Colin May meets an artist redefining jazz with a little inspiration from Alice's adventures in Wonderland

I JUST want to make great music,” says jazz drummer Corrie Dick. “I try to come at it fresh every time and try not to create too much that sounds the same, because that removes the potential for real magic... and that’s a dreadful shame.”

The 26-year-old Glaswegian knows about great music. Winner of the BBC Young Scottish Jazz Musician award in 2013, Corrie is making ever larger waves on the jazz scene as one quarter of the the young, bold and dynamic band Dinosaur, formerly the Laura Jurd Quartet, and by being invited to take the drum seat in high profile double bassist Jasper Hoiby’s new band Human Creatures – both lapped up by audiences in Oxford.

Now he is on his way back, with his Band of Joy – which he brings to the city’s Spin Jazz Club next Thursday.

Corrie embraces his reputation for being ‘quirky’. “I love surrealism,” he says, as he relaxes between recording sessions for still-under-wraps special project.

“I find it inspiring and hilarious as a comedic medium. For music too, I like to try and apply those ideas – twisting things but not to the point of complete abstraction. I want people to be in on it. I am not here to alienate.”

His Band of Joy album is titled Impossible Things – a reference to the Alice books, and there’s a tune, Six Impossible Things he recalls playing in The Mad Hatter bar off Oxford’s Iffley Road. It was a moment he says was “just surreal”.

It was perhaps inevitable that he should go into music. “There’s plenty of music in my family,” he says. “My mum’s artistic, she doesn’t play an instrument but she’s very much a music enthusiast. And my dad teaches piano and studied music at university. They were both really supportive, and allowed me to follow whatever I was interested in without pushing me in any particular direction.”

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Growing up, Corrie says he was “probably more into the popular music of the time” than jazz, and played several other instruments before settling on the drums. Then an unexpected twist of fate changed everything.

“In playing trumpet I got to play in this inter-schools big band,” he says. “I met another trumpeter who just started playing piano in the interval. He was called Peter Johnstone. I thought ‘here we go... I’ll have a sit on the drums then’.

“He was very good on the piano and I was clunking around on the drums. But he just had this really infectious enthusiasm and said ‘Man it’s great; you should play more... let’s play!’

Soon after that I did my first gig as a drummer as part of this nurturing Glasgow scene that is full of really supportive people.”

Corrie had found the drums but also drumming had found Corrie. ‘It’s the core to every tradition, in the same way the voice is. In every tradition you find percussion so it’s this really rich world. You can’t ever learn it all and you cant get bored. If you get bored playing the drums then you are a boring person.”

He graduated from the jazz course at Trinity Laban College as a gold medallist, but also London was an opportunity “to see what’s out there”.

“I couldn’t have imagined; there’s a taste of everywhere in London,” he says.

Corrie’s questing approach to life and to music is ‘to give himself as many experiences as possible”.

This openness has seen him jamming with local musicians in Marrakech while holidaying in Morocco, studying percussion in Ghana with kpanlogo master Saddiq Addy, and currently listening to recordings of the late great Qawwali musician Nursat Ali Fateh Khan.

“I try to study the grooves of a tradition that will have been refined over hundreds and hundreds of years by isolated generations, trying to get to the the heart of it and ingrain it in my practice. You find that the flavours just come out in ways you might not expect if you are playing with an open heart and mind and in the spirit of the moment. That’s much better than just shoehorning in your Latin lick, it means something when you have gone through that process and it’s part of you.”

He adds: “The best bands feel like a family in which you can see the characters and how they interact. For me, being a band leader is about leaving space for individuals to be themselves. I don’t dictate. I sit at the back and sometimes the music sounds completely different from what I’d envisage.

“The people I am playing with, I am delighted to be playing with. They don’t need an explanation, they just get on with it. They blow my mind every time. It’s just really really special.”

The eight strong line up of Band of Joy includes long time collaborator and current BBC New Generation artist trumpeter Laura Jurd, saxophonist Joe Wright who, like Corrie, is a winner of BBC Young Scottish Jazz Musician and violinist /vocalist and sometimes poet Alice Zawadski. While Alice is the main vocalist, there are others including Corrie himself.

“The whole reason I’ve got vocals involved is that one of my whole reasons for playing live music is to connect with people and have them loose themselves in a dream and disappear into this sound.

“Sound alone can do that. But why not remove one more level of abstraction by adding things people can relate to – like the drums with the voice. They are central to every culture, and strike to the core of what humans are about.”

Corrie Dick’s Band of Joy is at The Spin at the Wheatsheaf, off High Street, Oxford, on Thursday, June 8