London Jazz Award nominee Beats & Pieces: '.. we've got a few full time jazzers but others earn money as pop session players, dubstep producers, orchestral brass players, and experimental noise artists! So as you can tell, between us there's an extremely wide range of influences.'

Interview with bandleader Ben Cottrell.

There are 14 of you in Beats & Pieces, how did you all come together, and who keeps you all organised and cohesive?

We all met and began playing together in various projects whilst studying in Manchester - some of us were students at the Royal Northern College of Music, others at the University of Manchester and I was on a joint course between both. I'd only recently got into jazz properly and realised whilst listening to groups such as Acoustic Ladyland and Polar Bear that Jimi Hendrix, Radiohead and Bjork were equally valid influences on jazz musicians as Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker or John Coltrane… So inspired by that I wrote a couple of charts and handpicked musicians to come together and play them through one afternoon, we got our first gig at the Manchester Jazz Festival on the strength of the rough demo recordings from that first rehearsal and everything progressed from there.

Up till recently I've been responsible for everything to do with the band from composing the tunes to chasing and organising gigs, fixing the musicians, updating the website, even hand making the CDs. It got to the point though where I couldn't handle all that by myself so one or two of the other musicians take on little things now, and our upcoming UK tour is being produced by Serious who have helped us out a lot.

Please tell us about the most important influences for the band.

As touched on above, I guess we're all musically influenced by the music we've grown up listening to and by the variety of things that we're exposed to in our daily lives. For me, that means everything from people like Radiohead and Bjork, Miles Davis to Django Bates, and James Brown to Beyonce. Within the band though the guys are working over such a wide area of music that every individual's influences come together to make music that touches on loads of genres - in the band we've got a few full time jazzers but others earn money as pop session players, dubstep producers, orchestral brass players, and experimental noise artists! So as you can tell, between us there's an extremely wide range of influences…

If  you compose every piece keeping each musician in mind, do you spend a long time carefully manipulating the work, or does it evolve naturally without too much concentration on the individual?

By this point I know each of the individuals and their playing so well that I can almost hear in my head exactly how they'll play something that I write, and for the rhythm section I know how best to communicate to them the feel that I'm looking for because I'm so used to working with them. Same for allocating solos, each of them has a very distinctive sound and playing style so I can choose between these different options when composing and choose whoever I know will respond to each individual piece in the way that leads to the effect I'm after. That’s one of the great things about having this group of people together and being able to work with the same musicians regularly.

Why do you think the band has had so much success, and what is the next step for you all now?

I think we have the same kind of musical relationship internally between everyone as you would expect to find in a smaller band, which I suppose is rarer to see in large ensembles as logistical and economic reasons mean that its lots more difficult to get the same group of people playing together on a consistent basis. But because we're all good friends and have such a good time playing together we've managed to make it work, and I think that when people see us play live they can see that commitment to each other and to the band, that we're all part of a gang and above all else just having fun with our mates which hopefully translates into a good time for audiences too!

Next step is the release of our first full length album 'Big Ideas' on 27th February on our own label, Efpi Records - we're also out on a set of UK tour dates produced by Serious which begins at the end of January, see our website www.beatsnpieces.net for more info.