By: Andrew Weir

Andrew Weir — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 14:14:29 +0000

I attended not the jazz workshops but the more basic classes Howard did in 1983 and 1984 in cold huts outside the main Goldsmiths building. He’d give us a standard to copy out — to avoid copyright breaches, he was always a stickler — and the next week each of us would play with him on the two pianos, taking choruses in turn. I wasn’t going to make a career in music, so my amateur efforts did not deserve this masterclass-style attention, which was a joy and a privilege to participate in as well as gold-standard tuition for the class members who were honouring his deadly professionalism and dedication. He was a hard but totally fair taskmaster who also taught us so much about the history of jazz and improvisation, though he could be prickly and so dismissive of mainstream styles. But he was open-minded too; he couldn’t deny the genius of Keith Jarrett’s Standards Vol 1 and 2, which came out during my time with him, and loved Bill Evans, despite his own diametrically opposite style. It was a total education in the meaning of music as a whole, for me, not just jazz and led me to appreciate all genres so long as, as Howard used to say, the artist had “something to say”, which he certainly did. After leaving the class I stayed in spiritual touch by buying his CDs whenever they appeared and am so happy I was able to attend Cath Longbottom’s showing of her film at the Vortex in September 2022 and stand up at the end and testify to one of the best educational experiences of my life .

Comments on: RIP Howard Riley (1943-2025)

By: Andrew Weir