As one of the UK’s leading concert pianists, Steven Osborne has performed all over the world, an odyssey spanning three decades for which he has had to learn hundreds of concertos and sonatas. “I’ve done this all my life, so by now the basic mechanics of learning new music is a really well-oiled machine,” he says. But the 52-year-old, who is performing works by Shostakovich and Tippett at the Proms today, recently found himself lured by a new challenge. He is learning jazz – an alien world with its unique chords, scales and rhythms.
“I started trying to learn particular patterns based around jazz scales, and I really noticed at the end that my brain felt completely different,” he says. “There’s this incredible invigoration from
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