Pat Thomas views himself as “a traditional player who’s just open to things.” Although respectful of musical heritage, he refuses to be confined by genre, race, or class. As one of the UK’s most distinctive pianists, an electronics innovator, and a visionary composer, Thomas is finally earning the recognition he deserves at the age of 64. His acclaimed quartet, [Ahmed], will be performing at the EFG London Jazz Festival this month, and emerging artists such as Moor Mother and Xhosa Cole are eager to collaborate with him.
Thomas’s influence is easy to understand: his music blends jazz, reggae, jungle, funk, and modern composition into highly inventive and beautiful sounds. “To me, the most important thing is, am I making music that can touch people’s hearts?” he explains. “I try to play in as many different contexts as possible, but there’s always going to be an element of improvisation in it for me. My intention is always to try to make good music – whether they see it as ‘new,’ I leave that to other people to judge.”
A stimulating and good-humored conversationalist, Thomas shares his thoughts on music, faith, and anti-colonial history with infectious laughter. Recalling his early musical experiences growing up in Oxford, he describes how his Antiguan parents listened to reggae, calypso, classical, and country music. His interest in the piano began after watching Liberace on television, but it was jazz legend Oscar Peterson’s 1970s BBC series that left a lasting impression: “The whole thing for piano players, especially young Black piano players, was his level of excellence.” His exploration of jazz led him to the works of Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Cecil Taylor, and Sun Ra.
Due to financial constraints, Thomas initially practiced on a cardboard cutout of a piano. Eventually, some neighbors donated an upright piano, with the understanding that his parents would collect it. “Can you imagine these two Black people in their late 30s wheeling a piano down the road?” he recalls. “Automatically, I saw it as an obligation. But I wanted to play the piano anyway.” He later joined the Oxford Improvisers collective, which brought European free improvisation pioneers like Peter Brötzmann and Evan Parker to the city, and also played in the funk band M4 with his guitarist brother Evan.
Looking back, Thomas reflects, “In a way, it was very good that I was in Oxford, because of that eclecticism. In London at that time for a young Black player, jazz would have been the only environment I’d have seen.”
Thomas soon caught the attention of London-based musicians due to his dynamic piano playing and bold use of synthesizers and cassettes. Guitarist Derek Bailey invited him to his Company Week festival in 1991, leading to a notable meeting with US mavericks John Zorn and Buckethead. Thomas quickly became a major figure in the improvised music scene, collaborating with artists like Lol Coxhill, Tony Oxley, and Butch Morris. His 1997 solo debut, Remembering: New Jazz Jungle, was a radical mix of Amen-break drum’n’bass, mutant funk, and post-Webern atonality. “Jungle shocked people,” Thomas says, noting that it gave him the same sense of excitement as free improvisation, while aligning with his interest in dub and avant-garde electronics. His production style was inspired by the bold experimentation of the jungle genre’s early to mid-90s golden era, before its later, smoother phase, which he playfully calls “cafe latte.”
In 1990, Thomas converted to Sufism, drawn to its traditions of scholarship and social justice. “Being a former Marxist, what I liked about the Sufis is that they were revolutionaries. They were always with the people, feeding the poor, helping their neighbors.” His faith has had a profound influence on his music, with his recent solo piano album, The Solar Model of Ibn Al-Shatir, offering an example. Named after the 14th-century Arab astronomer whose theories predate Copernicus by a century, the album celebrates Islamic innovators who have been overlooked by Eurocentric historical narratives. The album features meditative pieces played on the inside of the piano, occasionally evoking the sound of birdsong.
Thomas also believes the Arabic influence on jazz has been underappreciated. He sought to address this with [Ahmed], a project inspired by the pioneering mid-20th-century fusion of bebop, Arabic, and North African music by multi-instrumentalist Ahmed Abdul-Malik. Through intense work on melodies, riffs, basslines, and grooves, saxophonist Seymour Wright, double bassist Joel Grip, and drummer Antonin Gerbal create a thrilling tension between repetition and development, with Thomas’s powerful clusters and angular vamps elevating the music to an ecstatic level. At a recent performance in Glasgow, captured on Wood Blues, the atmosphere was more akin to a nightclub than a typical jazz gig. As Thomas played with his eyes closed, he was unaware that the audience was dancing: “We never thought that what we’re doing was danceable. We’re so locked in that it seems to work.”
Having made a remarkable recovery from a stroke in 2020, Thomas is busier than ever. His current projects include Black Top with vibraphonist Orphy Robinson, Shifa with saxophonist Rachel Musson and percussionist Mark Sanders, the piano trios Bley School and Ism, and the experimental supergroup X-Ray Hex Tet. He has also released several electronic albums, from the extreme abstraction of Kanza Al Qalb to the polymorphous beats of This is Trick Step. While his music can be as far-reaching as possible, Thomas emphasizes that his aesthetic has always centered on beauty, even if, as he jokingly admits, “it might be a very different idea of beauty from everybody else’s!”
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