About.

Jacky Naylor is a pianist, composer and educator living in NW London. He leads his trio, Meraki, alongside Nick Jurd and Jonathan Silk, as well as his Sextet which was formed in 2019 for Lancaster Jazz Festival.

Naylor grew up in rural North Yorkshire, and his first exposure to jazz was through local music centre ensembles and big bands. This interest was fostered, and at 18 he moved to study Jazz at Birmingham Conservatoire under John Taylor, Percy Pursglove and Hans Koller. Here Naylor developed a deep interest in large ensemble composition, and was gifted a lesson with Maria Schneider after winning the Conservatoire’s Big Band Composition Prize in his 3rd year. This led to him writing the suite ‘Rough Boundaries’, a collection of five pieces about 5 different cities Naylor visited that year, with the intention of describing them through music - Moscow, Bilbao, Stockholm, Reykjavik and Marrakech. Naylor later recorded the suite with Birmingham Jazz Orchestra and it was released in 2016 to 4 star reviews from major UK Jazz publications. Naylor also received the coveted Dankworth Prize for Composition (2018) for his piece Bilbao from this suite.

In 2016, Naylor graduated from Birmingham Conservatoire with First Class Honours and reached the semi final stages of BBC Young Jazz Musician of the Year. He then spent the next 2 years performing, practicing and teaching in the city, notably at St Bernadette’s Catholic Primary School, The School of Theatre Excellence and Birmingham Hippodrome. In 2018, he received a scholarship to study a Masters at The Royal Academy of Music.

Jacky’s main influences come from the contemporary European Jazz Scene and during his studies at The Academy, he came into direct contact with these influences: Kit Downes, Gwilym Simcock, Jasper Hoiby, Nikki Iles, Pete Churchill and Stan Sulzmann.

In 2019, Jacky received a commission from Lancaster Jazz Festival and penned the suite ‘Industrial’. This was written for his newly formed sextet featuring some of his favourite musicians on the London scene. ‘Industrial’ captures different elements of the Industrial Revolution, based on the textile mills of Keighley and Saltaire, the backdrop to Naylor’s upbringing and family history.

In 2020, Jacky graduated from The Royal Academy of Music with Distinction. He now lives in NW London, and performs regularly across the UK and Europe. During the Covid-19 pandemic, he created The Jazz Pursuit - an online education channel aimed to help those who don’t have direct access to jazz education.