Listener Reviews 

"Just listened to this stuff for the first time. Very nice indeed. I think the orchestration really stands out, especially the realistic subtlety of the string mixes. The knowledge that you acquired in your studies really shows. Glenda Collens also sounds great. I never realized she had such a wonderful voice.

Good Luck with this venture."
--Neil  Payne

A Personal Note

From Composer & Producer John Thompson

I could hear music in my head when I was a child and then I realised I could improvise this music in my head too and add parts and hear them together. I thought maybe everyone did this, until during high school we decided to get into pop music. I had done some early piano lessons and I could read music notation so I started to teach myself chords and learn some chord progressions. Soon I could lift a progression from a recording and play along with the radio. My best friend had the idea we form a band, he introduced me to Sgt Pepper soon we got together and began to rehearse songs mainly Beatlesand some Latin, because Latin music was popular in night clubs at the time.

We also concentrated on composition and practiced many of our own songs. We got a spot at a night club after about five years of practicing and rehearsing together. I did that gigging until I was 24 years old. The band dissolved through lack of funding needed to acquire state heavy duty amplifiers and equipment that would elevate us to a higher sound level. I starting gigging with bigger bands but eventually had to go away to Canada and study Accounting I had gotten into a professional accounting firm and start an accounting career as my day job a few years earlier, got married too. While studying I met Greg Reid a Canadian who had a passion for funk music and he had stocked up his basement apartment with a four track recorder and a stereo sound system, a bass guitar and a Yamaha DX7. I had brought up my Mini moog synthesizer I just did not want to part with it. My wife brought it up for me when she came to join me in Canada. We got a guitar later, Greg learned to play bass and I started to compose songs. By the time I left Canada we had recorded a host of songs. I also enrolled in the University of Ottawa jazz program under Professor Dave Hildinger, a wonderful teacher and a well of knowledge on contemporary music and jazz. Dave had an assistant called Roddy Elias a highly talented guitarist. I bought Dave’s publications and learned from his classes too.

When I returned to my native Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean I got together with some friends and we formed a new band and gigged at a night spot on the Western Peninsula. Eventually my accounting career got the better of me I had come back a Canadian CMA/ CPA so my career became intense and I fell off the music scene. Then a jazz movement emerged in the country and a friend of ours began a jazz club in the capital, it fed an idea I had to bring down Dave and Roddy and others to perform and stage local workshops. By the time we became organised Dave had lost his penchant for travel and I was so disappointed, though not upset, I abandoned the idea.

Then came the music notation software Finale in the late nineties and I jumped on it, tenaciously composing and scoring my songs and instrumental music over the last ten years. I pursued academic study of orchestration using the Panassus, Nikolay Rimsky Korsakov, Walter Piston’s texts to sharpen my counterpoint, orchestral technique and harmonic capacity respectively. At 50 I took an early retirement and set about doing this recording. Over the years my composing has benefited from those orchestration studies which I picked up seriously in the nineties. As a child doing the piano my image of a musician was formed around the classical masters so my approach to my development naturally was to seek out similar faculties. I always saw it as you have to compose orchestral material and strive for scoring that music so any competent musician can play it. I’ve discipline my compositional method along these lines. I’ve written a sonata, a baroque piece, romantic period orchestral works, modal harmony and harmonic distortion 20 th century genre music as well as Spanish and Latin genre yet to be recorded. I’m looking forward to bringing exciting legacy compositions, modern pop and synthesized dance, avant-garde jazz and 20th century styles to the public as I continue on my musical journey.