Pianist Philip Clouts tours England and Scotland with his quartet in October to mark the release of a new album, Umoya, one of the first releases on the new jazz imprint of American classical label Odradek.
It’s an album that confirms the Cape Town-born Clouts’ ongoing love affair with South African music but also with rhythms and melodies from around the world. Influences including Sufi music, Nigerian dance rhythms and folk music from Romania and Southern Italy, as well as gospel music all figure, in his latest compositions.
“Jazz and world music have been important to me throughout my musical life,” says the now Dorset-based Clouts who emerged on the London jazz scene during the 1980s and became a key member of popular world jazz ensemble Zubop before moving to the Jurassic coast in 2006. “I’m inspired by both the freedom of jazz and the rootedness of world music with its sense of dance, community and spirituality. Listening to both genres always reveals a variety of approaches to rhythm, harmony and melody.”
Although he came over to the UK from Cape Town with his family as a young child in the early 1960s, Clouts grew up hearing the music of his homeland as his parents – his father, Sydney Clouts, was a poet whose work captured the South African landscape – had brought their favourite records with them.
After his two older brothers began taking piano lessons, he impressed the family by picking up what his siblings were playing by ear. He found himself drawn to improvising, and hearing the great British pianist Stan Tracey on a television programme when he was twelve attracted him to jazz and inspired him to take the instrument more seriously.
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