© Artist
A songwriter, pianist, and vocalist, Robin Phillips is an artist known for emotive storytelling and embracing all genres under the jazz umbrella, as well as leading the London-based Pinstripe Suit swing band. With a profound passion for funk, soul, jazz, and especially the blues, his work reflects a strong influence from New Orleans and its rich musical heritage.
Robin recently joined me to discuss the formative role his musical journey played in establishing his career in jazz, how an influential trip to America to investigate the origins of the blues helped to reignite his songwriting, and the process of creating his original album Return From The Source.
How did your journey into music begin?
It's funny, being a dad, because I'm watching my children go through the early stages of their musical journey. These days, it does help me reflect on what was really important to me, and what made an impact back then. I think I was always a musician: music has always resonated with me, and I sang a lot as a kid. When I got the opportunity I started with the trumpet – my brother played it, so there was a trumpet in the house, though I don’t think that instrument was the one for me. But I got an opportunity to start piano lessons with my cousins, because they had a piano before I did, and I just never thought about giving up even when it was hard. I was going through the grades that were very much from a classical syllabus, and didn’t really connect with the music I was playing, but even then I'm sure I never considered giving up.
I didn't really know where I fit in the music world. I went on residential music courses where I sat in the wind band, and I loved the environment of being surrounded by musicians – it was the first time for me that everyone in the canteen was a musician, rather than just you being the odd one out at school – but still musically I don't think I was really connected with it. But when we did the big concert featuring the orchestra, the wind band, and the jazz orchestra, I remember watching the jazz band and thinking ‘Wow, I'd really like to be sitting on that side of the room...’ So I went the next year and joined the Jazz Orchestra programme, and that was really what got me into jazz music and blues and things like that.
I think about this more these days, but everyone needs an ‘in’, don't they? Whether it's classical music, jazz, blues – just something that we love that sends us on a path. For me, that was very much Harry Connick Jr. It was seeing that you could be a modern jazz musician and still be connected to that traditional art form. A lot of my time during my mid to late teens was spent going up to London and hanging out at the record shop, asking for album advice. I'd hear Jason Rebello, Julian Joseph, and Ian Shaw on Jazz FM, something would interest me, and I’d go and buy the CD. I did a lot of self-study before I started having lessons in London, one-to-one, with some of the really great teachers down there. So my education has been a long one, and a bit of a slow burner, but I do feel like I did it thoroughly.
Where did the idea come from for your debut album?
It was a twenty year journey, really. When I was a teenager I wrote an album of originals that were more pop-like in nature, but I moved into the jazz genre and deep-dived the jazz standards for such a long time that I wasn’t really songwriting. I hit forty and was playing in a speakeasy with my band, Pinstripe Suit, in London, and a lot of people kept talking about how my music had a great New Orleans vibe about it. I felt like a bit of a fraud, because I know what I've read or seen through film, but I'd never walked the streets. So I ended up doing a road trip from Chicago to New Orleans on a Harley in 2019.
I just wanted to go and explore all these important places: Memphis, St. Louis, Chicago, New Orleans, and people were keen to see my journey. So I took a young filmmaker with me, and we made the documentary Back To The Source. Whilst I was on that journey, the further south we got, the more I started to feel like I was getting closer to the birthplace of all this music that I'd studied for so many years. And I was laying in a hotel room in New Orleans, and the St. Charles' streetcar was going past the hotel room. I was jet-lagged and thought, ‘Oh God, I'm not going to get any sleep because of the streetcar’. And then I thought, ‘Wow, I'm not going to get any sleep because of the streetcar – that's cool!’. So I just opened this little red notepad that they had by the bed and wrote ‘Lying in bed, can't sleep, streetcar’s rattling around outside the hotel room’, and that turned into the first line of the first track on the album ‘Ode to NOLA’.
Sounds like that was the springboard…
Well that little red notepad just became a place where I was dumping all my thoughts, and I stayed up all night on the flight home because I suddenly also saw England in a new light after the trip as well – those notes eventually became the song ‘I’m Coming Home’. So that was the initial start. After we finished the film, I hadn't written anything apart from the notes on the notepad, but then the lockdown happened. I wouldn't say there was nothing to do, because I was scrambling around trying to survive with teaching online, learning how to stream, all that stuff, but Sunday became my writing day and began to try and turn these into songs.
Weirdly, I've done a radio interview with AI recently. I was challenging how much I wanted to engage with AI with a friend of mine who runs an arts venue. He put my website into one of the AI language generators, and just from the information on my website, this AI created a two-person podcast about my album. I started listening to it in my car, and it was unbelievable how correct it was. But more than that, at the end of the podcast, the AI said, ‘what's the takeaway from this journey?’, and the response said that it was one thing to have a load of notes in a notepad, but often we don't have the space to make art from inspirational moments like that. The podcast ended by saying that lockdown ultimately gave me the pause, and the timeout from my busy gigging schedule, to create. And I thought ‘My god, you've just had a revelation about my album that I didn't even have’. Strangely, that AI podcast helped me realise that without the lockdown, that trip would have just been the trip and the documentary, but it would never have been my regeneration of my songwriting.
What was it like collaborating with different musicians?
One of the main things that I took away from the trip was how much creativity there was in New Orleans, and how the music there just didn't follow the rules. I watched accordions, gigs with two drummers and no bass, gigs with a sousaphone instead of a bass, or with three of the same sax. So I started writing songs and avoided thinking about a traditional band, but thought about what instruments would suit which song best. Every song grew organically, and the lineups are different which did make it more difficult to pitch commercially. It’s not just a jazz album – it’s also a funk album, it's the blues, it's got a string quartet on it, and a gospel choir. It's been a case of being able to reach out and work with different people, and do what was best for each song. I was able to work with the wonderful London-based Soul Sanctuary gospel choir, but I also wanted to work with people from other countries, so some of the brass sections are recorded in New Orleans. We even got Leroy Jones, Harry Connick Jr.'s long-term trumpet player, who I met at Palm Court Cafe in New Orleans, to feature. I connected with him again online, and suddenly, before you know it, you're in a studio in New Orleans playing with your childhood hero.
How was the recording process?
I've been developing a recording studio at home for the last six or seven years. I’ve grown more invested in music technology over that time, but I'm also very aware that the magic happens when you're in a room together. So I decided, just like the musicians would be a matching for each song, I would also match the recording space for each song. Some of it was recorded here, though it created loads of technical issues when I was singing in the same room as the drum kit! These days, of course, you wouldn't do that – especially in lockdown. You'd send the track and somebody could record it at home, because everybody learned how to record it at home. Everyone had a studio. So, it did mean that it was a bit more raw, but that was sort of what I was looking for. Some of it was recorded down in London in a bigger studio with a Steinway, and some of it was recorded in New Orleans, but you don’t notice that as you’re listening through. I’m very proud of that.
How has life been since the album release?
Jazz musicians are famous for this. By the time a recorded take has been mixed, mastered, designed, and you've done your launch, you're a year down the line and have likely moved on as a musician. Well, I recorded some of these songs two years ago, maybe more, but this album is different for me because I'm still learning from it. And I'm loving people discovering it; I'm enjoying going through that process with this album. So we have launched it, and it is out there – we even included it in the London Jazz Festival last month. We’re also starting to show the film before we perform the songs, like a doubleheader, and ultimately I think that the album informs every gig I do.
What’s next for you?
© Artist
The future's so exciting. What this album has done is informed me, for sure. You know, I was sat on the front porch of Morgan Freeman and Bill Luckett’s Ground Zero Blues Club in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and I was talking to Bubba O’Keefe. We included this conversation in the film because it was so important, and it answers your question I hope. I said to him: ‘Do you see me as a tourist? Do you resent us white musicians from England who're coming over to the Blues 'Disneyland' on a holiday of discovery?’. He said that I was 100% wrong. He said ‘We need you to come here, and remind us what we gave to the world, because a lot of people who live here have forgotten that’.
So I feel like I've become just another guy waving a flag, going ‘let's not forget where this comes from’. I feel like I've become a bit of a promoter of the physical places the music came from. But I am about to embark on a Creative Practice PhD, which I didn't see coming. I really feel like there's a story to be told about the music of Clarksdale, and a creative practice PhD enables you to make art in order to share a story. We're in the middle of talking about what direction that might take, but it’s a fascinating idea because I get to make another album and/or another documentary that will become a piece of research that hopefully no one else has done before, or in a way that no one else has delivered before.
We haven't finished rolling out the album, we're talking to festivals about showing the film and doing the live show and I've also got a lovely, exciting project with some guys in Canada at the moment, merging jazz with a different genre. But I’m still fascinated by the genres, the umbrella of the genre of jazz, and everything that comes within it. There's a lot of things circling at the moment above the airport of my creativity, and I'm just working out which one to invite to land next.
