MUSIC

The first thing to get out of the way is: "Music saved my life!" Not only is it food for the soul, it is also a life-saver.

I was fascinated to learn during my BA in Music that the foetus begins to hear at 26 weeks. So, at 26 weeks little baby foetus Christian was listening to Trojan Ska and Tamla Motown - his parents' favourite music and both musics heavily laden with saxophones! Once I was born and became old enough to air drum, that was all I would do - I would air drum to anything.

Fast forward twelve years and I was learning bits and pieces on the piano in the different 'care' homes I was sent to. The next relevant point to mention was my discovery of a little red book named "The Rudiments and Theory of Music" while in Borstal a few years later at fifteen years of age. I loved this book with its esoteric symbols, lines and spaces. I was fascinated by its contents and learned about relative pitch, different keys, clefs, sharps, flats, and naturals. There were perfect and plagal cadences, there were slurs and staccatos and rests - I learned everything I could from that book but had no musical instrument to experiment with. I would have to wait a few years before I could slowly put my knowledge into practice.

This was in Dartmoor prison and I was very lucky to encounter a very unlucky classicaly trained Spanish guitarist. He had been quite happy smuggling a suitcase full of heroin from India to his home country when his plane was diverted to land at Heathrow, the hottest airport for drug smugglers in the eighties (and probably still today). He was serving his time in Dartmoor and gave me tips whenever we would meet up. I became reasonably good in a short while. This new talent served me quite well on the festival scene once I was released.

In the early nineties I'd become pretty good at both playing guitar and singing and would whizz off to the South of France on busking trips for months at a time. This is where I learned to play well with others.

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Credit: Craig Kirkwood

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Next I picked up the alto saxophone in prison. A fellow prisoner possessed a saxophone but had no idea how to play it. He knew I was musical as he'd seen me perform at a couple of concerts in the prison gym. It wasn't so difficult transferring the skills I had on guitar to this instrument but I didn't get really serious until after I'd completed a rehabilitation programme to escape heroin and crime, the two things which had been preventing me from discovering my true calling - saxophone player with fun festival band The Don Bradmans (see video link on left and related content on YouTube). This transition from junkie criminal to festival rock star wasn't achieved overnight. Firstly, I had to complete two years' study at Chichester College's Jazz Course under the tutelage of the wonderful Adrian Kendon, double bass player extraordinaire. I spent a wonderful fifteen years playing at festivals in the UK, Italy and Holland, with these guys but all things eventually come to an end. I left the band last year when I travelled to Georgia in Eastern Europe and began doing solo gigs until discovering other musicians and venues in Tbilisi.

During my three year degree at Cardiff University, I also played with the amazing street band "Wonderbrass", founded by my BA course leader Dr. Robert Smith. This was also an oppurtunity to put the sight reading I had taught myself many years previously into practice at every Tuesday evening practice session. I was actually getting reasonably good at this when another change of location came about - moving to Cambridge to study for my Masterts in Criminological Research.

Music programmes in prisons is my major because these types of programme resonate with me due to my history and personal involvement in them (mainly the Irene Taylor Trust's Music in Prisons programme when I was in Highdown Priosn in 1997). I researched these aspects of music at both Cardiff and Cambridge Universities. Cardiff's ATRiuM - the Faculty of Creative and Cultural Industries - sits beside Cardiff's prison so I evaluated a programme which was conducting sessions there, Changing Tunes. And while studying criminology at Cambridge I evaluated the Finding Rhythms music programme's sessions inside HMP Isis in Belmarsh, London (see links below for more information on the amazing work both of these charities do ).

Click on either of these links to check out the Finding Rhythms, Changing Tunes, Irene Taylor Trust Music in Prisons, and Wonderbrass websites: