York, UK June 2012

When I first came to the UK, in 1977, I was a postgraduate student at York University and I was first published by Universal Edition because of a recommendation from John Paynter, one of the many illustrious staff at the University music department. So it was great to come back and give a presentation in what used to be Banks Music and is now the Musicroom, York.

The Musicroom is a large city centre shop and has an extensive sheet music department, which is where I was set up, with a Roland HPi-7 piano, a piano that has a dedicated CN button and 350 of my files embedded.

One of the teachers had come, with a student, all the way from Darlington and had heard about American Popular Piano from discussions on a teacher forum.

 Another of the teachers at the workshop was 20 years old when she sung in an opera I wrote called The Song of Roland, performed at York University in 1979. So we are talking 33 years ago! She has been teaching since and has also written some delightful self-published childrens’ songs. Here she is on the left, holding a copy of the American Popular Piano Preparatory book, while the teacher on the right is brandishing a copy of the Microjazz Trios Collection.

All of the teachers who came were new to APP and were very interested by its novel approach to the teaching of improvisation, which I demonstrated in Part 1 with some help from both teachers and students. They were also very taken with the range of styles and the use of teacher accompaniments and tracks throughout the series. A number of complete sets were purchased afterwards.


Part 2 was about Microjazz and I was able to demonstrate a number of “new” products (like the Trios Collection) - most of the teachers were only aware of early Microjazz volumes. 


Two of the teachers were very interested in Piano Festivals and it seems likely that the first Christopher Norton Piano Festival in the UK may well be held in York, which would be a nice coming home touch!