Luke Howard

Luke Howard fuses chamber music with ambient electronica across his serene output, accumulating credits as pianist, film scorer, and producer while also issuing his own contemporary works. Early in his development as composer and instrumentalist, he assisted experimentalists Nico Muhly, Ben Frost, and Valgeir Sigurðsson. The Australian first appeared in competition at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 2001 and began scoring film shorts, television, games, and theater by the late 2000s. The Luke Howard Trio, completed by Jonathan Zion and Daniel Farrugia, debuted on 2010’s The Meadowlands, and Sun, Cloud earned an Australian Music Prize nomination in 2013. National acclaim continued with 2019’s The Sand That Ate the Sea and 2020’s All That Is Not Solid (Live at Tempo Rubato, Australia / 2020), both ARIA Award nominees.

Howard trained in classical piano from childhood and later graduated from the University of Melbourne’s Victorian College of the Arts. He reached the finals of the Montreux Jazz Festival Solo Piano Competition twice in the early 2000s. While contributing piano to releases by Glenn Cannon, Slava Grigoryan, and Don Banks, he scored the 2009 documentary Children of the Eclipse, prompting additional assignments in television, film, games, and theater. His first album as leader, The Meadowlands by the Luke Howard Trio (with bassist Jonathan Zion and drummer Daniel Farrugia), appeared in 2010. The following year he issued the collaborative Open Road with bassist Janos Bruneel. In scoring work, Howard assisted Ben Frost on the 2011 online game World of Darkness, drawn from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris; the next year he aided Nico Muhly on Drones and Valgeir Sigurðsson on Architecture of Loss.

After signing with U.K. label Mercury KX, Howard delivered two 2013 projects: the solo LP Sun, Cloud and the trio album A Dove, A Lion, A Coast, A Pirate. Sun, Cloud brought an Australian Music Prize nomination. The 2014 remix set Night, Cloud appeared alongside Two & One, and his score for Where Do Lilacs Come From won Best Music for a Short Film at the 2014 APRA/AMCOS Screen Music Awards. Ten Sails, a collaboration with trumpeter Nadje Noordhuis, followed in 2015. In 2016 he released Two Places on Mercury KX plus the solo piano EPs Forgotten Postcards and Eighty-Eight Days on 1631 Recordings, while the Luke Howard Trio issued The Electric Night Descends. Open Heart Story, scored for piano, string orchestra, and electronics, arrived in 2018. Inspired by film director Matthew Thorne’s Australian outback imagery, The Sand That Ate the Sea emerged the next year and earned Howard his first ARIA Award nomination for Best Original Soundtrack, Cast, or Show Album. All That Is Not Solid (Live at Tempo Rubato, Australia / 2020) received a 2020 ARIA nomination for Best Jazz Album. The trio reconvened for the 2021 EP The Shadow and the full-length The Sanctuary the year after.