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SALSA’S FIRE, CARIBBEAN BEAT, SOUL OF THE SOUL

Self-taught, he is fast becoming one of Britain’s rising musicians playing Afro-Cuban jazz and salsa. As both an arranger and pianist, Alex Wilson is in great demand on the capital’s jazz scene.
He was named Rising Star at the prestigious British Jazz Awards in 1999 and headlines major festivals with his captivating seven-piece latino band.
At 32, Wilson is already a veteran of the British jazz and Latin scenes, a scintillating and versatile pianist with a virtuoso style who has played with Courtney Pine, Roberto Pla, Gary Crosby’s Nu-Troop and a host of other bands, in addition to making three critically acclaimed solo albums on Candid Records.
He has also played with several leading US figures, Bobby Watson and Larry Adler among them, and admires Kenny Barron and Herbie Hancock.
A year he spent in Courtney Pine’s band playing not only Jazz but everything from Drum’n’Bass to Hip-Hop, gave to Alex a feeling that he is equipped to try something different. It resulted in the sophisticated fusions of the album R&B Latino with guest singers Jocelyn Brown (Nyorican Soul), Maryanne Morgan and Mary Pearce from Courtney Pine’s Band.
Alex Wilson’s current music can be described as a mixture of Latin Jazz, Salsa, Caribbean and West African music influenced by his Sierra Leone roots; an exhilarating, energetic fusion of jazz and authentic Cuban sounds.
“I’d been hearing records by people like Sisqo and Destiny’s Child on the radio and I was struck by how much the drum programming borrows from the Caribbean,” says Wilson. “So there’s a direct link to Latin music. Rhythmically R&B is very sparse and Latin music tends to be very busy. But they both fitted like a glove.”

Although Alex Wilson was born in Britain, his grandfather was a minister in the government of Sierra Leone and he spent the first two years of his life in West Africa, before the family returned to Britain. Then when Wilson was ten, his father’s job took the family first to Vienna and then Geneva, where he spent his teenage years.
Wilson’s father was an enthusiastic amateur pianist and he taught his son to play piano from an early age. But he also had classical guitar lessons and auditioned on both instruments for the Vienna Conservatoire when he was 11. The rollicking dose of boogie-woogie he gave them on the piano did not go down well and he was told to stick to the guitar. Seven years of serious tuition turned him into a virtuoso, but he found classical guitar a “beautiful but solitary” instrument.
By the time he returned to the piano, he was living in Geneva and attending an international school that boasted 42 different nationalities among its students. Switzerland was also fertile jazz territory and via the Montreux Festival and the progressive music policy of Swiss television, Wilson received a crash course in jazz.
Suitably inspired, he formed a high school jazz band, composed a jazz concerto for the school orchestra and augmented his piano playing by learning saxophone, trumpet and bass.
Then he took a degree in electronic engineering at York and Santa Barbara, California, where he played in a West Coast fusion band. Back in Britain he attended a jazz summer school at London’s Guildhall and was a finalist two years running for the Young Jazz Player of the Year. A chance encounter with John Dankworth, one of the judges in the second year, was to prove critical.
Inspired by the musicians he met at Dankworth’s school, Wilson took a fateful decision and in September 1993 he turned professional. His first gig was a jam session for which he was paid the princely sum of a tenner. But soon he was playing five or six gigs a week.
Gradually he entered onto the salsa scene and by 1996, he had become one of the most in-demand keyboard players on both the London Jazz and Latin scenes. Gary Crosby invited him to join his Nu-Troop, there were gigs with bands led by Cleveland Watkiss and Alan Weeks and then Alan Bates at Candid offered him a record deal.
His debut solo album, Afro-Saxon, was released in 1997. The follow-up, Anglo-Cubano in 1999, found him travelling to Cuba to record and received rave reviews from both Jazz and World music critics.
By 2000, Wilson’s his growing stature had led to a call to play in Courtney Pine’s band. He put his own activities on hold and spent a year touring the world with Pine. Leaving was the hardest decision he’s ever taken, he says. “I’d learned so much in that year and to me, Courtney is a model of how to run a band. But I wanted to concentrate on my own projects.”
It was a right decision. As it was said earlier, today’s Alex Wilson is one of Britain’s rising musicians playing Afro-Cuban jazz and salsa.

“...an exhilarating blend of postbop forms, Latin-American and African music that performs the rare trick of capturing the vibrancy of the original sources”
The Guardian

“Irresistibly danceable”
Observer

Bursting with ideas and energy, Wilson cavalierly hurled dissimilar piano approaches together to the point where he could resemble a cross between Gonzalo Rubalcaba and Cecil Taylor.
John Fordham, Guardian

Wilson’s take on the familiar licks of salsa included drum’n’bass textures at the bottom end, and Jayasinha’s scorching trumpet lines against the usual pounding Cuban piano riffs would have opened any club door in Havana to him.
John Fordham, Guardian