London saxophonist and flautist Sean Khan has been much acclaimed for albums such as Palmares Fantasy, a 2018 collaboration with Hermeto Pascoal, 2021’s Supreme Love: A Journey Through Coltrane and this year’s Sean Khan Presents The Modern Jazz And Folk Ensemble Volume 1, on which he reinvents tracks originally recorded by British folk artists of the late 60s and early 70s such as Nick Drake and Pentangle.
But he nonetheless has an acute sense of himself as an outsider, as a musician who’s not fully accepted by the jazz establishment. “I failed my audition to Guildhall [School Of Music and Drama] and you can’t really be a jazz musician in London if you haven’t gone through the Guildhall or Trinity [Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance] or the Royal Academy [of Music].
‘When you go to a jazz jam everybody wants to slit each other’s throats – in a kind of passive-aggressive way because it’s a very middle-class world’
“Those guys are ubiquitous on the scene and I came into conflict with them a lot and I really struggled to make a go of music. I’m sort of friends with a lot of them now and I play with them but it’s taken a long time for it to be ‘Look, the guy can play’ and I’m still an outsider, really. I might headline Ronnie Scott’s or the Jazz Café but there’s always a bit of begrudgement. Jazz isn’t a very inclusive scene. It’s full of little cliques and machinations and musicians are not the nicest people, because it’s such a brutal game.”
Khan describes having been “traumatised” by failing his Guildhall audition as a teenager, which at the time seemed to him to end his chances of becoming a full-time professional musician. “My mum didn’t have enough money to help me so I said ‘All right, I’ll do something outside of music and give up this dream’ and I did a science degree.”
Khan gigged at night to finance his studies and found himself drawn to the dance-music scene. In 2001, indeed, he released the broken beat album When Will We Belong? with the SK Radicals. “Dance music is very democratic and I loved it,” he enthuses. “When you go to a jazz jam everybody wants to slit each other’s throats – in a kind of passive-aggressive way because it’s a very middle-class world. But I don’t come from a middle-class world so I found it difficult to relate to people when they were being horrible. But when you go to a club with a really good DJ you just forget all that crap. It’s just about the music, it’s not about the egos, it’s not about having been to the bloody Guildhall School of Music. So me and dance music are natural bedfellows and dance music gave me my chance.”
‘I didn’t study jazz – I’ve never studied jazz. I purposely went to Goldsmith’s because they didn’t have a jazz scene’
A few years after finishing his science degree, however, Khan determined to study music formally. “I didn’t study jazz – I’ve never studied jazz. I purposely went to Goldsmith’s [University of London] because they didn’t have a jazz scene. Jazz has only been around 100 years and the bits that influenced me were from Louis Armstrong to when Miles Davis retired in 1975. That’s only about 50 years. So I wanted to learn other styles of music and my head was opened to Ravel, Debussy, classical orchestration, how to write a fugue…”
Khan didn’t graduate, however. “I got kicked out because they brought in fees and stuff so I didn’t quite finish which is a bummer but I’m determined to go back and finish it.”
The SK Radicals album was released on the People label. Khan subsequently received an offer from another record company. “I didn’t want to make a dance record for a label that had no connections with the dance world so I said ‘On the side I play jazz, so I’ll make a jazz record for you.’ So I wrote some tunes and got a very strong band together and went in to the studio and blew. I’m quite a heavy player – and it was too heavy for the label! They said, ‘Why do you play with such intensity?’ And they wrote off the record and gave it back to me.”
Luckily the album, Slow Burner, was picked up by Far Out Recordings and was well-reviewed on its release in 2011. A second jazz album, Muriel, named after his Irish mother, followed in 2015.
Hermeto Pascoal, by chance, got to hear the albums and expressed a desire to work with Khan. The two men subsequently recorded Palmares Fantasy in Rio de Janeiro with bassist Paulo Russo and Azymuth drummer Ivan “Mamao” Conti. “Hermeto just filled the studio with his aura. It was like being in the studio with Zeus!” laughs Khan. “But he really liked my [compositions] and he said ‘We’ll do one or two of mine and the rest yours.’ And he said the reason he wanted to work with me was because he could hear I hadn’t gone to Berklee [College Of Music]! He said he could hear something very different in my playing.”
In 2021 Khan released Supreme Love: A Journey Through Coltrane, a tribute, of course, to John Coltrane. “He was massively important to my saxophone playing because there’s a spirit and a freedom there,” he says. “I don’t think I’d be playing saxophone now if it wasn’t for his inspiration. That record is my version of Coltrane’s stuff with a few of my own compositions thrown in and it’s kind of autobiographical because I got a few of the dance guys involved.”
Of Pete King: ‘I’ll get slaughtered for saying this but Tubby Hayes wasn’t in his league’
Legendary British saxophonist Peter King guested on the album. “Me and Pete met on a gig and got on like the proverbial house on fire,” recalls Khan. “There was no one who could touch him. I’ll get slaughtered for saying this but Tubby Hayes wasn’t in his league. I’ve transcribed both Tubby’s and Pete’s solos and the architecture of Pete’s lines was incredible. You just analyse the stuff and you think ‘This guy’s brain is operating on another level!’
“And he really encouraged my playing. He said ‘Sean, your problem is you’re too good!’ And I thought ‘I wonder what all the jazz guys would think of Pete saying that about me!’”
The Sean Khan Presents The Modern Jazz And Folk Ensemble album is Khan’s highest profile release to date. “I put my heart and soul into the record and I believe in the music,” he says. “It was just a pleasure to make.”
The album concept was pitched to Khan by executive producer Colm Carty. “I had John Martyn’s Solid Air album and I think he’s an amazing fingerpicking guitar player with a really cosmic feel vocally,” explains Khan. “And I’d heard of Pentangle and Fairport Convention but I had all of Nick Drake’s records so when Colm mentioned Nick I said ‘Yeah, man, I can do that!’ Nick had an exquisite musical sensibility – you’re born with that – and very eccentric English lyrics which I can relate to. He was an amazing guitarist and harmonically he was incredible. With all the others I reinvented the songs harmonically but with Nick I didn’t really touch his harmony.”
Pentangle singer Jacqui McShee’s vocals are beautiful on versions of her band’s Light Flight and I’ve Got A Feeling. “Aw man, she’s so, so cool,” smiles Khan. “She wasn’t worried about any of my suggestions and she sang great.”
Rosie Frater-Taylor sings John Martyn’s Solid Air and Nick Drake’s Things Behind The Sun with great sensitivity while Yorkshire singer Kindelan’s interpretation of Drake’s alienated, self-loathing Parasite is engrossing. Khan chose her for the album after being sent a sample of her work. “The vocal, the timing and the phrasing were fantastic. So I thought, ‘Yeah, I can work with that!’”
‘I haven’t got a bloody clue with marketing. I don’t do all this nonsense with moody photographs and all that bullshit’
Khan’s name was used in the title of the album for marketing reasons. “They pushed me up because I’m sort of established in the UK as a jazz musician and in a difficult, shrinking market I’ve had decent sales of my records over the years. So it brought in the people who would normally listen to my stuff as well as the people who would normally listen to Jacqui McShee and Nick Drake and stuff. But I haven’t got a bloody clue with marketing. I don’t do all this nonsense with moody photographs and all that bullshit. I’m bloody honest. I just tell the truth as I see it. And I make honest music and hopefully that’s enough for people to like the record.”