British national
UK resident
Tom Millar is a London-based pianist, composer, and bandleader. His debut album, Unnatural Events was launched in September 2017 at Pizza Express Jazz Club (Soho)
The album launch was followed by a 20-date UK tour supported by Arts Council England. Released on independent jazz label Spark!, it was recorded with funding from an Emerging Excellence Award (Help Musicians UK), the Jazz Services’ Recording Support Scheme, and a successful crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter. The quartet plays Tom’s original music, which is inspired by places and people that are important to him. Tracks include the soulful ballad Park Hill; his setting of the proto-environmentalist poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Inversnaid; and rock-out grooves in The Seafarer, Power Chord Thing, and Woad. It features some of the most in-demand young jazz musicians in London: Misha Mullov-Abbado on bass, Alex Munk on guitar, and Dave Storey on drums. Singer Alice Zawadzki also features on two tracks.
As a bandleader, Tom has performed at venues such as Wigmore Hall, Pizza Express Jazz Club (Soho), Vortex, 606 Club, KKL Lucerne, and the Paul Klee Centre (Switzerland), as well as at the London Jazz Festival.
As a sidesman, Tom has toured England and Wales with the Lyric Ensemble performing the music of Michael Garrick; with Ollie Howell’s quintet; with Duncan Eagles’s quartet; and has recorded albums with the Tom Smith Septet and Andrew Linham Big Band. Further afield, he has played in the USA, Europe, and Qatar, including a nationwide tour with Swiss blues star Philipp Fankhauser and venerable singer Margie Evans; a gig at the opening residency at Quincy Jones’s first ever jazz club, Q’s Bar & Lounge (Dubai); and a gig with bassist Lisa Hoppe’s Ambush at the ∫, Bern.
Tom previously ran the monthly jam session and gig at the Green Note, Camden, as well as playing a monthly duo concert there with some of his favourite singers. He was also a member of Way Out West musicians’ collective, for which he created various different projects including a quintet with Gareth Lockrane and Fini Bearman, and a nonet playing his compositions and arrangements with Jim Hart, Tim Whitehead, Tony Woods and Laura Jurd, among others.
After reading Music at King’s College, Cambridge, Tom studied Jazz Piano and Composition at the Royal Academy of Music, followed by two years with Django Bates in Bern (Switzerland).
