Adam Fairhall

Over the past decade, Adam Fairhall has forged a reputation internationally as a jazz pianist and improviser of exceptional versatility. Based near Manchester, England, and highly active on that city’s burgeoning creative music scene, he is perhaps best known as the pianist in Nat Birchall’s Coltrane-inspired band, and as a free improviser with such acclaimed groups as The Spirit Farm. His 2012 release under his own name, The Imaginary Delta (SLAM), was named Album of the Year by influential US blog Bird Is The Worm, and revealed a deep understanding of early jazz and the ways in which it can connect to free jazz and contemporary idioms. He has continued this synthesis in his 2017 solo piano album, Friendly Ghosts (Efpi Records).

In Adam’s playing, idioms drawn from any period of jazz history may be blended, collided, subverted, hinted at or played completely ‘straight’. His aim is to place his deep knowledge of jazz piano techniques, from ragtime to free jazz, at the service of playful, spontaneous invention, within a freewheeling and sometimes rough-edged improvisational style that creates its own momentum and energy. His 2019 live EP, Little Instruments (Efpi Records), hears him using four different portable keyboard instruments: the Dulcitone, single reed free-bass accordion, toy piano and harmonium, developing a unique musical language for each. In addition to his solo projects, Fairhall co-leads organ trio Revival Room with Mark Hanslip & Johnny Hunter.