The Greg Foat Group

The Greg Foat Group fuses bold experimentation with adventurous instrumentation and analog techniques to shape a modern jazz aesthetic equally steeped in soundtracks and library music as in modal and soul-jazz traditions. Pianist, composer, arranger, and DJ Foat assembled the ensemble in 2009, drawing on the skills of saxophonist Rob Mach, trumpeter and flügelhorn player Trevor Walker, drummer Tony Coote, bassist Jacob Ohvall, acoustic guitarist Henric Strall, double bassist Phil Achille, and guitarist Marius Ptas.

Their first album, the 2011 concept recording Dark Is the Sun, appeared on the Jazzman imprint after sessions in Sweden and evoked the energy of Britain’s late-’60s and early-’70s modern jazz milieu. The following year brought the ethereal, Moog-heavy, science-fiction-inspired Girl and Robot with Flowers. A Mayfair residency at London’s Playboy Club later yielded a dynamic live set issued in 2014. By contrast, the more atmospheric and pastoral The Dancers at the Edge of Time was captured the next year inside a chapel near Foat’s native Ventnor on the Isle of Wight, allowing a string quartet, woodwinds, and the church organ to occupy central roles. Cityscapes/Landscapes, released in 2016, revisited the late-’60s British jazz and jazz-rock palette; its first half originated during Foat’s Stockholm DJ engagements, while the second half took shape amid the rural Isle of Wight, tracing a clear sonic arc between those divergent settings.