My background: I have been playing Cornet and more recently Trumpet for over 30 years. During the late 1990’s with Brighouse & Rastrick Brass Band (B ’n R), I recorded albums at Abbey Road, played to packed out audiences in the Royal Albert Hall, Bridgewater Hall and Birmingham Symphony Hall (to name but a few), did recordings for the BBC and toured across America, Canada and Europe. In late 1999 after 7 years with B ’n R, I decided I had had enough of the formality and lack of improvisation that was involved with Brass Bands, so I handed back my Cornet and quit while B ‘n R were at the top (at the time they were the number 1 brass band in the world). In the 10 years that followed I got married, had 2 beautiful children, built up a decent career in I.T. and played my battered old Rudy Muck Trumpet no more than a handful of times! I decided to get back into playing music again in late 2009, but rather than play Cornet in another Brass Band, I bought a new Trumpet and started work on becoming a serious Jazz musician. My approach to making music: For the majority of my playing career I have been reading from sheet music with no room for self-expression: in order to create the music I want I have become a keen exponent of what I now call “Composition through Improvisation”. Whilst I know my way round a musical score and can talk musical theory with the best of them, I want to leave all of that behind and concentrate instead on getting the music out of my head and into my Horn, without writing it down first. I feel I have more freedom that way. Ask me about improvisation and I will be the first to admit I still have lots to learn (who doesn’t!), but what I am passionate about is maintaining a freethinking and unrestricted approach to playing, something that hopefully comes across in the music I create. Technology has also started to play a large part in my music and after buying a MacBook, plus teaching myself how to use Garage Band, Abelton Live and Audacity, I started to realise that recording, producing and publishing my own music was not only fairly easy to do, but could also be done relatively cheaply! I am now combining these new found technology skills with my existing musical experience, to try and create a fresh, contemporary and hopefully original new Jazz sound. All of the music I have created so far was recorded in my home, mostly in a bedroom or the dining room using my own Macbook and a bunch of software tools and MIDI controllers. I espec