As the Wind Changes: an interview with pianist and composer Elliott Jack Sansom
In a perfect world, everyone would learn to play the piano the way Elliott Jack Sansom did. He explored. He experimented. Guided by his mother and grandmother—both pianists—he benefitted from freedom within structure, and internalized the knowledge that music was fun, not a chore.
This freedom and love of music forms a thread through Sansom’s life and career. His passion for the piano gave him an outlet and an avenue for managing Asperger’s Syndrome. In his own words,
“Music was about feeling free. When I’m playing now, I don’t need to think about anything, it is just bliss. I’m so relaxed…Piano was, and always has been, a distraction. I can just sit down, shut my eyes and be in my happy place, totally absorbed in the act of performing and creating.”
From this place of freedom and bliss, Sansom creates meticulously-crafted, heartfelt, meltingly-beautiful music. A finalist in the 2016 BBC Young Jazz Musician of the year contest, Sansom toured as a jazz pianist for several years until the pandemic brought his gigs to a halt. In the silence and introspection of lockdown, he discovered a new, quietly-expressive way of creating music. His 2021 single“Kaleidoscope” reached number one on Spotify’s Peaceful Piano playlist. His first album, Finding Beauty, a collection of ambient piano solos, was released soon after and has 30 million streams (and counting). As the Wind Changes, Sansom’s latest EP, which appears June 23, 2023 on all streaming platforms, offers whimsy, lyricism, freedom, and his signature blending of classical and jazz sounds. It is an honor to feature him and his music on No Dead Guys.
One of the heartwarming things I noted in your bio is how your mother and grandmother—both pianists—helped guide your musical development as a child. What was their approach and why do you think it was so effective?
Yes, I am the third generation, and keeping the gift of music alive! First and foremost, music was always in the household, and I believe this to be one of the most crucial factors in my development…As far back as I can remember, there was music and there was a piano!
My Mum and Nanny approached my early musical development cautiously, and instead of imposing a strict routine of piano lessons, they encouraged self-discovery and creativity, allowing me to find my own voice. I guess they never wanted the music to be ‘knocked out’ of me through early piano lessons. I will be forever thankful for this as it allowed me to foster a deep, personal, and everlasting connection with music.
I remember spending a lot of time with my Nanny, we were either baking cakes or playing the piano, and at one point we were playing duets together, probably whilst waiting for the cakes to come out of the oven haha…Music was ALWAYS fun, and that’s what has kept the music alive for all these years.
My family have been a huge support from day one and I was always given many opportunities - from having a studio built in the garage, owning my first piano, joining music clubs…the list goes on!
You’ve shared quite a bit on your website about your experience with Asperger’s Syndrome and how playing the piano helped you manage it. Can you tell me more about this?
Yes, and I’ve become more comfortable talking about it in recent times. I was never very sociable when I was younger and found situations extremely tricky. I would play them out over and over in my head which would make me anxious and frustrated. There are still remnants of that, but over time, with the support of my family, I have gained more and more confidence in expressing myself. The piano has always been my refuge, transporting me into a world of my own, escaping anxiety, and being in control of my thoughts and feelings. The piano is an integral part of me, it’s my medicine, it’s my meditation.
What was it about jazz that first drew you to learning and performing that style of music?
My route into jazz was through blues/gospel piano, and the music of Ray Charles. I was obsessed with his piano playing (still am). Ray led me to early jazz greats such as Art Tatum, Nat King Cole, and Duke Ellington. I then found bebop and the music of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie which further solidified my love for jazz. I particularly remember when I first heard Art Tatum play the piano. Absolutely virtuosic. I remember being curious, a little bit confused, and most importantly, excited! The flavors and colors that he was producing sparked my ears, and I wanted to understand what the hell was happening! My first piano teacher at school, Jo Ruddick (from the age of around 14 years), showed me my first jazz turnaround progression, and the rest was history!
After being a finalist in the BBC Young Jazz Musician of the year in 2016, and performing and touring as a jazz pianist, you started writing ambient piano music. Why did you choose to make this change?
I live and breathe jazz. It’s the first thing I play when I sit down at the piano, and it very much informs my sense of melody, harmony, form, rhythm, and technique. However, the lifestyle of gigging jazz started to take a toll on my mental health. I wasn’t happy. I would constantly be doubting myself, and my abilities, criticising and over analyzing my performances, and generally feeling out of touch with myself and my purpose. Things were getting stale. During the pandemic, I had the opportunity to switch things up, and do something to meet this burning inner desire for a change. I had the time to explore something completely different, and something that I knew was deep within somewhere. It was the search for inner peace, and I wasn’t always getting that from the music that I was performing. I was excited by the music I was playing, but not necessarily feeling calm with it. The minimal style of felt piano, allowed me to express myself in the simplest of forms, it’s liberating!
After your 2021 track “Kaleidoscope” reached number one on Spotify’s Peaceful Piano playlist, you were inspired to compose and release your debut album, Finding Beauty, a beautiful collection of ambient piano solos. How do you feel this style of music allows you to express yourself differently than you do when you play jazz?
I feel like I am putting on a slightly different creative hat, but the fundamental principles of melody, harmony, and form still underlie my musical language. While improvising jazz, I aim to create a composition in real-time, whereas in crafting ambient piano music, I have the luxury of taking time to think things through and live with them over many months. However, in both cases, expression remains central, whether in the moment or predetermined, as it is with the tracks on Finding Beauty.
Congratulations on being picked up by Decca! What can you tell me a little about how they discovered you?
Thank you! Decca discovered me through my past label (1631 Recordings) whom they distribute for. I was contacted by both the UK and the US A&R’s. Being from the UK, it made sense to sign a deal with the label in my home territory.
I’m most impressed by the elegance and clarity of both your compositions and your playing. With both jazz and classical elements, your pieces contain hidden complexity behind surface simplicity. Can you tell me a little bit about your composition process? How much of it is formally composed and how much improvised?
That’s very kind of you! There never seems to be a clear pattern with my process, every time seems slightly different…for instance, I can sit down at the piano and compose something from start to finish within a few minutes, or other times - I can be working on the first four bars for months on end and feel totally stuck in the mud with it. I think I am at my most creative when I don’t put pressure on myself, or when my mind is clear, and I am not overthinking the process. Inspiration is a funny thing; it comes when you are least expecting it.
I would say that the starting point for most of my pieces begins with me improvising melodies at the piano. Sometimes I like to sit there and simply be a vessel to the music, playing free right-hand lines until I find something that interests me. Once I have established a melody, I can use my intuition to fill in the gaps with developing the idea, filling out the harmony etc. Nowadays, I pour a lot of energy into the recording and performance of the track. Sometimes I think this is more important than the underlying composition itself…if I can perform the ‘notes’ with genuine emotion, and pay attention to creating a captivating sound, then I consider my mission completed. Of course, this does not mean that I neglect the composition process, but the performance is everything. Bill Evans had the remarkable ability to transform even the simplest melodies into something truly beautiful with just his touch and tone alone!
What sort of response did your album Finding Beauty receive when it was released?
I have been really overwhelmed with the response, I am very grateful for all the love and support from my integral fans. I have had over 30 million streams globally which is incredible!
Tell me a little bit about your latest EP, As the Wind Changes. What sorts of pieces are on it, and when can we hear it?
My upcoming EP ‘As The Wind Changes’ is out on the 23/06/23. The 5 tracks are inspired by the beauty and renewal of spring, and I drew a lot of inspiration from the village in Hertfordshire where I currently live. Expect tracks that reference moments in nature, such as chirping birds and the blossoming of trees/flowers. I’m excited to share this collection!
Now that you’ve made a reputation for yourself composing and playing ambient piano music, do you think you’ll ever be drawn back to jazz?
I do, and I think that doing a jazz project now would feel extremely fresh. I think it would be exciting to step back into the jazz scene and see how the past few years have changed my perspective. Maybe I would sound slightly different, maybe it would feel more liberating, just like the ambient piano felt when I first began? Who knows, but I am excited to venture back into it at some point.
Thank you for making sheet music of your compositions available for purchase on your website. What prompted you to do so?
You are welcome. I think it’s nice to have your works written down in notation. It allows other pianists to enjoy or even study the music. I think having sheet music completes the ‘package’! I am hoping to have some physical bound books printed soon and I will make sure to send you one…
What future projects are you most excited about?
Over the past few years, playing live has been nonexistent for me, so I am excited to get back out there and share my music! I have also started collaborating and writing with other artists, with some exciting projects in the pipeline…I am excited to see where this takes me.
What advice can you offer to other musicians who are seeking to create a career in music?
I think my most important piece of advice is not to compare yourself to anybody. I have struggled with that in the past, and it can be a huge hinderance. Remember we are all on our own paths, merely take inspiration from others but do not compare your work against theirs, as you end up going down a dark path. Try to be as honest as you can and accept that every step backwards is ALWAYS a step forwards.
Elliott Jack Sansom had an unlikely career change: he was one of Britain’s rising jazz stars until he took a U-turn into modern classical music and unexpectedly found himself at the top. His 2021 track Kaleidoscope reached number one on Spotify’s Peaceful Piano playlist and remained in the chart for eight months; he can now claim over 100 million streams collectively. This shift – from the cerebral, competitive world of jazz to the meditative space of ambient piano – inspired his debut album Finding Beauty. “I wanted to take a step back and return to the simple melodies that first got me into music,” he says. “It feels so liberating - I almost forgot what it does for your soul. I love the intellect of jazz but I felt that I needed to come back to a more simple form of expression.”
Sansom is doing something new with the genre: his song-form compositions are injected with colourful jazz chords and harmonic direction, less minimalist than much modern classical piano and more emotive in performance. He approaches his songs as if they were standards, with melodies inspired by show tunes and the Great American Songbook. There are countless influences at play, from Duke Ellington to Debussy, Frederic Mompou to the Carpenters – but they are worn so lightly. His closely-miked instrument is so hushed and intimate, you can hear the hammers hitting the felt.
Sansom, born in Solihull in 1994, has a wry sense of humour and already wears years of musical experience. You grow up fast in jazz: he was a finalist in the BBC Young Jazz Musician of the Year in 2016 while still at the Birmingham Conservatoire, where he played with jazz greats such as Stan Sulzmann and Norma Winstone. He toured with Clark Tracey – son of the legend Stan – and studied in Paris, where he played with the drummer Jimmy Cobb, who featured on A Kind Of Blue. He also had his own trio, and the touring was endless: Trondheim Jazz Festival, Ronnie Scotts, the Albert Hall… “It’s not that I’d had enough of it, but it was getting a bit full-on and avant-garde,” he says. “I was quite out-there harmonically. So it’s quite a switch from burning jazz to Peaceful Piano...”
Sansom has always done things his own way: he has Asperger’s Syndrome and struggled with discipline and with his temper as a child. His mother, who played the piano herself, noticed that music would focus and calm him from an early age: at just four, he was picking out songs by ear. But she knew that classical training wasn’t what Elliott needed: “She never wanted me to have strict lessons, she didn’t want to knock it out of me,” he says. “We tried a few teachers and it didn’t work – I was playing songs, bits of jazz and show tunes and the teachers didn’t know what to do with me…” His main musical guide was closer to home: his grandmother, whom he’d visit “when my mum needed a break from me”. He still describes her as his greatest inspiration: a fantastic piano player, she was fluent in Cole Porter, Vera Lynn, and all those great songs of the forties and fifties which she considered pop, but which to the young Elliott sounded just like jazz…
At school, he frequently missed lessons to be in the music practice room. “I didn’t have much confidence,” he recalls: “I was very naughty and crazy and hard work.” His mother enrolled him in Stagecoach drama school, where he won lead roles in musical theatre, appearing as the young Ebenezer in Shane Richie’s Scrooge – “and in Joseph, featuring H from Steps”, he laughs. He performed in the children’s choir for the stage show The Carpenters Story. And as he got more and more involved in music, his tempers left him – and he found himself.
“Music was about feeling free,” he explains. “When I’m playing now, I don’t need to think about anything, it is just bliss. I’m so relaxed. When I was younger, I had a few tics, and when I played the piano they would just disappear. Piano was, and always has been, a distraction. I can just sit down, shut my eyes and be in my happy place, totally absorbed in the act of performing and creating.”
What about the music on Finding Beauty? Is it freer, somehow, than jazz?
“It’s a very different type of freedom,” he says. “When I’m composing, I’m still improvising, so in that respect it is just as free. I’m thinking about song and melody, not just ‘this is my solo’.”
The seventeen songs on Finding Beauty offer a magical soundscape of place and memory, with mysterious titles that let the imagination roam. From New Day, with its echoes of Radiohead, to Forever, where fragments of Debussy or Chopin are at play in a poppier setting, they were composed throughout lockdown and beyond, spanning a period in which Sansom and his girlfriend Katie moved from a noisy street in Moseley, Birmingham, to a small cottage outside Oxford. The physical journey mirrored his own transition to a quieter, more contemplative space in which to create his music.
“I was with my girlfriend in our little flat and we had all this time together; we would go for walks, hearing nature more - nature literally knocking on the door.” The evocative Window Rain was inspired by the sudden silence of his old Birmingham Street in lockdown. As the country came to a standstill, his compositions took shape: “I reminisced more, I appreciated things more...”
For Sansom, the music comes first, then a memory arrives to match it. Secret Garden recalls a scene in Agnieska Holland’s 2005 film of the classic novel, which he saw in one of the few history lessons he attended at school. Mary steps into the garden for the first time and is met with incandescent nature: when the movie came on TV a few months back, Sansom turned off the sound and improvised while watching the scene.
The rolling grandeur of the song Symonds Yat “felt like a journey, a moving pattern,” he says; he recalled a trip with Katie to the Wye Valley, and a five-hour wild canoeing experience they took there, with no idea what they were getting themselves in to.
The tentative, gossamer-light melody at play in Alone in Paris took him back to his days in the city as a student; how he loved being alone, sitting on his balcony with a view of the Sacre Coeur, or walking the streets at night.
Song for Katie was not only inspired by, but partly written by, his girlfriend: “I should give her a credit. She was singing this little major melody and I extended that idea – it’s about her, but it’s by her, too.” Miniature footsteps dance exquisitely on the piano’s highest register.
And Melody to Freedom, one of the richest compositions on the album, has a gospel vibe, part hymn, part American Songbook. It spoke to Sansom of “coming out of lockdown, returning to normal, being able to see my grandma again...”
Like any true musician, Sansom is a perfectionist – “I overthink things like you wouldn’t believe”. He went through four upright pianos in three months for Finding Beauty, before settling back to the Yamahas he had always felt most comfortable on. He recorded half the album on the wrong instrument, then went back and did it all again… Fortunately, studio space was easier to find: he runs Sansom Studios in Birmingham with his brother, renowned for its jazz recordings. He booked himself in for four days, in spring this year, and stayed there day and night to get it right.
It is hard to believe that Sansom’ modern classical work began as a “throwaway idea”, an experiment in the genre. Spotify listeners voted with their ears, and after self-releasing a few tracks he joined forces with the label 1631, who distribute for Decca. Now, his work has found its major label home.
The music may be a big change for him – he may have taken on a new name, to mark his move from one world to another – but it is clear from the sophistication and playfulness of Finding Beauty that the spirit of jazz has never left him.