Keith Nichols

Keith Nichols ( born February 13, 1945 in Ilford, Essex ) is a British jazz musician, arranger and bandleader.

Nichols is one of the British authorities for the early Classic Jazz and Ragtime, which has specialized in the interpretation of composers and musicians such as Scott Joplin, James P. Johnson, Fats Waller and Duke Ellington. He plays piano, trombone, tuba, vibraphone, saxophone and clarinet, and has worked as a singer and arranger.

At the age of five years, Nichols received his first music lessons on the piano and the accordion. In 1960 he received the award of a Great Britain Junior Champion for his accordion playing. He studied at the Guildhall School of Music and began his career as a professional musician. For seven years, he worked as a pianist, trombonist and tuba player with the jazz - comedy band Levity Lancers on tour. Since the early seventies, he gives as a soloist and with smaller ensembles regular ragtime concerts at London's South Bank. In 1976 he attended as a member of Dick Sudhalters New Paul Whiteman Orchestra for the first time the United States and performed in Philadelphia and in New York's Carnegie Hall. During this period three solo albums for the record company EMI and some for Decca, including a collaboration with Bing Crosby. Since the mid- 80s, he is represented on more than twenty albums of jazz specialty label " Stomp - Off" on which it occurs both as a leader and as an instrumentalist in appearance. In 1977 he founded the Midnite Follies Orchestra with arranger Alan Cohen, with whom he plays the music of Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway from the Harlem of the 1920s and 1930s. He has created numerous arrangements and transcriptions in the style of the 1920s and 30s, especially for the " New York Jazz Repertory Company ," the series " Smithsonian Masterworks " and the Pasadena Roof Orchestra.

His current projects include working up the works of Fats Waller, Bix Beiderbecke, and under the name " Jazz Classics Revisited " a challenging show chronological history of jazz. In 1990 he was invited by music director Bob Wilber to play the piano part of Hoagy Carmichael on the soundtrack of the film, the Bix recorded in Rome.

He has a big share of the working-up of the music of Fletcher Henderson for CD recordings and led on in the Carnegie Hall concerts with the Royal Academy Big Band works by Benny Goodman.

Keith Nichols is in addition to his concert career and his record productions holder of a chair of jazz history at the Royal Academy of Music in London.

Today, he works freelance and occurs in the UK, Europe and America, he has performed in France, USA, Germany, Switzerland, Ireland and Egypt.

In March 2003, he drew attention to himself when he " in Modern Music Experiment" conducted at Trinity College of Music, a reconstruction of Paul Whiteman's concert, which included a performance of Rhapsody in Blue in its original instrumentation. In the same year he founded a new orchestra, the ten -headed "Blue Devils ", the jazz and dance music of the 20s, 30s and 40s of the 20th century list.

In 2004, Keith Nichols BBC Jazz Award was presented.