My mother was an amateur soprano soloist and choral singer, so I listened to her performances and heard her play the piano at home, practising for Handel’s Messiah or Mendelssohn’s Elijah among others.

I took piano lessons from around the age of seven and started to compose my own tunes. When I heard Take Five by The Dave Brubeck Quartet I was stunned – my parents bought me the LP Time Out, which changed my musical life from then on.

At secondary school age in 1960 I went to boarding school, where my music-making really took off. In the school choir I became the school’s main boy soprano soloist, taking the solo part in a staged version of Bach’s Peasant Cantata. I taught myself to play Take Five and got together a jazz piano trio with my friends Nick Would (double-bass and guitar) and Rod Temperton (drums and guitar) and we formed our own pop group in which I also played guitar.

I listened to Jazz and contemporary classical music on the BBC – the EBU classical concerts the BBC relayed from Europe were remarkable for including new scores by Ligeti, Stockhausen, Penderecki, etc. I heard the music pretty much as it was created and recorded.

Eric Dolphy’s ‘245’, from his first studio album Outward Bound (1959), includes a breathtaking alto sax solo and a wonderful and unusual piano solo by Jaki Byard. I also bought Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come (1959), Free Jazz (1960) and Ornette Coleman Town Hall 1962 on ESP-Disk.

Charles Mingus’ The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady (1963) made a big impression on me, as did the Candid recordings, which include an exhilarating solo / duet with Mingus and Dolphy on Stormy Weather (1960). My personal favourite was Charles Mingus – Right Now, Live at the Jazz Workshop (1964), an aggressively ‘seat-of-the-pants’ gig that was exactly how I thought a jazz group should be.

Other favourites included Getz / Gilberto (1963), The Modern Jazz Quartet Guest Star Laurindo Almeida (1963-64), Brubeck At Carnegie Hall, Miles Davis’s Nefertiti (1967), Jaki Byard’s Sunshine of my Soul (1967), the Elvin Jones Trio’s The Ultimate (1968) and the Gary Burton Quartet and Orchestra performing Carla Bley’s A Genuine Tong Funeral (1968).

Archie Shepp’s album On This Night (1965) seemed pretty uncompromising until I heard Sounds by the Roscoe Mitchell Sextet on Delmark (1966) – it was a precursor to Lester Bowie’s Numbers 1 & 2 (Nessa 1967) and the group they formed with Joseph Jarman and Malachi Favors – The Art Ensemble of Chicago, who recorded the moving People In Sorrow in 1969.

Carla Bley played piano with trumpeter Mike Mantler in the Jazz Composers Orchestra. JCOA Records released a box of Mantler’s compositions Communications (1968), concertos for Don Cherry, Gato Barbieri, Larry Coryell, Roswell Rudd, Pharoah Sanders and Cecil Taylor, with an extremely large band – fiercely avant-garde even at that time. Bley also contributed compositions and arrangements to Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra (1969), a glorious album that pulls together many strands from music that had gone before. A masterpiece.

The 1950 recording of The Stan Kenton Orchestra playing Shorty Rogers’ score Jolly Rogers can still blow your socks off. Adventures In Jazz by Stan Kenton’s Mellophonium Orchestra (1961) had forward-looking scores by Dee Barton. The Don Ellis Orchestra’s Live at Monterey (1966) was quite a shock, and I followed all his subsequent recordings until his untimely death in 1978.

I enjoyed The Thad Jones Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra Live at the Village Vanguard (1968), the exciting Oliver Nelson’s Big Band Live from Los Angeles and Jazz Suite on the Mass Texts (1964) by Paul Horn, a strange ‘crossover’ album composed and conducted by Lalo Schifrin: the Credo shows the influence of Ligeti.

Particularly influential, Thesaurus (1968) by the Clare Fischer Big Band included wonderful Tristano-esque oblique, linear improvision, composing and arranging.

Radio was the main source for hearing New Music: I heard Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima and Ligeti’s Atmospheres via the BBC. Albums were hard to come by, but I bought the boxed set of Penderecki’s St Luke Passion on its release – the overall sound and passionate singing (quarter-tones and all) of soprano vocalist Stefania Woytowicz was a revelation.

I also searched the sales bins for modern classical music and managed to find some Vox Records – Varèse’s monumental Amériques performed by Abravanel and the Utah Symphony Orchestra (with prominent sirens!) is still the best version (Vanguard, 1966). Also Ensemble ‘Die Reihe’ playing Ligeti’s Aventures / Nouvelles Aventures, Horenstein’s Mahler Symphony No. 9 and pianist David Burge playing Berio, Stockhausen, Dallapiccola, Boulez and Krenek.

Although I knew Stockhausen’s studio electronic work Gesang Der Jünglinge, it was my friend Rod Temperton who introduced me to the Nonesuch albums The Wild Bull (1968) and Silver Apples of the Moon (1967) by Morton Subotnick: the first time I heard synthesizers. These pieces used Buchla’s ‘modular voltage-controlled synthesizer’. It had sequencers, no ‘piano’ keyboard, and was designed so that it could be played onstage using faders. The stacked sequencers could play streams of notes and also drive changes in configurations by manually stepping through additional stacked sequencers for timbral and temporal changes. Only later did I realise that this foresaw the use of memory banks on synthesizers, and voltage control on mixing desks – although none were as sophisticated as Buchla’s instrument. These two great records are probably the most important and influential in the history of electronic music.

I’d bought the Beatles albums With the Beatles and A Hard Day‘s Night and learned the guitar so I could play and sing the tunes. I bought singles by The Kinks and The Who as well as The Rolling Stones’ first two albums and Five by Five EP.

In August 1970 Soft Machine played at the Albert Hall Proms following the release of their great album Third. I bought the albums We’ll Talk About It Later and Solar Plexus by Ian Carr’s Nucleus and Mike Gibbs’s first album Michael Gibbs (1970). There was an increase in contemporary music tours across the North of England, so I was able to see concerts by Alan Hacker’s group The Matrix playing Birtwistle’s Nenia: The Death of Orpheus; Peter Maxwell Davies’ group The Fires of London; and the Howard Riley Trio with Tony Oxley and Barry Guy.

After buying Miles Davis’s In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew I got hold of Joe Zawinul’s Atlantic album Zawinul (1970) and realised how much Zawinul had contributed to the sound-world of those Miles albums.

1970 was a good year for Jazz and the start of what became known as Jazz-Funk: the track Fat Albert Rotunda by Herbie Hancock; Compared to What by Les McCann, Eddie Harris and Benny Bailey live at the Montreux Jazz Festival on Swiss Movement; Follow Your Heart by the Joe Farrell Quartet with John McLaughlin; Quincy Jones’s Gula Matari.

Three ground-breaking albums were influential at this time: Weather Report’s I Sing the Body Electric (1971), John McLaughlin and The Mahavishnu Orchestra with Inner Mounting Flame (1971) and Herbie Hancock’s Crossings (1972). I saw Weather Report at Ronnie Scott’s in 1971 – the virtuosity of the collective playing was staggering.

In 1972 I met John Walters in South Wales at the Barry Jazz Summer School, which was directed by drummer / composer Tony Oxley. There was a marvellous cross-section of modern jazz styles – from bebop to the latest avant-garde. One memorable experience was playing in a free-improvisation trio with Evan Parker.

Soon after, I moved to Germany, bought a Fender Rhodes piano and joined a multinational band playing club dates and US bases. The sets we played were very long, a huge cross-section of covers, including soul, pop, country tunes and chart hits – I learned a lot.

While in Germany I was able to get hold of many records I wanted: the first recording of Stockhausen’s Mantra; the Steve Reich box set of Drumming; Xenakis’s Terretektorh and Nomos Gamma; and Jimmy Webb’s solo album Letters.

As soon as I moved to London, I enrolled at Morley College, where I took a practical course in electronic music (VCS3 synthesizers and Revoxes) and attended Anthony Gilbert’s composition classes. The latter included some analysis of Schoenberg’s piano music: we examined No. 2 of the Six Little Piano Pieces Op. 19. To realise that everything that you seek – intellectually and emotionally – in a piece of music can be contained in nine bars is humbling. Even after looking at what is going on in those nine bars, the music remains fresh and mysterious.

I was lucky enough to attend an early performance of Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel (composed 1971), sung by the Gregg Smith Singers. I have always loved it for its sense of space, balances of rhythm and stasis with hints of repetition. A very beautiful piece of music.

In 1974 I formed an electronic free improvisation group called Accord with two incredible musicians: Richard Burgess on percussion and amplified percussion and Roger Cawkwell on synthesizer. I played amplified grand piano with ring modulators. The listening process involved in free improvisation has always been important to me – I can still hear and feel that interaction on some of the live tracks on the Landscape A Go-Go box set, it’s a joy.

Landscape A Go-go: the story of Landscape 1977-83. is out now, available from the Landscape official store, on Bandcamp and via streaming.

See also INFLUENCES – JOHN L. WALTERS

INFLUENCES – ANDY PASK

INFLUENCES – RICHARD JAMES BURGESS

INFLUENCES – PETER THOMS