Keith Nichols

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Keith Nichols (born February 13, 1945 in Ilford , Essex , † January 21, 2021 in London ) was a British jazz musician, arranger and band leader .

Live and act

Nichols was considered one of the British authorities for early classic jazz and ragtime , who had specialized in the interpretation of composers and musicians such as Scott Joplin , James P. Johnson , Fats Waller and Duke Ellington . He played the piano , trombone , tuba , vibraphone , saxophone and clarinet and worked as a singer and arranger.

At the age of five, Nichols received his first music lessons on the piano and the accordion . In 1960 he was named Great Britain Junior Champion for his accordion . He graduated from the Guildhall School of Music and began his career as a professional musician. For seven years he was on tour as a pianist , trombonist and tuba player with the jazz comedy band Levity Lancers . From the early 1970s he gave regular ragtime concerts as a soloist and with smaller ensembles in London's South Bank. In 1976 he visited the United States for the first time as a member of Dick Sudhalter's New Paul Whiteman Orchestra and performed in Philadelphia and New York's Carnegie Hall. During this time, three solo albums were created for the EMI record company and some for the Decca company, including one with Bing Crosby . From the mid-80s he was featured on over twenty albums of the jazz special label "Stomp-Off", on which he appeared both as a band leader and as an instrumentalist. In 1977 he founded the Midnite Follies Orchestra with arranger Alan Cohen , with whom he played the music of Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway from Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s. He has made numerous arrangements and transcriptions in the style of the 1920s and 1930s, especially for the New York Jazz Repertory Company, the Smithsonian Institute Masterworks series and the Pasadena Roof Orchestra .

Later projects included reworking the works of Fats Waller and Bix Beiderbecke as well as a demanding chronological show of jazz history under the name "Jazz Classics Revisited". In 1990 he was invited by music director Bob Wilber to play the piano part of Hoagy Carmichael on the soundtrack of the film that Bix recorded in Rome.

He played a major role in the processing of Fletcher Henderson's music for CD recordings and performed works by Benny Goodman in Carnegie Hall concerts with the Royal Academy Big Band .

Keith Nichols held a chair in jazz history at the Royal Academy of Music in London , alongside his concert activities and record productions . He has also worked as a freelancer, performing in the UK, Europe and America, giving concerts in France, USA, Germany, Switzerland, Ireland and Egypt.

In March 2003 he attracted attention when he conducted a reconstruction of Paul Whiteman's concert “Experiment in Modern Music” at Trinity College of Music , which included a performance of Rhapsody in Blue in the original instrumentation. In the same year he founded a new orchestra, the ten-piece "Blue Devils", which perform jazz and dance music from the 20s, 30s and 40s of the 20th century. In 2004 Keith Nichols received the BBC Jazz Award .

Nichols was admitted to a London hospital on January 15, 2021 with prostate problems and died there of COVID-19 on January 21, 2021 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Richard Pite: RIP Keith Nichols (1945-2021). London Jazz News, January 21, 2021, accessed January 21, 2021 .
personal data
SURNAME Nichols, Keith
SHORT DESCRIPTION British jazz musician, arranger and band leader
DATE OF BIRTH February 13, 1945
PLACE OF BIRTH Ilford , Essex
DATE OF DEATH January 21, 2021
Place of death London