Mike Westbrook - photo: Xavier Lambours
photo: Xavier Lambours
MIKE WESTBROOK
SOLO
Internationally acclaimed as ‘one of the UK’s most creative, experimental and daring jazz composers’ (The Times), Mike Westbrook improvises on themes from his musical history. In this rare solo performance, remembered show tunes, pop songs and jazz classics are interwoven with originals from the Kate and Mike Westbrook Song Book.. Andy Robson, reviewing the album Starcross Bridge wrote “Chords, Messiaen-like, hover and decay, melodies elide and fall: some songs are vividly deconstructed like Lennon/McCartney's Because, some split apart before us like the extraordinary take on Strayhorn's Johnny Come Lately And beneath it all, the blues, as on For Terenzi, roll and tumble.” Jazzwise
“Westbrook’s playing is intimate, restrained, reflective, and deceptively simple, moulding disparate sources into a beautiful and beguiling whole”
Barry Witherden BBC Music Magazine
“I find those probing, exploratory chords so engaging, and the segues and juxtapositions really intriguing, gently dismantling so many barriers.”
Martin King WestbrookJazz Notice Board
"I loved the sense of a man playing these pieces for the thousandth time but still searching for new angles, new shapes, and new combinations of notes with which to deepen his investigation of their wordless essence. There was not a wasted note, not a superfluous gesture, not the tiniest hint of display for its own sake."
Richard Williams The Blue Moment
“Westbrook’s style is an engaging mixture of warmth and dissonance, spiced by a touch of honky-tonk. With its constantly changing moods and familiar melodies cunningly revealed, an hour’s music seems to pass in half the time.”
Dave Gelly The Observer
“An hour of solo piano that is fresh, rich and improvised, yet references a myriad of the master’s many previous musical lives. Westbrook nests together his loves, heroes and inspirations, the man and his music, the music and the man, as one.”
Andy Robson  Jazzwise
In a musical career spanning over fifty years Mike Westbrook has written for, toured and recorded with a great variety of ensembles, from Trio to Jazz Orchestra. His compositions for voice, many written in collaboration with his wife, vocalist/librettist Kate Westbrook, range from cabaret songs to opera. They include large-scale orchestral works combining jazz and classical ensembles and settings of European poetry, as in The Cortège, and his latest album London Bridge Live in Zurich. Current projects include Kate Westbrook’s Granite Band; the WestbrookTrio+2, celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Trio with Kate and Chris Biscoe. As well as The Westbrook Blake, settings of the poetry of William Blake; performances with his West Country-based big band The Uncommon Orchestra of his much loved Ellington tribute On Duke’s Birthday and a revival of the popular Big Band Rossini, variations on themes from the operas of Gioacchino Rossini, the first jazz work ever to feature in the BBC Proms and recently played to great acclaim in Rossini’s home towns of Pesaro and Lugo.
"Whether he is writing for a trio or a 20 piece orchestra, Westbrook's style is unmistakable. He combines instruments in unique ways, twists conventional jazz forms into surprising new shapes and seasons it all with delicate touches of humour and irony."
Dave Gelly The Observer
Mike Westbrook solo piano

on Bandcamp
the piano and me      westbrook records 2022
on cd
Starcross Bridge        hatHUT records 2017
Starcross Bridge
PARIS                        asc records 2016
Paris
on Bandcamp
Piano                        impetus records 1978
Piano
on film
Paris                         Temple Music 2016
Paris film
We’ll Always Have Paris     westbrook records 2016 
We'll Always Have Paris film
the piano and me
Mike Westbrook