James Heather Tickets

As a child growing up in Southampton, James Heather’s grandad on one side of the family taught him composition techniques and how to manipulate the tuning of piano strings, whilst his granny on the other used to dabble with dreamy improvisations on the instrument. Inspired by a love of Beethoven, Debussy and hearing his older neighbour’s Acid House pirate radio station, Heather spent many years honing his piano playing alone. He imagined composing for a collective of some sort one day, but a mixture of shyness and the different trends of the day meant things mainly evolved privately, expressing the band he imagined in his head, but using only solo piano. After a near death experience, he had the energy to step out finally as an artist. The result was to bring a fresh take to piano music which on streaming services have been played over 120 million streams in just a few years and his debut album charting at #14 in Classical Crossover in the Billboard (USA) charts. Influence wise, the music takes as much from electronic music in structure, ambience and sensibility, and post-rock in its exploration of building meditative tones as it does its classical and jazz grounding. Heather proves adept in the intricacies of composition from the tender to more propulsive, trance-inducing dynamics, always highly personal and with warmth and hope in the sadness, it belies the fact the music is often coming from just one acoustic instrument.