ProStudioMasters.com

Elliott Jacqués had an unlikely career change: he was one of Britain’s rising jazz stars until he took a U-turn into modern classical music and unexpectedly found himself at the top. His 2021 track Kaleidoscope reached number one on Spotify’s Peaceful Piano playlist, with its 6.5 million listeners, and remained in the chart for eight months; With additional incredible support over the years from Apple Music, Amazon Music and Deezer, he can now claim over 70 million streams for his self-released songs. This shift – from the cerebral, competitive world of jazz to the meditative space of ambient piano – inspired his debut album Finding Beauty. “I wanted to take a step back and return to the simple melodies that first got me into music,” he says. “It feels so liberating - I almost forgot what it does for your soul. I love the intellect of jazz but I felt that I needed to come back to a more simple form of expression.” Jacqués is doing something new with the genre: his song-form compositions are injected with colourful jazz chords and harmonic direction, less minimalist than much modern classical piano and more emotive in performance. He approaches his songs as if they were standards, with melodies inspired by show tunes and the Great American Songbook. There are countless influences at play, from Duke Ellington to Debussy, Frederic Mompou to Michel Legrand and the Carpenters – but they are worn so lightly. His closely-miked Yamaha YUS5 is so hushed and intimate, you can hear the hammers hitting the felt.