Beatrice Nicholas and I discuss a classical/jazz fusion

Welcome to the latest episode of Harmonious World, where I interview musicians about how their music helps make the world more harmonious.

Pianist Beatrice Nicholas spoke to me just ahead of her appearance Upstairs at Ronnie Scott’s on 17 August.

Thanks to Beatrice for allowing me to play extracts from Black and Classical alongside our conversation.

Thank you for listening to Harmonious World. Please rate, review and share: click on the link and subscribe to support the show.

Don't forget the Quincy Jones quote that sums up why I do this: "Imagine what a harmonious world it would be if every single person, both young and old, shared a little of what he is good at doing."

Transcript

Hilary 0:41

Hello and welcome to the latest episode of Harmonious World. My name is Hilary Seabrook, and what you're listening to now is a performance of Troubled Water by Margaret Bonds, performed by my guest today, Beatrice Nicholas. Beatrice has a very, very interesting story to tell, and this is taken from her 2024 EP Black and Classical. So I hope you enjoy listening to my conversation with pianist Beatrice Nicholas. Hi Hilary. Hello. Oh, what a pleasure to talk to you. I'm absolutely delighted. Thank you. I've quite an honor to be on your podcast. Thank you. Yeah. So um I want to talk to you about your upcoming gig upstairs at Ronnie's and your the music that you've produced, but also what's behind all of that. There's so much to unpick here.

Beatrice 1:39

Great. Yeah, so I'll be playing upstairs at Ronnie Scott's on the 17th of August, 6.20 pm. We start doors open for 5 pm. And as you know, Ronnie Scott's have recently opened a classical series. So I'm playing as part of their classical series, but I'm someone who's coming with classical jazz fusion. I really wanted to honour the legacy that Ronnie Scotts have. And I'm someone that yes, I'm trained to be a concert, classical concert pianist, but I love jazz, and I thought I'd fuse the two in my show.

Hilary 2:10

Yeah, and you have a very interesting your your style. I find piano playing really interesting because it's a physical thing, isn't it? That you you know you're hitting the keys, but actually the different ways that people hit those keys are just you know, there's so much there.

Beatrice 2:34

Absolutely, yeah. I mean, I guess physically it's all to do with weight and touch, you know, but the way you touch the keys can just give round rise to so many different types of colour and styles. Um, one of the people who I love listening to is Haromi because she just has so many different types of nuance in the way she plays and colours. Um, and I was I was at Ronnie's last week, I was just having a little of a jam session with James Pearson. Oh, and he was yeah, he's wonderful, he's totally wonderful. And he was just saying to me, you know, Beatrice, one thing that you can really bring to jazz from your classical training is colour, you know, more dynamic and more colour. Like classical pianists are used to spending hours and hours trying to find, but jazz pianists may not, and he said, You could bring that, um, and that could be something that's unique to you.

Hilary 3:24

Yeah, and I think one of the things about the difference is that when you're a classical pianist, you are taught very much you play what is written, you might interpret it in terms of style, uh, your speed and that sort of thing, but you are playing what is written. Whereas I think jazz pianists focus on the improvisation, yeah, and and although they have their own way of touching those keys, I think you know, you there's so much more that you can do, and it sounds like you're gonna it's gonna be really exciting, and I'm desperately, desperately sad that I can't be there on the 17th. I would have loved to. I think it sounds like it's gonna be an amazing because it's it's an amazing venue upstairs. I think they have created something very special up there.

Beatrice 4:13

Oh so beautiful. I mean, every time I go out there, I'm gonna like who designed this? It's just you know, the material on the walls, even the bathroom is exquisitely done.

Hilary 4:23

Yes, yeah. Yeah, the and on the ceiling, they've used the fabric from around the thing on on the sort of um the soundproofing bars, things that are across. And they're just beautiful. It's like every time you look somewhere different, there's something nice to look at, and that's alongside always the amazing music.

Beatrice 4:45

Yes, yes, they've really gone for excellence. The acoustic is brilliant. Um, now they've got classical and jazz going on, film music. I mean so much. This beautiful place to come and listen to music to eat, great bars. I'm told that the restaurant upstairs is an entirely different kitchen to the restaurant downstairs. Um, so whether you're upstairs or downstairs, you're getting a different experience in both places.

Hilary 5:10

Yes, yes, and and and I think sometimes, you know, dare I say it, sometimes the pit the audience is people who have come to Ronnie Scott's to come to Ronnie Scott's because it's a tourist attraction, it's a very well-known jazz club around the world, you know, and and sometimes there's a little bit of, you know, they've got no idea who they're listening to. Whereas every time I've been upstairs, it's very much everyone's really engaged. A lot of single people have I've noticed upstairs, um, you know, where they're people who've just come because they want to hear this particular uh musician.

Beatrice 5:49

Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. No, if if definitely expanding their audience, that's what it was. Exactly. Probably what they wanted to do. Um and it's it's been it's been shown to work uh um to have been it's been successful very quickly.

Hilary 6:01

Yes, I think. Right. Absolutely. So let's talk a little bit about the music. So at the start of this podcast, I'm playing uh um some of uh Troubled Water. Oh, great, because uh Margaret Bonds, who is not a pianist I'd ever heard of, uh, which is I think part of the reason you included her on the EP, is that she's not a very well-known composer, certainly in the UK. And also I love Troubled Water because it's based on Wade in the Water, which is a spiritual, but also, you know, we know it as a it's been a rock, you know, it's been in been performed by rock musicians. So is that why you chose to include that on your EP and as part of your uh your portfolio of tunes?

Beatrice 6:47

I was fascinated by the fusion that was going on um in all the composers of that EP, but particularly Margaret Bond. So in Troubled Water, you've got the African American spiritual that's going on underneath it. But you've also got these jazz influences as well. And then in the middle section, it breaks that into something that's more like Rak Baranoff. And I find that not just her, but her teacher, who's also on the album, Florence Price, another composer. Um, and actually a lot of African American composers in the 1940s and earlier would fuse black heritage music together with classical music. Um and it's almost like a genre in itself.

Hilary 7:30

Yeah, yeah, and and I I love the uh you know, Gershwin obviously, and you know, those those sort of early pioneers of American music, you know, where America really started getting its sound as a precursor to the sort of fit 1950s where all of a sudden jazz hit and bebop and you know, and you get then get people like uh you know McCoy Tyne, Herbie Hancock, you know, the modern uh ja real jazz pianists, but a lot of them had uh they had a lot had a classical training because you couldn't have a jazz training then.

Beatrice 8:09

Yes. Yeah, yeah, you're totally right, totally right. Um yeah, I mean when I think about Leonard Bernstein, who's you know big classical composer and conductor, he said the common denominator in American music is jazz. Yeah. I think that for me, sometimes people who don't know me have said, Are you American? Can you keep you know going about American music? I'm like, No, I'm British, but I'm just so attracted to the influence of jazz in across musical musical culture in America that I just want to spend time in it. Um yeah, so I just I love fusion, so naturally being very attracted to American music, there is just so much fusion in it.

Hilary 8:51

Yeah, absolutely. So at this point in the podcast, I would like to play Summer Interlude by Betty Jackson King. So let's do that. They are they feel they've definitely got some jazz influence, haven't they?

Beatrice 11:06

Yeah, yeah, they have. Um for me when I hear it, I hear jazz influence, and I also hear gospel influence. Uh I'm not entirely sure why, it's not overtly gospel harmonies being used, but there's this call and response. And I remember playing it actually to my sister for the first time, who if is not a professional musician, she said it sounds like church, and she didn't mean like Anglican church, she kind of meant like black Pentecostal church, and she couldn't pinpoint white either. But the black heritage flowing through it is it's so strong. Um, the way I tried to play it is to give a feeling of it being improvised. I've been really blessed because I had to connect with her aunt, who um sorry, not her aunt, her niece, who's her only living relative that's around, and she connected me to people who are still alive who knew her, and they all talked about this huge capacity she had to improvise. Um, she was a great improviser as well as a great rap man of player. So she probably stood between both traditions of classical and jazz, as most um African-American classical musicians in that time did. They could all improvise, they could all, you know, play gospel and jazz to some extent. Um, it was part of their natural musical upbringing. Um what's interesting is when they cross over and bring it into classical as well.

Hilary 12:33

Yeah, I uh it it's lovely. I often tell this story that when I started this podcast six years ago, I got myself all organized and I had a folder on my uh on my desktop for jazz downloads and a folder for classical downloads, and within about two weeks I was kind of like, This isn't gonna work. Because there's too much where you kind of go, Well, yeah, it is jazz, but there's a classical influence, and it is a classical, but there's a jazz influence. Um which I love, I absolutely love. One of my first guests was Maria Schneider, and you know, she's absolutely one of those people who wouldn't be the woman she is if she hadn't studied some classical music before she studied the jazz.

Beatrice 13:20

Yeah, yeah, and one of the people um I'm bringing into the Ronnie Scott show is Lil Harding Armstrong. So she was Louis Armstrong's second wife. She trained to be a concert pianist, but you know, couldn't find work in that time. And one of the things she did was she, when she met Louis Armstrong, he wasn't famous at all. She encouraged him to step out as a soloist, she marketed him as a world-class solo um player, and also she taught him classical music theory to underpin his solo playing and to give it more harmonic variety. Um, yeah, so she's a great example of someone, you know, kind of going between both worlds and shaping it into something that worked for her. That's something actually that was a main um inspiration for this show. African-American women who um were between classical and jazz, or maybe African-American women that we know of jazz stars, but actually started out wanting to be classical concert pianists, but couldn't be because of the racism in the time. Like we know Nina Simone, all she wanted to do was play Bach. I mean, in some way, thank God she didn't. Right? But that wasn't her plan, and she never got over the fact that she was rejected from Curtis Institute. She never got over it because she wanted to be this Bach player and she was an incredible Bach player. Um, but yeah, there's there's all these parts of history that not just shape music but shape people's pathways. Um, and we have a lot of jazz stars that were intending to be classical artists.

Hilary 14:53

Yeah, yeah. Uh it it's it sounds like that's gonna be a wonderful show. Um can can you talk a little bit about your background? I mean, how did you how did you become this amazing pianist that you are?

Beatrice 15:07

Thank you. Um one of five children, my parents wanted all five of us to study classical music in some way um as a hobby, um, but they were very uh strict about us practicing. So it was a hobby, but we were, you know, I had to practice for a certain amount of time, six days a week. So it was very disciplined. And the deal was that when we got to grade five, we were allowed to give up or pick a second instrument, and I picked a second instrument, the cello, and and I just I think particularly when I got to secondary school, I just absolutely loved it. Um, and it became something that became kind of my life, really. Um, when I was 15, I went to either junior college or the Royal College of Music, obviously picked up big foundations for classical technique there. And from there I just kind of went down the classical route. I went to the academy, I went I went to Berlin to study with some brilliant concert pianists. Um, but when I was 13, my dad paid for me to have jazz, jazz and gospel lessons at home. Um, I think the gentleman moved or something happened, so they didn't last a very long time, but that's when I actually had the opportunity to start learning how to improvise. I say learning, I probably was improvising already because I'm quite creative, and so actually improvising for most people, um, especially outside of Europe, is kind of how you approach music anyway. Um, but you know, I kind of had some formal help with it at that point. Um, he left, so um, those left and stopped, but it's something that always kind of stayed inside of me, and as I started composing in my teenage years, very often I would score things that had a jazz influence or were just pure jazz. I think when I did my um auditions for music college, I auditioned as a pianist and a composer for all the four main colleges in London and also Royal Northern in Manchester, and one of the compositions I submitted in my portfolio was a score for big for Jazz Big Band. Um and I remember the Royal Northern, they loved it. They were like, Oh, we weren't expecting you to write jazz, you know, and they loved it. So it kind of stayed in me. Um, but I've had a classical career, but now more and more I'm just wanting to fever to and to bring something more out of the bag. Yeah, yeah.

Hilary 17:28

Who are your um so so moving away from the sort of African American side, who are the who the who are the British musicians? You've talked about James Pearson, but what other British musicians do you listen to? Are there other British pianists? Because I'm thinking, I've got a couple in my mind, and I'm just wondering if you've got the same sort of ideas. Who would you listen to?

Beatrice 17:48

Yeah, I have to confess to listen to listening to a lot of American um pianists and overseas pianists, when it now I think about it, I hadn't really clocked that before. Um yeah, I am I am listening a lot to um people like Robert Glasper and Tigran, and so I probably should invest more in listening to British pianists.

Hilary 18:13

Yeah, um yeah, but Robert Glasper and Tigan, I mean they're they're just they're incredible, aren't they? I this is where I get my feed from. Yeah. Tigran, I saw him at um the Barbican last year, and he was he was his his he was playing with such enthusiasm, his hands were bleeding. And he apparently apparently he had he'd done something, you know, he'd caught it on something, you know, before it wasn't, you know, it wasn't that he he caused it, but but he he started bleeding and just carried on playing because it was like, you know. I mean he was just ah he just blew me away, completely blew me away.

Beatrice 18:55

Isn't it amazing uh going back to what you said to be that free on stage that uh yeah like your passion causes you to bleed, it's it's phenomenal.

Hilary 19:05

Have you heard Bill Lawrence? Not live. Oh right, okay. That's my that's my challenge for you is go and see Bill Lawrence performing live because he has got that jazz classical thing going on, like absolutely brilliantly. And yeah, um I went I interviewed him in his studio in South London, and uh when I saw him I saw him at the Kudarkin Hall and he'd got a grand piano and an upright piano, and they were at right angles to each other, and he was sort of playing sometimes he'd play one and then he'd play the other, and then he'd play one hand on the other one, and then he'd swap them over, and you know, it was just because they had such different tones, and you know, oh it was just amazing.

Beatrice 19:54

That's so brilliant, and it's so good to watch as well. Oh, absolutely.

Hilary 19:58

Yeah, yeah. And his album last year he he released an album called Lumen, which is just it where he just sat in a church, his local church, and um had it all um, you know, he had a Yamaha piano brought in and it was just in there and just amazing. So okay. Yeah, and the reason I mentioned that is because I think that you so people would probably think of you as a classical pianist who maybe veers into jazz, and he's a jazz pianist who veers into classical, but I think you're the you're the same. It's just you know, yeah.

Beatrice 20:38

Oh, brilliant, yeah.

Hilary 20:40

I'll take that one. Thank you. Yeah, no, that's all right. It's I when I interviewed him, it was such a pleasure, like talking to you where you just kind of you get it completely. I just you know. So what else is new? So you've got the gig at um upstairs at Ronnie's on the 17th of August. What else is coming up?

Beatrice 20:59

Um, coming up, I still you know have my kind of classical stuff. I'm doing a Tchaikovsky concerto in September that I'm having to be very busy and disciplined about practicing for. Yeah. Um I'm gonna I can't kind of I don't think I'm allowed to say what the event is yet, but it's gonna be a really big one. But I can say that I'm gonna have to spend quite a bit of time in the autumn um looking at Winfred Atwell. She's gonna be she's gonna be my next project. Um this is really cool because I was already wanting to record some of her music anyway, and just try and get back to some black British women. Um so, but then someone else has said we would like you to do such and such with Winfrey at well. So um maybe the next time I see you, I'll be able to tell you what that is.

Hilary 21:44

But excellent. Oh, I I you you've you've uh you've you've wetted my appetite for that now. That's really interesting. That's fantastic.

Beatrice 21:54

Oh, brilliant! And then composing, so I compose as well. I'm working with um a family. And my sister put me in touch with her because she um you know she plays in Paris for the Money, but she also plays for the duck, so she as well is going in between classical and jazz, and she said to my sister, I just can't find um pianists in Paris who will do both, it's either completely classical or completely jazz. And my sister said, Oh, you can find people like that in the UK. If you want to meet my sister, so I'm writing um a jazz suite for her, really sweet for her. Done the first movement already, we've rehearsed that, it's gone really well. I've got to write a couple more movements. Um, so yeah, I'll be writing that, and then um the show that I'm doing for Ronnie's, which is a both a mixture of jazz and classical and a fusion of jazz and classical. I've really really enjoyed putting it together. So now I'm sketching ideas. Um a similar show that takes it further, where I can add uh I mean this show is for jazz trio, but I want to add, you know, saxophone, trimbone. Um since since um trumpet, I want to add more instrumentation, um, and just do something uh bigger and better.

Hilary 23:15

It sounds absolutely brilliant. So your gig at Ronnie is with a jazz trio.

Beatrice 23:20

Yes.

Hilary 23:21

Oh, so who have you got on bass and drums?

Beatrice 23:23

I've got Matt Home on drums, who is fantastic. Yeah, that's that's drum solos, absolutely love with drum solos, and then Matt is half I get on bass. They play they both play in a group called Five Way Split. They released an album earlier this year. Um, I think the album is called Mojus Operandi, which is also the title of the main track. Really lovely track, lovely album. So then my jazz trait, and what we're doing is we're alternating each number. So it'll be jazz trait, then solo piano, jazz tray, solo piano, solo piano. Um and the idea is to have high energy and then that's jazz, and then completely switch to kind of very calm, um, tranquil, classical, and then switch up immediately into high energy jazz. Um, that was my idea. And gonna be kind of highlighting that, you know, with all sorts of stage tricks like lighting and you know, all the things we can do at Ronnie's to make a show come alive.

Hilary 24:17

Absolutely, that sounds amazing, and I am really, really sad that I can't believe that. Oh, brilliant.

Beatrice 24:25

Well, I hope it goes really, really well. Thanks for um being willing to talk about it and meet me. It's been great to meet you, really, really good.

Hilary 24:59

And there will be more coming. So, what you're listening to now is Clouds by Florence Price, who Beatrice mentioned. Although Clouds is classical in structure, it's created to sound like it's a free improvisation. So, thank you for joining me once more for Harmonious World. And if you're one of my regular supporters, thank you so much because it really helps me keep going. If you're not, then think about becoming a supporter. You can you can uh sign up on my Patreon channel and just stay connected with me and find out what else is coming up because I have some exciting news about live editions of Harmonious World, because there's more to come. So have a great week and thank you for joining me on Harmonious World.