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Rick Simpson

Rick is based in London playing a wide variety of music, and leads his own group playing original jazz music. Rick is a regular performer at Ronnie Scotts, the 606 Jazz Club, Pizza Express Dean Street, The Vortex, The Bull’s Head, and he has appeared at larger UK venues such as the Royal Festival Hall and the Purcell Room.

In 2008 Rick won a Yamaha Scholarship Prize for Outstanding Jazz Musicians. A recording of Rick’s band was put on the front cover of Jazzwise Magazine.

Since graduating from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in 2008 he has performed with musicians such as Christian Scott, Eric Harland, Joe Sanders, Michael Janisch, Ernesto Simpson, Martin Speake, Earl Burness Travis, Stan Sulzmann, Jeff Williams as well as younger musicians in London. Rick plays in the ensembles of Michael Janisch, Leo Richardson, Jay Phelps, Rory Simmons, Alice Leggett, Riley Stone-Lonergan, Andre Canniere, and Kristian Borring amongst others.

Rick also teaches on the prestigious MEhr Clef courses alongside Stan Sulzmann, Steve Waterman, Alan Barnes, Malcolm Edmonstone Mark Hodgson, Lee Gibson, Ursula Malewski and Martin France.

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8
Album Review

Soweto Kinch: White Juju

Read "White Juju" reviewed by Chris May


Adding politically charged spoken-word lyrics to instrumental jazz needs to be done with care, because if sloganeering is tedious to listen to once, it becomes unbearable on repeated exposure. The record containing it drops off one's playlist. Counterproductive or what? The British saxophonist and rapper Soweto Kinch, however, has pulled the trick off many times. From Conversations With The Unseen (Dune, 2003) through to The Black Peril (Soweto Kinch Recordings, 2019), Kinch has made the combination work because of the ...

21
Album Review

Kristian Borring: Out of Nowhere

Read "Out of Nowhere" reviewed by Jack Bowers


After coming of age in his home country, Danish-born guitarist Kristian Borring relocated to the U.K. where he became a stalwart fixture on the jazz scene and released four albums as leader of his own groups. Out of Nowhere is the fifth, recorded in 2019, shortly before the coronavirus pandemic struck, and featuring as before a rhythm section comprising three British comrades: pianist Rick Simpson, bassist Mick Coady and drummer Jon Scott. Borring wrote six of the ...

11
Album Review

Rick Simpson: Everything All Of The Time: Kid A Revisited

Read "Everything All Of The Time: Kid A Revisited" reviewed by Ian Patterson


It is one thing to cover a rock song, after all, jazz musicians have been doing that since The Beatles, but few have tackled an entire album by a rock band. The target of UK pianist/composer Rick Simpson's admiration is Radiohead's Kid A (Parlophone, 2000), an album that provoked wildly divergent critical response in its day. Some lambasted the electronic-influenced follow-up to the hugely successful, hook-laden OK Computer (Parlophone, 1997) as pretentious, incoherent and alienating. Others saw it as bold, ...

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Music

Recordings: As Leader | As Sideperson

White Juju

Soweto Kinch Recordings
2022

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Out of Nowhere

Self Produced
2021

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Everything All Of The...

Whirlwind Recordings
2020

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Live at The Vortex

Self Produced
2017

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Videos

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