Graham Reid | | 1 min read
As with his peer and fellow jazzman Nathan Haines, Auckland-born keyboard player, DJ, producer and composer Mark de Clive-Lowe was a serious young jazz musician who came of age in the hip-hop era. And so his musical – and then geographic – horizons widened rapidly.
These days he is a global citizen who has collaborated with local players in Japan, performed in Cuba, South Africa, Budapest, New York, Hong Kong, San Francisco and all points around Europe. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the singer Nia Andrews, and their children.
He initially recorded for his own Tap Records which he co-owned with producer Andrew Dubber in Auckland, but has subsequently appeared on Loop and Kog, Columbia Japan, Universal Jazz, and Tru Thoughts in the UK.
Mark de Clive-Lowe always seemed like a young man in hurry, right from when he was playing Auckland clubs such as Cause Celebre and Manifesto Wine Cellar in the 1990s .
Born to Japanese and New Zealand parents, he started with piano lessons at four; his school friends included producer Andy Morton (aka Submariner), DJ Rob Salmon and Zane Lowe (onetime rapper in Auckland’s Breaks Co-Op, an influential DJ and VJ in London and now LA-based tastemaker for Apple’s Beats 1).
He might have been a young man in a hurry, but he was well connected too.
Ever busy, the self-managed de Clive-Lowe – whom Andrew Dubber has said the word “hustler” was invented for – was in the quartet Jazz in the Present Tense in the early 90s. Their self-titled album on Tap (1996) included the American bassist Richard Hammond and drummer Steve Hass, who met de Clive-Lowe and Auckland saxophonist Jason Jones at Berklee College of Music in Boston when they all studied there.
Playing mostly standards and the occasional de Clive-Lowe original, Jazz in the Present Tense created a scene around themselves through . . .
To read this article in full at audioculture.co.nz go here.
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There is more on Mark De Clive-Lowe (interviews and reviews) at Elsewhere starting here.
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