Pat Thomas interview: “Jazz is an incredibly intellectual and incredibly difficult music. It takes a lifetime”

“The piano is a great sound source,” enthuses Pat Thomas. “There’s no instrument like it in the Western world because it’s so self-contained. And the fact that it’s still being used, the fact that you can’t replicate it. I’ve yet to come across any sample that sounds like a real piano. You think of other instruments that are now regarded as outdated and it’s incredible. It’s still got a mileage of another hundred years at least. It’s way ahead of its time.”

Thomas is well placed to make such pronouncements. Over the last couple of decades, he’s emerged as the UK’s pre-eminent modern master of the piano avant-garde. He’s also a deep thinker with compendious knowledge on a dizzying range of subjects. Chatting with him over Zoom from his home in Oxford – where he grew up – I’m treated to a series of erudite yet rambling micro-lectures.

“The piano is basically a zither with keys,” he continues. “There is an Arabic instrument called a kanun that had a big influence on it. The whole jazz percussion thing has come from the Ottoman Empire, the snare, the cymbal – up to this day, the best cymbals are still Zildjian from Turkey. We’ve sort of forgotten the Ottoman Empire. Beethoven and Mozart living in that time were well aware of its influence on Western music.”

Not just a scholar, he’s also a consummate and committed improviser with a liberated approach to the piano that extends beyond the keys to include its inner workings too. This can be heard to thrilling effect on his new solo piano album, The Bliss of Bliss. Its centrepiece is an astonishing 40-minute live improvisation that probes the piano with scientific diligence and focus, while its title hints at a poetic appreciation of the ineffable.

“I was thinking about trying to go beyond,” Thomas confirms. “When we get into the beauty of music, it’s all about going beyond words. There’s a particular state, which you can’t describe.”

This deep feeling for the mystical experience is a key facet of his music – and his identity.

“I’m a practicing Muslim,” he explains, “and a very integral part of that is what’s called tasawwuf, which is Sufism. I’m a traditionalist. Music was always seen as a spiritual thing, as a way to get close to God. Like [John] Coltrane, he was clearly searching. Traditionally, music has always been seen, all over the world, as a spiritual practice, as a thing that is of divine origin. For example, Indian classical music, which doesn’t really work in the West. You can’t really play a morning raga for a concert in the evening! That’s something I’ve always loved about improvised music. When you do an afternoon gig it’s a very different vibe from the evening. I think it’s the only music in the West that’s keeping that tradition of real time music, and the effect it will have according to the people and the time and the place. I think that’s very important.”

The Bliss of Bliss is the latest in a series of solo piano albums Thomas has released, including Al-Khwarizmi Variations (2013), The Elephant Clock of Al-Jazari (2017) and last year’s The Solar Model of Ibn-Shatir. All of these titles reflect his abiding fascination with Islamic traditions of mathematics and astronomy – and his ongoing mission to ‘educate’ audiences. Part of that has involved a profound engagement with the work of Ahmed Abdul-Malik. A double bassist who worked with Art Blakey, Thelonious Monk and others, Abdul-Malik was also a virtuoso player of the oud – the short-necked, pear-shaped lute ubiquitous in Arabic music – and pioneered its use in jazz settings. Across six albums he cut as a leader between 1958 and 1964, Abdul-Malik proposed a fusion of jazz and North African music, providing a cutting-edge, Sufi-informed aesthetic corollary to mid-20th century black nationalism.

It’s a body of work that Thomas has been excavating through his extraordinary quartet [Ahmed], which features UK saxophonist Seymour Wright, Swedish bassist Joel Grip and French drummer Antonin Gerbal. In concert – and documented on live recordings such as Wood Blues and the monumental 5-CD set Giant Beauty, both released last year – [Ahmed] routinely take a composition by Abdul-Malik as a springboard to extended improvisation favouring the trance-inducing properties of rhythmic insistence and repetition over the usual improv abstractions.

“[Ahmed] is a very disciplined band in the sense that it’s very different from the things that we all do individually,” says Thomas. “You do know that it’s going to be a long trip. It wasn’t like we planned to do it this way, it just happened. We started to work in the music and realised we needed to take a longer approach to it. When we do a piece, it’s usually going to be 50 minutes minimum. It needs that unfolding.”

With [Ahmed], Thomas implements an idiosyncratic style, crashing out great, splayed chords from his huge hands with a monomaniacal and mechanistic determination.

“Those great recordings of Abdul-Malik’s haven’t got a piano,” he says. “So, it’s forced me to think differently, like ‘what are we going to do with a piano player?’”

It’s a style that has also applied well to [Ahmed]’s more recent forays into the catalogue of another of Thomas’ great inspirations, Thelonious Monk. In February this year, they cut their first studio date – due for release next year – focusing entirely on Monk compositions.

“I think people will be surprised,” he says. “We do ‘Round Midnight,’ which people probably wouldn’t think of us doing. Being in a studio, we were able to compress it. Some tracks are just 15 or 20 minutes, which, when we are playing live, that’s not going to happen. We just played shorter versions concentrating on Monk’s tunes. But it’s still [Ahmed]. The Monk tunes are so strong, we’re able to just make them like [Ahmed], which is part of the band’s strength.”

“Jazz is an incredibly intellectual and incredibly difficult music. It takes a lifetime,” Thomas muses. His own life in jazz began in the mid-1970s when he was a 16-year-old classically trained pianist: “I saw Oscar Peterson on the TV and it just blew my mind. I thought, ‘What the hell’s he playing?’ I’d never heard of this music. That was a shock to me because I just thought everything was on paper. He was my way in, because I personally needed to see someone with that sort of facility, someone with some serious chops, doing something different, and who was black.”

Nearly half a century later, one of his eternal touchstones in the music is Duke Ellington. Last year, I saw him performing in Finland with a trio – which has yet to release an album – featuring the Norwegian rhythm section of bassist Per Zanussi and drummer Ståle Liavik Solberg, performing deconstructed versions of Ellington tunes. They pulled off the impressive feat of exploring impressionistic shapes while somehow retaining the distinctive mood and feel of the original tunes.

“I think my model for that is Duke himself,” Thomas states. “You can listen to him playing so many different versions of the same tune, like ‘Caravan’, they’re all completely different. It’s ‘Caravan’, but he might do it slower, he might do it faster, he might do it in a waltz. They’re malleable. You can do it in the style of Schoenberg and it’s still going to be Duke. This is what makes a great composer. And I think that’s why Duke is so loved by modernists. Think about Monk doing Duke. It’s Monk and it’s still Duke. I mean, that’s incredible.”

You can add to that equation the idea of Thomas doing Monk, or of Thomas doing Duke. Whatever the setting, he plays with a muscular authority and angular imagination that make the material his own, yet he’s also clearly mindful of his place in the pantheon.

“I think lineage is important,” he says. “I feel I’m very lucky that I had real teachers in improvised music and jazz who I could go to. I could go to Keith Tippett and say, ‘what the hell are you doing, Keith?’ And Howard Riley, Tony Oxley, Evan Parker, all these people, I could just go and see them. It’s all about hanging out with the right people, isn’t it? I think that’s much harder now with the way music is taught in terms of getting people in and out as quickly as possible. To learn music, it’s a lifetime.”

Certainly, Thomas’s lifelong devotion to the music has paid off. Approaching his 65th birthday, he’s now an eminence grise of UK improv and experimental music. As well as piano, he improvises with electronics, as can be heard on last year’s This Is Trick Step and his avant-jungle banger New Jazz Jungle: Remembering, originally recorded in 1997 and reissued in 2022. And his sui generis duo, Black Top, with vibes/marimba player Orphy Robinson melds loops, samples and dubwise effects with free-jazz fire while extending the lexicon of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora.

Yet, it’s as a pianist in settings like The Bliss of Bliss that his voice speaks loudest. Here, while he’s clearly operating in a post-Cecil Taylor milieu, the most obvious antecedent to his approach is the free-wheeling spontaneity of Sun Ra.

“Yeah, Sun Ra is a massive influence on me,” he agrees. “One of the greatest gigs I’ve ever seen, I was about 23 and I went to see him on my birthday. To this day, it’s still the best synthesiser solo I’ve ever heard. It was otherworldly. With Sun Ra you literally felt anything could happen.” What’s more, Thomas recognises in Ra a fellow mystic and kindred spirit.

“He was clearly touched by something that allowed him to look at music in a completely different way to anybody else. He was doing a lot of meditation, he was reading things like Gurdjieff, he was doing a lot of different things. There’s no doubt, whatever it was, it did touch him, and he felt he needed to convey it.”

For Thomas, too, there’s a strong urge to transmit the secrets and encourage spiritual transcendence. Getting back to why he chose the title for The Bliss of Bliss, he explains: “I’m also in a way using that rhyming slang that you get in hip hop. People forget that, before it got taken over by the corporations, conscious hip hop was all about elevation. It’s always been about people saying, ‘things are bad, but this is what you can do to make it better.’” Is that, I wonder, what he’s striving to do through his own music?

“Yeah. Things may be bad but maybe for 45 minutes, you can help people see there’s something that takes them somewhere else. We need to be taken somewhere in these times!”

Pat Thomas’ The Bliss of Bliss is out now on the Konnekt label