Mark d'Inverno

Mark d’Inverno was born in 1965 and started playing piano around the age of 5 and jazz piano from the age of 13. Whilst studying at St Catherine’s College Oxford he co-founded the Oxford Jazz Club in 1983, where he played weekly with his trio and other guest musicians. He also led a number of bands in Oxford in the mid-1980s and featured regularly in the music of town and university life. After touring Japan for several months as a drummer in a pop trio in 1989 he moved to London and immediately started to play with some of the leading musicians on the jazz scene there.

As a graduate student at UCL in London he led and conducted the UCL big band, which went on several European tours and appeared several times at the London Jazz Festival. During this time he ran a weekly workshop series over several years encouraging people to take up jazz. This led a number of bands in the jazz/pop world that played in London both Further afield. (One of the most successful was MoCity a 70s cover band that played prestigious venues in the UK – “MoCity are to 70s music what Bjorn Again are to Abba” was a headline in the Daily Express!).

In 1994 he formed a trio with Andy Hamill (bass) and Steve Brown (drums) which went on to perform at venues across the UK, such as London’s Royal Festival Hall freestage. The trio recorded the album Joy, which, 10 years later, still enjoys radio play on Jazz FM and BBC radio. Subsequently Mark joined forces with Winston Clifford (drums) and Larry Bartley (bass) to form a new trio, which also became the basis of the Mark d’Inverno quintet.

Mark met guitarist Francois Pachet in 2009 and started to collaborate both as a composer and a scientist. All songs on the quintet album ‘Count On It’ have been composed jointly by Pachet and d’Inverno, and the entire process of composition has been documented for future reference, in order to try and understand something analytically about what takes place during the composition process. The fifth member of the band is saxophonist Ed Jones, whose bands Mark had been a fan of through the 90s, and with whom he had performed several times.

In addition to being a jazz pianist, Mark is a Professor of Computing at Goldsmiths, London, looking at ways technology can be used to support and extend the creative process. He was Head of the computing department at Goldsmiths from 2007 - 2011, which has become a world-leading institute for promoting computing as a creative practice in art, music, design and games. In 2013 he took up the position of pro-warden (director) for research and enterprise at Goldsmiths, which continues a very strong relationship in its research and teaching with London’s creative and cultural sectors.

Mark has composed for theatre, radio and film and was the founding chairman of the charity Safeground that worked in many UK prisons promoting courses on parenting and family relationships.

Awards

The album “Joy” by the “Mark d’Inverno Trio” was awarded BBC Music Magazine Album of the month by Ian Carr.