easy for Hornsby to sit back and churn out endless variations on the same theme, but his 30-plus year career is released today - has been remarkably diverse.

There’s been an album with bluegrass legend, Ricky Skaggs. Sparse, Aaron Copland-inspired soundtrack work with Spike Lee. He was part of the Grateful Dead’s live band in the ‘80s and guested on albums by Bob Dylan, Squeeze and Crosby, Still and Nash. Pat Metheny and Brandford Marsalis slot comfortably into his jazz-tinged 1993 album, Harbor Lights. And last year’s Absolute Zero album featured Bon Iver, English folk trio, The Staves, and jazz legend, Jack DeJohnette.

“You can’t live in the past, making the same album time after time,” he says with a shake of his head. “It’s not interesting for the audience and it’s not interesting for me. I listen to a lot of different music and that makes me want to experiment with new sounds and styles. As a musician, I believe you have always got to be looking forward… moving forward. Embrace what’s out there.

Bruce Hornsby: the 10 albums that changed my life

1. Elton John - Tumbleweed Connection, 1970

“I was 17 years old and riding over to York Town, Virginia with my older brother, Bobby. He had an 8-Track cassette machine in his car, and he played me this album. Song after song, it kept hitting me… Amoreena, Ballad of a Well-Known Gun, Burn Down the Mission.

“I had piano lessons when I was a kid, but this was the album that took me back to the piano. I got serious. In the process of learning every one of those songs, I began to find my own style. This was where it all started.’

2. Leon Russell - Leon Live, 1972

“The first time I heard Leon was on the Joe Cocker album, Mad Dogs & Englishman. And I loved his playing so much that I became a huge fan.

“I could have picked any one of his albums, but this gives you so many of his great songs in one sitting. And the energy of the live show is unbelievable. If you saw Leon back in the early-’70s, it was out of this world.

“You can still feel Leon’s music reflected in my songs like Rainbow’s Cadillac, which we play in Leon’s style.”

3. Keith Jarrett - Facing You, 1972

“As I became a serious music fan, I started to pick up all the magazines… Crawdaddy, Rolling Stone. And I read a review of two new records by a pianist called Keith Jarrett. One was Expectations and the other was a solo piano record, Facing You. It was an import, so I couldn’t get it in my local store, but I found a copy in Boston when I was looking at colleges. 

“Up until that point, jazz wasn’t really on my radar, so this was an amazing step forward. It opened me up to a whole new box of harmonic knowledge and melodicism, but you also had this killer gospel/blues groove on tracks like In Front.

“This became a bridge from Elton and Leon to the more complex jazz like Bill Evans and my next album.”

4. Bill Evans - Montreux II, 1970

“So, I’m getting interested in jazz and I see this album in the record store. I didn’t know anything about Bill Evans, but I bought it on a whim.

“Bill was my introduction to what you might call a more traditional jazz sound, but it’s based on some of the great American standards like I Hear a Rhapsody. Maybe that was what drew me in.

“After hearing this album, I went headlong into the jazz world. Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, McCoy Tyner. In my first year of college, I wrote Chick a letter and he actually sent me some sheet music. Later on, I got to know him, and we always used to laugh about that.”

5. McCoy Tyner - Song of the New World, 1973

“The thing about McCoy is that he had his own original take on jazz. Most people know him as the pianist for John Coltrane and he played on one of the ‘great’ jazz records, A Love Supreme.

“He recorded this with an orchestra - a small orchestra, I believe - but then you’ve got his intense playing on top of that.

“McCoy used quartal harmony; chords in the intervals of fourths. This was a completely new sound for me and, yet again, I was broadening my palette of sounds.

“I managed to sneak some McCoy-esque chords into The Valley Road, a single from our second album. Whenever I hear it, I always think, ‘How did I get away with that on mainstream radio?’”

6. Joni Mitchell - Hejira, 1976

“This is Joni’s road record. She wrote it on a long car journey, with just her guitar for company. It’s a record that speaks to you. It takes you to a beautiful, cinematic landscape and it holds you there for the entire record. I’ve never made an album like this, but it moves me every time I hear it.

“Can I add one more track from Joni? It’s off the following album, Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, and it’s called Paprika Plains. There’s a middle section which is harmonically quite dissonant and that seemed to bother a few of Joni’s fans. Not me! That’s when it starts getting interesting.”

7. Rickie Lee Jones - Pirates, 1981

“Some might say that Rickie Lee Jones and Joni Mitchell are kindred spirits. They both have a jazzy side to their music and their lyrics are… well, they could stand alone as poetry. Yeah, you’ve got the big single, Chuck E’s in Love, but if you want to find the real Rickie Lee, try this album. There’s the powerful opener, We Belong Together; the doo-wop-jive of Woody and Dutch on the Slow Train to Peking.

“This album gave me chills 40 years ago, and it still does today.”

8. The Band – Rock of Ages, 1972/Grateful Dead - Europe ’72, 1972

“You gotta let me have two albums for this slot because I could not choose between them. Both of these are live albums and the performances are out of this world.

“Rock of Ages was the first Band record I owned and every time a friend was over at my house, this was the album I played.

“When you listen to The Band, it’s almost as if you’re reaching into America’s past. Some of these songs sound like they could have been written 150 years ago. And it’s the same with the Dead. Ramble On Rose… Tennessee Jed. What you’re hearing is old time American folk songs written in the modern era.

“There are a lot of Dead albums out there, but the period from Workingman’s Dead, through American Beauty to Europe ’72 is them at their absolute peak.”

9. Pierre-Laurent Aimard - Ligeti: Complete Etudes/Ursula Oppens - Oppens Plays Carter

“Sorry, guys. This needs to be another two for one. György Ligeti was a Hungarian composer and, for me, his Études are the greatest of the 20th Century. And Elliott Carter was an American composer who showed us all how to get deep into the music. Even though he lived till 103, this guy never stopped pushing the envelope.

“These are both what you would call modern classical and, yeah, I understand that this music doesn’t appeal to everyone. But I’ve always had a penchant for atonality and listening to these albums gave me the idea of introducing some adventurous, angular harmonics into my own music. Much to some of my fans’ chagrin!”

10. Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music

“And here we are… full circle. A legendary compendium of gutbucket, spit ‘n’ sawdust field recordings. We started out with Elton’s Tumbleweed Connection, which pulled some of its inspiration from the deep well of traditional American music, and this takes us right back to the source.

“What have we got on here? Clarence Ashley; The Carter Family; Blind Willie Johnson; soaring gospel from the Alabama Sacred Harp Singers; skanky, old country blues from Dock Boggs. People call this the sound of old, weird America. And I am a big fan of the old, weird America!”