We are very pleased to present the Judges for the NNJPC 2008.

  Tim Richards         Dave Newton             Jonathan Gee             James Harpham

Tim Richards.

Tim's first encounter with a piano was at the age of 8 in a dentist's waiting room. After classical piano lessons he taught himself jazz and blues from the age of 14, after seeing Thelonious Monk on TV.

Since forming the long-lived modern jazz quartet SPIRIT LEVEL in Bristol in 1979, he has performed his compositions at jazz clubs and festivals in almost every European country. Tim expanded SPIRIT LEVEL to a nine-piece in 1999, renaming it GREAT SPIRIT and recording a first CD with an all-star line-up that included Denys Baptist, Gilad Atzmon and Tony Kofi. The nine-piece have toured the UK several times, featuring some of Britain's top jazz musicians such Pete King, Ed Jones, Dick Pearce, and many others.

Tim has released over ten albums under his own name, including two with Austrian saxman Sigi Finkel and two TRIO albums. He has toured and recorded with many well-known blues artists including the award-winning Otis Grand, Dana Gillespie and Earl Green, and US guitarists Joe Louis Walker and Larry Gamer.

Apart from his playing activities, Tim is one of Britain's best-known jazz educators, a jazz examiner and contributor to the Associated Board's jazz piano syllabus, and the author of the acclaimed tutors IMPROVISING BLUES PIANO (1997) and EXPLORING JAZZ PIANO (2005), both published by Schott & Co (with CDs). The latter won the prestigious MIA award for 'Best Pop Publication' in 2006. Tim currently teaches jazz piano at Morley and Goldsmiths Colleges in London.

Dave Newton.

Growing up in Renfrewshire, Scotland, Newton had a musical upbringing with the piano trio sound of Peterson, Tatum or Garner an ever-present feature in the Newton household. After graduating from Leeds College of Music in 1979 David Newton freelanced around Yorkshire and eventually became a resident musician at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough for two and a half years. A move to Edinburgh followed where theatre work using local musicians quickly led to an established position on the Scottish jazz scene but after some four years there, his old roommate from college, Alan Barnes, persuaded him to move to London where he rapidly became a much sought after pianist teaming up with Barnes, guitarist Martin Taylor and saxophonist Don Weller.

Newton's recording career had begun in 1985 with Buddy De Franco and Martin Taylor and his first solo album was released in '88 in association with producer Elliot Meadow who oversaw the next nine years of recording for Linn Records followed by Candid Records. Once again, in 1997, David Newton and Alan Barnes teamed up and together with Concorde Label agent Barry Hatcher, made four CDs for that label. By 2003, Newton had learned a great deal of the ways a record company operated and he set up a business partnership with former pupil Mike Daymond and they established "Brightnewday Records" initially as a vehicle for Newton's own music but with an eye to opening up the catalogue to other artists later on.

In the first five years of the nineties, Newton's reputation as an exquisite accompanist for a singer, spread rather rapidly and by '95 he was regularly working with Carol Kidd, Marion Montgomery, Tina May, Annie Ross, Claire Martin and of course Stacey Kent, with whom he spent the next ten years recording and travelling all over the world. While all this was going on, Newton was composing music which he would record on his own CDs as well as writing specifically for Martin Taylor, Alan Barnes, Tina May or Claire Martin and Newton's music can now be heard on many television productions, especially in the United States where over twenty TV movies benefit from Newton's haunting themes. In 2003, after a twenty year gap, David Newton was reunited with playwright Alan Aykbourn having been involved with eight world premiers in Scarborough and London back in the early eighties, and he was asked to write the music for two new productions, 'Sugar Daddies' and 'Drowning on Dry Land'. Currently, with the release of a new CD called "Inspired", on the 'Brightnewday' label, David Newton is relishing the musical freedom of his Trio and the special sound it makes whilst working on two other new recording projects, as an arranger and a composer.

David Newton has been voted best Jazz Pianist in the British Jazz awards six times and was made a Fellow of Leeds College of Music in 2003.

James Harpham.

James Harpham has been composing and playing for films, concerts and other media ever since his first commission for the film The Saturday Men. This followed an OUDS production in collaboration with Dudley Moore. Jack Brymer played James' Clarinet Concerto in the Queen Elizabeth Hall; the RPO, choir and soloists presented his Fantasia on British Folk-songs in the Albert Hall.

For TV James scored 3 episodes of Chronicle, seven series including Tenko, The Ratties (with Spike Milligan) and The National Gallery. He provided a score for MOMI (the Museum of the Moving Image) and was twice on a BAFTA jury. Among his film scores were two for The Children's Film Foundation and a massive arts documentary for A&E with Kathleen Turner called Love in the Ancient World.

John McCabe premiered James' First Piano Sonata, and recently Gabriel Keen performed the Jazz Piano Sonata for the BMIC. Bill Russo, having left the Kenton band, christened Harpham's 29 Steps with his own band in London.

James has conducted the Midland Philharmonic, Syntharmonic, the LSO and other orchestras at various concerts and recordings. He also conducted the first symphony concert at the Glastonbury Festival 25th anniversary in 1995. His group, The Wooden O, appeared on TV, toured Europe, published an LP and performed fund-raising concerts for Sam Wanamaker's Globe Theatre.

James is now passionately involved in accompanying silent films, for which he provides a complete concert on the piano, using material from the time of the film's production or before. Each score uses about 80 different slices of musical culture and takes about a month to assemble. So far he has 4 feature films up and running, including 2 of Buster Keaton's : Steamboat Bill Jnr and The General.

Jonathan Gee.