Daily Dose Of Jazz…

David Panton was born on October 20, 1946 in the Midlands, England where his formative musical experience revolved around singing in the local church choir and later with a mixed voice choir and an amateur operatic society. He began teaching himself classical piano from the age of twelve and by fifteen had begun to compose by improvising at the keyboard. At seventeen he joined the army as a bandsman, taking up the oboe and being posted for a year in 1964 to Kneller Hall, the Military School of Music. He later attended Birmingham School of Music for piano tuition under the late William Fellowes for a year from 1966. His composing took on a more modern direction which was largely unintelligible to his military colleagues.

After four years as bandsman he resigned to pursue a musical career back in civilization, taking up the alto saxophone as a result of hearing some of the American and British free jazz players of the time such as Ornette Coleman and Mike Osborne. He formed several groups and gave solo performances at the Birmingham Arts Lab, Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham and Midlands Institue as well as numerous pubs. He made contact with London based musicians John Stevens, Evan Parker, Derek Bailey and Maggie Nichols which led to occasional appearances around the city.

He ventured into folk music with the group Forest, followed by the experimental theatre group Chameleon Laboratory Theatre. In 1979 he received an Arts Council jazz bursary, allegedly the first provincal based musician to do so, with a second following in 1981. By 1989 he abandoned music and started up an audio cassette duplication business. When the demise of the audio cassette undermined business viability, David opted to take up a civil service post in the late Nineties from which he retired in 2006.

In 2009 he was awarded the MA in Music from the Open University and has continued to pursue music activities in academia.

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