David Newton Solo Piano

David Newton Solo Piano

• David Newton (piano)

A very rare opportunity to see one a solo concert from one of the most popular and inventive pianists to have graced the UK jazz scene over the past 40 years. David Newton is always a very welcome guest on the Isle of Wight, and has three gigs with us in 2024.

In the first five years of the nineties, Newton’s reputation as an exquisite accompanist for a singer, spread rather rapidly and by ’95 he was regularly working with Carol Kidd, Marion Montgomery, Tina May, Annie Ross, Claire Martin and of course Stacey Kent, with whom he spent the next ten years recording and travelling all over the world.

While all this was going on, Newton was composing music which he would record on his own CDs as well as writing specifically for Martin Taylor, Alan Barnes, Tina May or Claire Martin and Newton’s music can now be heard on many television productions, especially in the United States where over twenty TV movies benefit from Newton’s haunting themes.

In 2003, after a twenty year gap, David Newton was reunited with playwright Alan Aykbourn having been involved with eight world premiers in Scarborough and London back in the early eighties, and he was asked to write the music for two new productions, ‘Sugar Daddies’ and ‘Drowning on Dry Land’.

He has continued to compose / arrange / teach and play at the highest level, in the view of IWJW organiser Jim Thorn "no effort expended by David or any notes played by him, are ever excessive or out of place. Everything is perfect, played with meaning and humour, exactly the right notes played in exactly the right order".

David Newton was made a Fellow of Leeds College of Music in 2003 and in 2019, was voted ‘Best Jazz Pianist for the sixteenth time by the Jazz audience of the UK in the British Jazz Awards.