You can tell a lot about a musician by the jobs they keep getting called for, and renowned bassist and musical author Phil Mulford has built a career that spans session bass, West End theatre pits, TV work, pop touring, jazz fusion, and film recording.

Geoff meets Phil in his South London studio and starts right at the beginning: picking up bass at school because it was the only instrument left, then levelling up through youth big bands, serious listening, and the kind of early opportunities that reward players who show up prepared.

From an engineering apprenticeship to playing on the QE2, Phil shares how going professional often happens faster than you expect, and why sight reading, time feel, and calm nerves are not "nice to have" skills. We talk Gloria Gaynor gigs, stepping deeper into jazz and fusion, and the realities of West End ‘depping’ where you need to know the book well enough to survive conductor changes and high-pressure calls. Phil also reflects on session highlights, including TV pre-records connected to big live moments, and why preparation is the real cure for stage anxiety.

Then we get practical: Phil explains how he uses the Quartet jazz standards play-along app to practise chord changes, build walking bass lines, and expand vocabulary through jazz harmony. We play through Wes Montgomery's 1960s classic ‘Road Song’ and dig into what makes it such a rich standard for bass players, from ii-V-I movement to minor harmony and altered dominants. If you care about becoming a more adaptable bassist, improving your sight-reading, or getting more confident on standards, this chat is full of real-world guidance.

Subscribe, share the episode with a bassist friend, and leave a review so more players can find the show.

Presenter: Geoff Gascoyne
Series Producer: Paul Sissons
Production Manager: Martin Sissons
The Quartet Jazz Standards Podcast is a UK Music Apps production.

Perfect pitch, bebop, and the hard reality of a badly formatted big band chart all collide in this week’s episode. Geoff chats with the brilliant Alex Clarke, a young UK alto saxophonist (and multi-instrumentalist) who already sounds like she has lived inside the music for decades.

Geoff welcomes Alex into his South London home and gets straight into the choices that shaped her career from Cheshire school bands to Ronnie Scott's Jazz Orchestra and beyond.

Alex talks openly about dropping out of Birmingham Conservatoire after one year, not because she stopped loving jazz, but because the environment made practice feel like a chore. From there we follow the practical path: gigging early, learning the mechanics of form and harmony on bandstands, and taking a live-in job at Warwick School during the pandemic that let her keep playing while the world stalled. We also dig into her experience of the ‘Young Musician of the Year’ competition (‘BBC Young Musician’) and how a single line on an email can give promoters confidence at exactly the right moment.

The heart of the conversation is craft. Alex explains how she built jazz vocabulary through listening and transcription, pulling language from Art Pepper, Phil Woods, Cannonball Adderley and Scott Hamilton, and how perfect pitch helps with keys while sometimes masking deeper harmonic gaps. We talk jazz standards and the American Songbook, then play the 1930s Schwartz/Dietz standard ‘Alone Together’ (accompanied by Quartet - what else?) and break down her improvising approach, including diminished-based thinking, chord tones versus passing notes, and what makes the alto saxophone so flexible in sound and feel.

If you care about straight-ahead jazz, bebop language, learning standards by ear, and building a sustainable life as a working musician in the UK jazz scene, you will want this one in your playlist. Subscribe, share it with a fellow player, and leave us a review with your favourite standard to practise and why.

Presenter: Geoff Gascoyne
Series Producer: Paul Sissons
Production Manager: Martin Sissons
The Quartet Jazz Standards Podcast is a UK Music Apps production.

Geoff is in Croydon, South London to meet the accomplished British bandleader, multi-instrumentalist and musical director of the Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Orchestra, Pete Long.

One record can reroute a whole life, and for Pete it was Glenn Miller’s version of the Joe Garland hit ‘In the Mood’ (1939). Pete follows the sound from swing into the deeper waters of Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie, where big band jazz becomes a lifelong obsession with colour, craft, and joy. Pete talks candidly about choosing saxophone with the firm intention of going pro, adding clarinet through Benny Goodman, and why certain classic charts still spark that boyish excitement when the page turns.

We also get into the working reality behind the glamour: leaving a banking job for music college, learning arranging the unromantic way on an Atari, and eventually writing for major bandstands including Jools Holland. If you lead a band or dream of it, you’ll recognise the stress points: depping, last-minute panics, fees, and the quiet truth that good musicians want the gig to succeed as much as you do. Pete shares what actually makes big bands manageable today, from infrastructure to communication.

Geoff brings it back to the basics: jazz standards. Pete names his favourites, explains why it helps to call both the start and finish key, and treats us to an impromptu improvisation of the Klenner/Lewis 1930’s standard ‘Just Friends’ on his clarinet - accompanied by the rhythm section of the Quartet app.

His best advice for learners is a mindset shift: stop calling it “improvising” if that word makes you freeze, because you’re really editing a vocabulary of licks, chord tones, and shapes you’ve absorbed by listening and transcribing.

If you enjoyed this, subscribe, share it with a mate who loves standards, and leave a review so more UK jazz musicians can find the show.

Presenter: Geoff Gascoyne
Series Producer: Paul Sissons
Production Manager: Martin Sissons
The Quartet Jazz Standards Podcast is a UK Music Apps production.