David Newton

Growing up in Renfrewshire, Scotland, David Newton had a musical upbringing with the piano trio sound of Peterson, Tatum or Garner an ever-present feature in the Newton household. After graduating from Leeds College of Music in 1979 he freelanced around Yorkshire and eventually became a resident musician at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough for two and a half years.

A move to Edinburgh followed where theatre work using local musicians quickly led to an established position on the Scottish jazz scene but after some four years there, his old roommate from college, Alan Barnes, persuaded him to move to London where he rapidly became a much sought after pianist teaming up with Barnes, guitarist Martin Taylor and saxophonist Don Weller.

Newton's recording career had begun in 1985 with Buddy De Franco and Martin Taylor and his first solo album was released in 1988 in association with producer Elliot Meadow who oversaw the next nine years of recording for Linn Records followed by Candid Records.

In 1989 ha became Carol Kidd's musical director and pianist and as a result of his participation in her album "The Night We Called it a Day ", Linn Records asked him to record his album "Victim of Circumstance" (Linn AKD 013). It received many excellent reviews proclaiming it as "a beautifully mature and relaxed collection", "a brilliantly accomplished recording" and one to be "highly recommended ". This was followed by "Eye Witness" which received an equally strong response - "even better than his debut, which is saying something" The List

In 1997, David Newton and Alan Barnes teamed up and together with Concorde Label agent Barry Hatcher, made four CDs for that label. By 2003, Newton set up a business partnership with former pupil Mike Daymond and they established Brightnewday Records initially as a vehicle for Newton's own music but with an eye to opening up the catalogue to other artists later on.

In the first five years of the nineties, Newton's reputation as an exquisite accompanist for a singer, spread rather rapidly and by '95 he was regularly working with Carol Kidd, Marion Montgomery, Tina May, Annie Ross, Claire Martin and Stacey Kent, with whom he spent the next ten years recording and travelling all over the world. While all this was going on, Newton was composing music which he would record on his own CDs as well as writing specifically for Martin Taylor, Alan Barnes, Tina May or Claire Martin.

Indeed, Newton's music can now be heard on many television productions, especially in the United States where over twenty TV movies benefit from Newton's haunting themes. In 2003, after a twenty year gap, David Newton was reunited with playwright Alan Aykbourn having been involved with eight world premiers in Scarborough and London back in the early eighties, and he was asked to write the music for two new productions, "Sugar Daddies" and "Drowning on Dry Land".

Currently, with the release of a new CD called "Inspired", on the Brightnewday label, David Newton is relishing the musical freedom of his Trio and the special sound it makes whilst working on two other new recording projects, as an arranger and a composer.

David Newton has been voted Best Jazz Pianist in the British Jazz Awards six times and was made a Fellow of Leeds College of Music in 2003.