About Adam

“Adam Fairhall is a total star” – Independent on Sunday

“There is no jazz code he hasn’t deciphered and mastered” – Manchester Evening News

“A real find” – Jazz UK

“Fairhall’s piano is a questing, quixotic voice with a comprehensive ‘inside and out’ vocabulary” – Jazzwise

“A homegrown autodidact and musical genius” – dyversemusic.com

“Astonishing” – Bebop Spoken Here

“A hugely accomplished instrumentalist” – The Wire

 

Over the past fifteen years, Adam Fairhall has forged an international reputation as a jazz pianist and keyboard improviser of exceptional versatility and striking individuality. 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 an eclectic, ‘Ragtime-to-Free’ solo pianist.

His debut release under his own name, The Imaginary Delta (SLAM 2012), 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 continued this synthesis in his solo piano album, Friendly Ghosts (Efpi 2017), and in his album with drummer Johnny Hunter, Winifred Atwell Revisited (Efpi 2022). 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.

Raised in Cornwall, Adam began by practising blues piano with friends during school lunchtimes, and as a teenager he received piano lessons covering jazz harmony and repertoire. Adept at both art and music, Adam dropped out of Leeds College of Music after one term in order to study Contemporary Arts at MMU Cheshire, where he received a first class honours degree and an MA with distinction. However, having made a final decision to devote his time to the study of jazz, Adam returned to Leeds College of Music to pursue a Masters degree, receiving a MMus in Jazz Studies (Performance) in 2005. While at Leeds he studied with pianist Mark Donlon and also took lessons with pianist Matthew Bourne. In 2005 he received the college’s Sam Hood Rosebowl for Outstanding Jazz Performance. Returning to MMU to teach and continue his practice and research, Adam received a PhD in 2008 and continues to teach music in HE.

Adam has released fourteen albums as leader or co-leader on a variety of respected independent labels. His music has received 4-star reviews from Jazzwise, Jazz Journal and the Guardian, and frequent glowing reviews in The Wire. He is often heard on BBC Radio; his album tracks have been played on Radio 3’s Late Junction and Jazz Line-Up, and he has played on sessions for Radio 1, Radio 2, Radio 3 and 6Music. He has also received frequent airplay on JazzFM and a variety of internet radio stations. He has been interviewed for The Wire, Jazzwise and Radio 3, and in 2014 Dutch public radio service Concertzender devoted an edition of the programme ‘Art of the Improvisers’ to Adam’s work. In 2009 Adam was selected for Take Five Edition VI.

In addtion to his piano work, Adam is an acclaimed Hammond organ player; the debut album of his organ trio with Mark Hanslip and Johnny Hunter, Revival Room (Efpi 2021), received an ‘Editor’s Choice’ 4-star review in Jazzwise. He is also an accomplished accordionist, an instrument which allows him to explore more fully the interest in folk, world and roots music that underpins much of his work.

Adam also collects, prepares and performs upon a range of small keyboard instruments, including a prepared Hohner Pianet T electric piano, an Indian harmonium, a Dulcitone and several toy pianos. On these instruments, and on organ and accordion, Adam enjoys exploiting and subverting conventional techniques while investigating the idiosyncratic, individual qualities of the instrument and its potential for free playing. In developing a free vocabulary for instruments relatively rare in that field, Adam is becoming increasingly sought after as a free player, both in the northern scene and the London scene.