I'm Phil Best - award-winning RNCM graduate performing & recording artist - pianist, composer, producer & vocalist - and innovative piano teacher & singing teacher, offering piano, singing or composition lessons online or at home in my small but well-equipped studio in London SW6, Fulham / Hammersmith.
As a communicator and educator my passion is for music as a language that we can "speak" fluently to tell our inner stories. You can hear my music - pieces, songs and improvisations - on YouTube, SoundCloud, Spotify and other streaming sites.
artist
As a practitioner of fluent musicianship (vocal and keyboard) I aim to express inner feelings with direct spontaneity, authenticity and candour. Whether the music is complex or simple, deep or light, challenging or accessible, the meanings must be clear, relatable and honest.
In my eclectic contemporary classical compositions, I explore the rhythmic and tonal language of jazz and pop as well as classical music. My unique “voice” appears naturally without following or contriving any particular style or genre. The music that I compose and improvise is personal - a kind of processing of my feelings and a reprieve from a confusing world.
"Artist" is a loaded word: I see my job more as a musical storyteller, to communicate with clarity and directness, using a rich musical vocabulary to evoke vivid scenes and atmospheres. I always aim to do this in a natural, intelligible way - even in completely unplanned improvisations. I'm fascinated by the way musical language can evoke the intricacies of our interior moods and convey subtle shifts of feeling with sharp precision. Ultimately, I aim to describe how it feels to be alive in the world today, to experience catharsis and solace that music offers.
This site is devoted chiefly to my classical-based work and my teaching. I also have a jazz project - Lewis Harrison. And I create and teach music for meditation and transformation - Tone and Groove.
teacher
I teach fluency in the language of music for piano or keyboard players and singers. My unique, radical approach builds on natural, intuitive musicianship to generate powerful skills. I coach students to focus effortlessly on internalised musical “vocabulary” and “syntax” whilst actively letting go of expressive blockages and self-consciousness. This skill of focus and letting go is more meditative than cognitive, and is a fascinating challenge to explore.
It’s a highly practical system that is very different from current conventional music learning. I don’t use elaborate concepts of technique or physiology; instead we keep the mechanical aspects of singing and playing the keys to a minimum. I don't use complex theory; instead the model we use is simple and practical for developing deep, internalised understanding of musical language. Traditional approaches that use rehearsing, repetitive muscle-memory, drilling of finger or voice exercises or scales, "karaoke" or how-it-goes memory, or show-and-play instruction… all these approaches have no place in my musical fluency training.
A fluent musician has incredibly useful musical skills such as improvisation, playing by ear and true sight-reading or sight-singing (not the usual decoding). Fluency removes the stiffness that conventional music training causes, generating the freedom to express musically with natural ease and flow.
Fluency in the language of music as a means of authentic self-expression is the heart of my work both as an artist and a teacher
background
I was fortunate to have studied with two wonderful teachers - Ella Pounder until the age of 9, and Denis Matthews until the age of 18. They both encouraged me to discover real fluency in the language of music. From the age of 9 to 14, I had a conventional, strict, pressurising teacher. I rebelled quietly, and discovered my own clear, simple model of musical language - the one I now use as an artist and teach to others. Although I practised my model as a rejection of the pressure to achieve competitive success, paradoxically it enabled me to do well in exams and competitions. But most importantly it gave me access the joy of self-expression.
At 18, I went to the RNCM, studying piano with Ryszard Bakst, and singing with Vera Cross. There I performed in many public concerts, won awards and graduated with high marks but decided that a conventional career as a classical pianist was not for me.
So my work as a professional musician (artist, teacher, composer and producer) has always been unconventional. I always made fluent musicianship the primary focus. I've worked with many brilliant musicians and have an extensive, rich and diverse experience of music across different genres - classical, jazz and pop.
Symmetry, structure and natural flow
For me, the language of music has deep simplicity. It follows a very simple model of rhythmic and tonal structure that is perfectly natural. Although we all have an intuitive sense of this structure, my conscious awareness of it gives me the kinds of musical skills that are often thought of as rare, special, innate powers that can’t be trained. In reality, it was my early fascination with the symmetry of the keyboard map and the rhythmic matrix (or groove structure) combined with a passionae love of music that formed my abilities to improvise, sight-read and play by ear with such ease and fluency. My nonlinear experience of musical structure gave me a very deep grasp of how musical language works. The expressive freedom this provides means that playing directly from the body and soul becomes possible.
soul, not ego
Fluent music communicates directly soul to soul, bringing joy, solace and catharsis, even healing. So with flunecy as my goal, both as an artist and as a teacher, I regard the competitive climate of today’s music and music education industries as problematic. Being rooted in egotism, cold commercialism and status-seeking weakens the true purpose of music.
Having experienced early success as a young classical musician, I was injured psychologically by the pressure of working within a system that feeds an insatiable hunger for prestige and rank within the hierarchical competitive realm. The continual process of healing - transcending these painful experiences - is a great opportunity for growth and insight, both as an artist and teacher. My believe my job is to serve the healing properties of music, using its extraordinary power as the language of inner feeling, telling musical stories that help us make sense of living in this complex and often troubling world.
"Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life, bringing peace, abolishing strife."