Richard Fairhurst
Biography Richard Fairhurst
Richard Fairhurst
is one of the UK’s leading jazz pianists & composers. He released his first album to critical acclaim when just 19 and has worked with many of the top names in jazz today.
Richard released three albums as leader of the band ‘The Hungry Ants’ which also featured renowned saxophonist Iain Ballamy. He won the Pat Smythe award for young musicians of outstanding talent and received a scholarship to study jazz and improvised music at the New School University in New York where he studied with Kenny Werner, Fred Hersch and Reggie Workman.
He has been a Steinway Artist since 1998, had a residency at Ronnie Scotts at the age of 20 and reached the final of the Montreux Jazz Festival’s Solo Piano Competition.
Since this early success he has gone on to perform throughout the UK and at Jazz Festivals worldwide including Jerusalem, Copenhagen, Cologne, Vienna, Glasgow, Cheltenham Jazz festival, Bath festival and Senegal where he supported Joe Zawinul.
He has made numerous appearances on radio including BBC’s Jazz On 3, In Tune, Jazz Line-Up and Loose Ends and was selected as one of two artists representing the future of British jazz for a BBC documentary about jazz in the UK.
Richard was commissioned to write new music for the Cheltenham International Jazz Festival which won the BBC Jazz Award for Best New Work. This music for sextet was released on his fourth album as leader ‘Standing Tall’.
As an educator and someone who believes strongly in passing on his skills and teaching young musicians to play Jazz Richard has taught at the Royal Academy of Music, the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of music in London. He also curated his own jazz course for young musicians, which was commissioned by the Richard Attenborough Centre and ran across selected schools around the UK.
Richard made three highly acclaimed duet albums with Berlin based trumpet player Tom Arthurs, ‘Mesmer’, ‘Postcards From Pushkin’ and ‘One Year’. The duo went from strength to strength with a BBC commission for the ‘City of London Festival’ and a performance at the BBC Proms. They also performed at Ronnie Scotts for BBC Jazz on 3‘s live radio broadcast celebrating Jazz in Britain.
He then went on to release a trio record,‘Triptych’ with Danish bass player Jasper Hoiby and New York drummer Chris Vatalaro.
Richard also worked with the great pianist John Taylor in a two-piano duet. They performed at the ‘Steinway 2 Pianos Festival’ several times and John invited Richard to perform with him at his 70th birthday concert broadcast live from the BBC on Radio 3’s ‘Jazz Line-up’. They released their debut album ‘Duets’ on Basho Records.
Most recently Richard has been consistently writing and performing with his trio featuring Dave Whitford on Bass and Tim Giles on Drums, their new album ‘Inside Out’ is due for release on Ubuntu Music in June this year.
