A little about me. My name’s Chris Jones, I’m from Newcastle, in the North-East of England, I’ve been on this planet since 1982, and playing the piano for almost as long.
Here’s a picture of me playing my grandad’s organ in the 80s:
My grandad was my biggest musical influence and taught me piano when I was young. Here’s a very grainy clip of him playing piano sometime in the 2000s:
I’ve been writing music in some form or other almost as long as I’ve been playing. My early attempts were very basic, largely with the same old chord progressions and melodies that occasionally stretched to three notes. But as the years went by, I developed an interest in more complex chord progressions and intricate melodies. This led to several collaborations with friends over the years, making music that generally sat somewhere between electronic and acoustic.
Although I feel that I’m fundamentally a pianist, I also love writing and arranging electronic music, although I’ve yet to have a dancefloor hit. In the 90s, I used the auto-accompaniment feature of the early Yamaha PSR keyboards, and as they became more sophisticated, I learned to programme my own basic rhythmic and harmonic parts, writing melody lines over the chords. When I got a PC in the late 90s, I got my hands on whatever music software I could (freeware, shareware, purchased and none-of-the-above) and that really opened up a whole new world of creative possibilities.
I am also the proud owner of several other musical instruments: an acoustic guitar, a bass guitar, a ukelele, a set of electronic drums, a harmonica, a pair of bongos, various other percussion instruments and a kalimba. So far, the kalimba has made it’s way into one of the A Minute’s Peace pieces, and hopefully more instruments will soon.
In terms of inspiration, I have a pretty broad taste in music, and the pieces I’ve written for this project are mostly inspired by Romantic and 20th century Classical (Chopin, Debussy, Saint-Saëns, Philip Glass); film soundtracks (Hans Zimmer, Thomas Newman); and also a range of electronic and pop artists (Moby, Pet Shop Boys, New Order, Sparks, Divine Comedy). I’d love to say I’m deeply inspired by traditional and modern jazz, but in reality I just write music that’s occasionally ‘jazzy’, i.e. I play some major and minor sevenths, and occasionally venture into the world of sharpened fifths and flattened ninths. For someone broadly trained in the classical traditional, jazz is a whole new language, and one that simultaneously fascinates and intimidates the living f*** out of me…
My A Minute’s Peace pieces are written and recorded on my trusty Roland FP-10 digital keyboard, but rather than using its own built-in soundbank, I connect it up to my Mac via MIDI, and use a piece of software called Pianoteq for the grand piano you hear in the videos. This just gives me a bit more flexibility in terms of editing, and I also think it’s a more realistic sound. I use my old Samsung phone for the video recording – nothing flashy, but it does the job. I sync the audio and video together in Davinci Resolve, and upload to the socials. Easy peasy.
One final thing: my two cats frequently get more views than my piano videos, so a few words about them. The white/tabby cat is Kerry, and was rescued in Shanghai in 2014. The tabby is Lola, and was rescued in a little town near Rome in 2021.
I hope you enjoy the music and find some solitude in it. For what it’s worth, I love writing and sharing it.
Peace, love and major sevenths,