The people he hung out with were far removed from the modern British jazz fan-who tends to be middle-class and clean-cut, in my experience-but not too far from the kind of free-thinking itinerants who embraced the music when it first emerged. I’d just be jamming along to the DJs playing jungle music all night long.” “So I was going to a lot of raves under motorway bridges-but I always took my sax. “At 14 I got into a bad crowd, going to parties, drinking and smoking all night,” Ewan said. “I would just sit and think about what the cover of my jazz autobiography was going to look like, one day.”Įwan would go on to study at the prestigious Guildhall School of Music and Drama-but not before one almighty rebellion against his straight-laced upbringing. “At that point, I just decided that I was going to be a famous jazz musician-that was my life now,” he told me on a video call from his London home. The attraction was as intense as it was instantaneous. Shortly thereafter, a friend lent Ewan a saxophone and he began listening to bebop. He took up the clarinet aged seven and the piano aged 12, but Bach and Brahms weren’t really doing it for him. Rather, the obsessive musician came to the idiom the long way around via classical, folk, and electronic dance music.īorn to proficient classical players, Ewan’s interest in music was almost inevitable. He must have been immersed in traditional jazz almost from birth, you might think-but you would be wrong. In huge demand both at home in the UK and abroad, he could scarcely work any harder: Check out the list of upcoming gigs on his website and you’ll notice that he is playing with some duo, band or orchestra almost every night of the month.

It’s a neat trick he whips out at solo gigs, but Ewan need never play alone. And in any key you care to name, to boot. Invariably dressed in a collarless shirt with slacks and suspenders, his mastery of the instrument is such that he can play countless jazz standards-as well as waltzes, polkas and more-with just one hand, accompanying himself on the piano with the other.

Seeing him live, audiences would be forgiven for thinking he was born on the bayou with clarinet in hand. If any modern, British musician embodies Louisiana circa 1920, it must be Ewan Bleach.

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