Paul McCartney in the room on your first tune at Ronnie Scott’s would rattle anyone, but pianist and composer Tom Cawley somehow turned moments like that into fuel! Geoff sits down with Tom for a warm, very honest catch-up that traces Tom’s path into the London jazz scene, from a school big band in Lincoln to the Royal Academy of Music, and the sudden realisation of just how much listening, harmony and time feel it takes to become a working musician.

We dig into jazz standards as the core training ground for improvisation, especially for rhythm section players. Tom talks comping language, chord voicings, how to create space, and why context matters more than any single lick. He plays two choruses of Charlie Parker’s 1940s standard ‘Confirmation’ on Geoff’s slightly out-of-tune Yamaha, then unpacks what he’s thinking about when he goes “outside”, plus the lasting influence of Phineas Newborn Jr and a hard-won love for Thelonious Monk’s deliberate weirdness.

The conversation gets personal too: the value of honest feedback, the highs of playing with Peter Gabriel, touring the ‘Scratch My Back’ project, and the kind of confidence that comes from simply enjoying playing on stage. Tom also shares a frightening stretch of hearing loss and tinnitus that made it hard to hear bass frequencies, and how that changed his relationship with nerves, cues and trust on the bandstand.

If you care about jazz piano, improvisation, music education, and the real-life craft behind standards, press play. Subscribe, share this with a musician mate, and leave us a review so more listeners can find the podcast.

Presenter: Geoff Gascoyne
Series Producer: Paul Sissons
Production Manager: Martin Sissons
The Quartet Jazz Standards Podcast is a UK Music Apps production.