Greg Foat

London-based keyboardist, composer, bandleader, and DJ Greg Foat produces work that feels rooted in the present yet detached from any single era. His distinctive non-contemporary jazz draws on both standard instruments and rarer ones such as harpsichord, tubular bells, and a choir of fifteen voices. The music draws its core materials from library and soundtrack sources, worldwide folk practices, psychedelia, hymn traditions, ambient textures, and pop, soul, and blues of the 1960s and 1970s. Operating alone, sharing leadership of Hampshire & Foat with multi-instrumentalist Warren Hampshire of the Bees, or directing the Greg Foat Group, he has steadily erased conventional divisions between styles and periods ever since the group’s first album, Dark Is the Sun, appeared in 2011. A steady recording schedule has yielded one release annually, among them the widely praised Dancers at the Edge of Time in 2015, Galaxies Like Grains of Sand in 2017 with Hampshire, Symphonie Pacifique in 2020, and The Glass Frog in 2024. His compositional language reflects the British jazz pianists and composers Gordon Beck, Stan Tracey, Michael Garrick, Keith Tippett, and Graham Collier, together with European and American figures Ennio Morricone, Piero Piccioni, Michel Legrand, Vangelis, and John Klemmer.

Foat entered the world in Ventnor on the Isle of Wight. He traces an enduring ambivalence toward the piano to an incident at age three when he tumbled from a stool at his aunt’s home. At ten he requested an instrument from his parents; on the inexpensive upright his father obtained, he mastered Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata by ear and took a handful of lessons from a conventional teacher who introduced him to a basic blues form. Using that instruction as a technical foundation, he quickly moved on to self-taught improvisation and composition, after which he discontinued formal study. An avid record collector from the age of eleven, he absorbed knowledge directly from discs. Several years later Jeff Clyne and Trevor Tomkins visited his school for a jazz workshop, prompting him to join the Isle of Wight County Youth Jazz Orchestra. Clyne supplied him with cassettes of numerous jazz pianists. Reading in an encyclopedia that Clyne had recorded Experiments with Pops alongside pianist Gordon Beck, Foat wrote to inquire and received a tape containing both that album and Gyroscope. Captivated by Beck’s playing, he listened repeatedly until the tape deteriorated, internalizing its lessons; he has since named Beck his primary influence. He even requested and obtained Beck’s telephone number, eventually studying with him on several occasions.

Additional formative figures included musicians living on the Isle of Wight, an area long known for an active music community and numerous retired session and jazz players who had performed on cruise ships between the 1960s and 1980s. Their broad repertoire reflected material gathered during worldwide travels. Foat performed alongside these veterans, absorbed their methods, and refined his personal aesthetic. With an already extensive catalogue of material, he began working as a session musician and touring accompanist, appearing on recordings with QuestLove and touring Europe and Scandinavia with Wendy James. Outside music he has also written, contributing a regular column to a British women’s magazine and publishing the 2008 spoof novel Gigolo, which a female friend ghostwrote and edited. Presented as drawn from personal experience, the book prompted publicity appearances in character that stirred controversy; it later appeared in seven languages.

In 2010 Foat contributed to Swedish-Finnish composer Anna Järvinen’s third album, Anna Själv Tredje, issued by Stranded/Universal. By then the Greg Foat Group was fully active and released its debut, Dark Is the Sun, on Jazzman in 2011, earning strong critical notice. Employing unconventional arrangements and instruments, including a small vocal chorus, Foat’s pieces echoed Bruno Nicolai, Michel Legrand, Serge Gainsbourg, and British jazz and library figures Keith Mansfield and Alan Hawkshaw. That same year he played piano on Jonathan Jeremiah’s Island album A Solitary Man, alongside the J.B.’s Fred Wesley, Pee Wee Ellis, and acid-jazz trumpeter Graeme Flowers. The following year the group issued Girl and Robot with Flowers, featuring trumpeter Matthew Halsall; the stylistically wide-ranging set later inspired remixes. In January 2014 Live at the Playboy Club, London was recorded straight to analog tape, documenting the ensemble at full stretch across Foat’s expansive compositions. International recognition arrived in 2015 with Dancers at the Edge of Time, described by some critics as psychedelic modal jazz and inspired by a Michael Moorcock story collection (Foat being an admirer of new-wave science fiction). The recording employed an expanded fifteen-piece ensemble, after which the Greg Foat Group operated as an octet rather than a quintet. Warren “Woz” Hampshire appeared on guitar, church organ, and glockenspiel. The album remains the group’s most celebrated to date. In 2016 the band released two 10-inch EPs, Cityscapes and Landscapes, later compiled together; these marked its final recordings before Hampshire & Foat launched their own project with Galaxies Like Grains of Sand on Edinburgh’s Athens of the North label, titled after Brian Aldiss’s linked science-fiction stories. Additional strings and winds augmented core Greg Foat Group members, and American folk and pop singer-songwriter Bob Lind supplied liner notes. Two further Hampshire & Foat albums appeared in 2018. Honey Bear, framed as a concept album drawn from an imaginary children’s book, treated each track as a chapter, interspersing hypnotic folk pieces with ambient field recordings gathered on the island’s beaches, cliffs, and gardens. Nightshade carried cover art styled after a 1960s sound-library release and followed a similar internal structure, its first side offering potential film cues and its second a recurring-theme suite.

In 2019 the duo released their fourth album, Saint Lawrence, captured over two sunny afternoons in the fall of 2017. Recorded live without overdubs inside two churches in Saint Lawrence on the Isle of Wight’s south coast, the performances were mixed directly to a vintage stereo Nagra IV-S reel-to-reel. Longtime associates Phil Achille and Eric Young joined local musicians and friends to preserve both the architectural ambience and surrounding landscape; track titles reference nearby landmarks, secluded beaches, and rural paths.

Foat next completed The Mage in May, pairing British jazz past and present through his own compositions performed by library and soundtrack veterans Duncan Lamont, Art Themen, Ray Russell, and Clark Tracey, together with contemporary drummers Moses Boyd and the Heliocentrics’ Malcolm Catto. A standout track presents the Caribbean Christian hymn Of My Hands, sung by Kathleen Garcia, who had first recorded it forty-five years earlier as a child, supported by a backing chorus directed by Simon Ljungman. Foat’s remaining pieces fuse downtempo folk textures, modal jazz, hip-hop, and soul.

Realizing a longstanding ambition, Foat convened the full Greg Foat Group at Malcolm Catto’s all-analog Quatermass Sound Lab. Tenor saxophonist Binker Golding, guitarist Hugh Harris of the Kooks, and Catto on second drums augmented the ensemble. The resulting album, The Dreaming Jewels, appeared in November on Athens of the North and juxtaposed jazz-funk pieces contributed by group members and guests with two of Foat’s more expansive, ethereal compositions, the title track and Lake Kussharo.

Later that year Foat was invited to record the first album at Athens of the North’s newly opened studio alongside producer, engineer, and DJ Linkwood, also known as Nick Moore. Designed expressly for exploration, the facility yielded a collection that combined Balearic beats, warm atmospheric tones, and hypnotic meditative grooves shaped by spacious synth and electric-piano melodies. Still later in the year he released Symphonie Pacifique for Strut, weaving library music, strings, choirs, pedal steel, chimes, and additional elements into a unified whole. In 2021 Upturned Glass appeared, reuniting Hampshire and Foat.

Foat issued the solo synth recording Psychosynthesis in 2022 as a sequel to 2019’s Photosynthesis, the latter captured in isolation during the pandemic. The following two years, 2023 and 2024, saw him compensate for pandemic-related inactivity. Three albums emerged in 2023: Off-Piste, a collaboration with veteran British saxophonist Art Themen; Dolphin, recorded with Italian composer, producer, and musician Gigi Masin, formerly of Gaussian Curve; and, in December, Interstellar Fantasy, a synth-and-percussion duo project with Kokoroko’s Ayo Salawu.

In July 2024 Foat released The Glass Frog, an atmospheric jazz album featuring trumpeter Trevor Walker, Art Themen, Binker Golding, and Idris Rahman on tenor saxophones, Daniel Casimir on bass, Salawu on drums, and three percussionists. He followed in November with a further ensemble recording centered on science fiction and mythology. Themen, Walker, drummer Natcyet Wakili, and bassist Jasper Osbourne participated, with Katherine Farnden harmonizing alongside Walker’s flugelhorn on Cor Anglais. Shawn Lee also contributed, playing his horror-movie soundtrack instrument, the waterphone.