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 a 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
My fluent musicianship skills as a pianist and vocalist allow me to express inner feelings with complete spontaneity, authenticity and candour. Whether complex or simple, deep or light, challenging or accessible, the meanings are always clear, relatable and honest.
In my contemporary classical compositions, I explore the rhythmic and tonal language of jazz and pop as well as classical music and allow my subjective tastes and experience to unselfconsciously create originality and a unique “voice” without following or contriving any particular genre.
"Artist" is such a loaded word: my job as a performing musician is to be a musical storyteller, to communicate with clarity and directness, using a rich, personal musical vocabulary, evoking vivid scenes and atmospheres in a natural, intelligible and coherent way - even in completely unplanned improvisations. I love how 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 offer insight, catharsis and solace.
This site is devoted chiefly to my classical-based work (as well as 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 lucky to have two wonderful teachers - Ella Pounder (a student of Solomon) and Denis Matthews - who encouraged me to explore music fluently. Between them, from the age of 9 to 14, I had a conventional, strict, pressurising teacher. I did well for him - passing all the AB grades with distinction, entering and winning many competitions but I hated the pressure. Paradoxically, I benefited, as this led me to rebel against him and discover my own model of musical language - the one I now use as an artist and teach to others. This model accesses the joy of self-expression and I practised it as a rejection of the pressure to achieve competitive success or to be cool, relevant etc. 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 some awards and graduated with high marks but decided that a conventional career as a classical pianist was not for me.
I’ve worked as a professional musician (artist and teacher) for too many years to count, in my unconventional way, always working to make fluent musical expression or communication the primary focus. My musicianship skills have led me to work with many amazing musicians and I 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 special powers, that are innate and can’t be trained. In reality, my early fascination with the symmetry of the keyboard map and the rhythmic matrix or groove structure is the underpinning focus that I use to be able to improvise, sight-read and play by ear with such ease and fluency. Symmetrical rather than linear thinking provides a way to experience music as the language of the soul.
soul, not ego
Fluent music communicates directly soul to soul, bringing joy, solace and catharsis, even healing. This is the goal of my all musical work, both as an artist and as a teacher. I dislike the competitive climate that we find so often in today’s music industry: rooted in egotism, cold commercialism and status-seeking, it 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 role is to serve the healing properties of music, using its extraordinary power as the language of inner feeling, to tell 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."