Interview with Gwilym Simcock and Emma Rawicz: "From the first time we met up, it just felt really easy to play together"

In the intimate landscape of jazz duos, where musical relationships often mature over decades, the story of pianist Gwilym Simcock and saxophonist Emma Rawicz stands out as a refreshing anomaly. Their debut album together, Big Visit (ACT Music), captures a musical partnership almost at its genesis – a rare documentation of two extraordinary talents discovering each other’s musical language in real time.

The jazz world has seen its share of legendary piano-sax partnerships. Branford Marsalis and Joey Calderazzo’s 2011 album Songs of Mirth and Melancholy (Marsalis Music/Universal) had 13 years of music-making behind it, dating back to when Calderazzo replaced the late, great Kenny Kirkland in the Branford Marsalis Quartet in 1998.

Prior to releasing their 2016 live album on Nonesuch, Nearness – six duets actually recorded five years earlier during their 2011 European tour – Brad Mehldau and Joshua Redman had begun their long-running musical partnership in 1993 when Mehldau joined Redman’s acclaimed first quartet, which also featured bassist Christian McBride and drummer Brian Blade. More recently, Jason Rebello and Tim Garland’s 2023 album Life to Life (Whirlwind Recordings) celebrated three decades of musical friendship.

What makes Simcock and Rawicz’s collaboration so remarkable is how quickly they’ve found a profound musical connection – and how beautifully they’ve captured it.

Their paths first meaningfully crossed at Simcock’s 40th birthday celebration concert at London’s Royal Academy of Music back in February 2023. Simcock, an established virtuoso and Professor of Jazz Piano at the Academy, was already a figure of admiration for Rawicz, then a student there.

“Gwilym has been a real inspiration of mine for a long time prior to that project,” Rawicz recalls. “When I was asked to be part of that project by Nick Smart [Head of Jazz at RAM], I was really up for it. I had to get a load of bass clarinet music together and that was a huge challenge. I remember being struck by the incredible attention to detail in the music and also the writing itself blew me away.”

For Simcock, the collaboration with Rawicz arrived at a pivotal moment in his life.

“I’m at that stage of life where I just want to enjoy making music," he explains. "I have a child now, other things come into play, of course, as life goes on. That concept of leaving the house, whether to play a concert, to rehearse or to record an album, all those seconds of your day which are not involved with your domestic life become that much more important – you want that time to be spent doing something that you really feel passionate about and this duo project has been the main thing for the last couple of years.”

The artists represent two generations of exceptional talent. Simcock stands as one of Europe’s most versatile and accomplished pianists, bridging jazz and classical worlds with ease. His performances have taken him across the globe, including five years touring with jazz legend Pat Metheny, co-leading the acclaimed Anglo-American supergroup The Impossible Gentlemen, celebrating a 20-year partnership with Tim Garland’s Lighthouse Trio, plus projects with orchestras, choirs, and big bands.

Rawicz, born in North Devon, has already established herself as one of jazz’s most remarkable young talents. Twice winner of a Parliamentary Jazz Award (Jazz Newcomer of the Year in 2022 and Jazz Instrumentalist of the Year in 2024), she graduated from the RAM in July last year and was awarded the prestigious Musicians’ Company Silver Medal for excellence – unprecedented for a jazz student.

Having independently released her debut album Incantation at just 19, she’s now performed across 15 countries and signed with the ACT Music label, with whom she released her acclaimed follow-up, Chroma, in 2022.

When asked what qualities they heard in each other’s playing that made them believe in this partnership, Simcock doesn’t hesitate: “I think, stylistically, the way Emma plays is perfect for my music. From the first time we met up, it just felt really easy to play, time feel-wise.”

Rawicz’s career taking off in Germany, where Simcock is based in Berlin, allowed them to rehearse before recording. After playing just a few concerts together, they made the bold decision to enter the studio – a surprisingly rapid progression from initial meeting to creating a definitive musical statement. The album title Big Visit reflects what Simcock describes as going in “with maximum commitment, effort, and joy whilst playing a piece of music – having a big visit into the story and journey of each piece.”

Rawicz experienced the two-day recording session as a journey of exploration and creative experimentation.

“I feel like I was still discovering where the parameters of the project were musically while we were in the studio,” she elaborates. “The best thing about the recording session for me was this feeling of play – discovery in the moment was very much part of the process. I felt like it was fine to not know exactly how something would come out.”

“All the things that we actually share in common meant that we could get to a reasonably high level of interaction and trust, even at this early stage after only having done a handful of concerts,” Simcock adds. “That felt really good to me, that I could take a few risks underneath what Emma was doing and feel like that wasn’t a liberty but something that will be embraced, and likewise in the other direction.”

This approach is perhaps best exemplified in their rendition of the beautiful Carl Fischer-penned ballad ‘You’ve Changed’, a tune which holds special significance for Rawicz, as she recalls: “We didn’t rehearse that at all. Right at the end of the session, we were like, right, let’s record this standard. I remember having no idea what Gwilym was going to do, no idea what I was going to do, and that being a really positive thing – because that can be quite scary and I’m certainly a person that likes to overprepare and overpractice.

"That’s quite rare, I think, to have the balance of the risk or the element of the unknown, and it also be super supported and super positive at the same time.

“I’m very interested in ballads because there’s so much space and you have to be yourself. Ballads were the thing that made me confront that thing of, 'OK, I need to say something original, or at the very least try to'. And that’s obviously a very difficult thing to do. All of that was wrapped up within me learning this ballad at the age of 18. It signalled a turning point of me being like, 'OK, I need to say something here, I need to find a way to express myself'. It’s kind of a sentimental thing, really, and also a little bit of a musical thank you to Pete [Churchill, Professor of Jazz Composition at the RAM], because I definitely wouldn’t be where I am if it wasn’t for him.”

Simcock speaks equally enthusiastically about the track: “We both spend so much time writing our own music that it was actually quite easy to approach this standard with a freshness. I feel like it doesn’t really sound like anybody else, I think we did manage to just be ourselves. I do so many different projects – which is what I love about music – but it’s easy to end up being a bit of a chameleon. Doing this project felt like I could get on with being me – just playing how I would normally want to play. And that’s the greatest compliment I can give to this situation.”

The album’s only other cover, a re-interpretation of Stevie Wonder’s ‘Visions’, – a ballad originally on Wonder's landmark 1973 Motown album Innervisions – is a piece that Simcock similarly first performed as a RAM student during a sextet show at the 606 Club. Here, the pianist’s harmonisations in the preludial opening evoke an almost Olivier Messiaen-like harmonic language.

“That tune has always stuck in my head,” Simcock explains. “As time goes on, what becomes really important to me is that, in an almost cinematic way, you’re trying to tell a story. That’s another thing that really attracts me to Emma’s playing – that it feels perfect for the places that I want to go to. I knew that there’d be that kind of wailing, heartfelt quality to the way she would approach it.”

Rounding out the album are four original compositions – two from each artist – which the duo created specifically for each other. Simcock’s multipartite, scene-setting opener, ‘His Great Adventure’, is an ecstatic, Jarrettesque tune which begins with a gorgeous, rhapsodic, free time introduction before subtly morphing into a groove. “It felt like it could be a good start to the album, because it’s quite a welcoming thing,” Simcock explains. “Joy and positivity are two really key words for us in our musical lives, in our musical associations.”

The first of Rawicz’s two contributions, ‘The Shape of a New Sun’, draws inspiration from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Half of a Yellow Sun: “That was a book that left a very long-lasting impression on me, the feeling of hope and that image, the shape of a new sun. It’s optimistic, it implies a new beginning, which I thought was appropriate for a project that was so young. When we play that tune together, I always feel there’s a real sense of positive purpose behind it.”

This literary influence speaks to Rawicz’s broader approach to composition. “I’m a complete bookworm and actually draw a lot of inspiration from the written word,” she notes.

Rawicz’s second piece ‘The Drumbledrone’ connects to her Devon roots through its title’s reference to Devonian dialect – drumbledrone being the Devonian word for a bumblebee. For Rawicz, this dialect carries a charm that runs deeper than mere words – it’s the voice of her childhood, echoing through memories of her grandparents’ farm on Exmoor.

Raised in what felt like a pocket of preserved time, the local dialect was the soundtrack to a way of life that emphasised togetherness, binding not just families but an entire community.

She tells me that the piece conjures images as simple and joyful as a bumblebee buzzing through a summer meadow – playful, natural, unaffected.

Simcock’s ‘Optimum Friction’ meanwhile, detonates an incredible rhythmic charge and showcases his remarkable ability to function as an entire rhythm section at the piano, with the pianist supplying ever-shifting blocks of textural detail.

“I love the idea of trying to be the whole rhythm section and that responsibility you have,” he explains. “It’s a challenge if you’re playing for 10 minutes and you want to try and get every single note in the grid. That idea of really doubling down and trying to have this kind of bulletproof feel for the music is a constant that I’m aspiring to.”

For this piece, he found inspiration in an unexpected place: “I had quite a lot of listens to that great Wayne and Herbie album, 1 + 1, which I’ve had in my collection for about 25 years but was never one that I instantly gravitated to. I thought, given that we were approaching this project, it would be nice to have a listen to that. Talking about the time feel, when Herbie plays the piano the time just rolls out of him through the instrument. And that’s something that I’ve always tried to aspire to as well.

"You can’t have any filter in the way. It’s just got to come out of you, and you’ve hopefully done the homework that you get to that point where it does come out in a high-quality enough way. Trying to channel a bit of Herbie in that respect was definitely a part of the idea of that piece.”

Despite the newness of their partnership, both artists see vast potential for growth moving forward.

“I feel it’s got so much further to go,” Simcock enthuses. “I like the idea of lifting it out and plugging it into other situations. We’ve both written many hours of big band music, so that’d be a fun thing to do. But I love the idea of trying to do this with a string orchestra or chamber orchestra. I think that would really suit our sensibilities, both from our musical histories, but also just what we like to listen to.”

The duo recorded at least another half hour of music beyond what appears on Big Visit, suggesting that a second volume may be forthcoming.

The title track itself, Simcock reveals, is among the compositions that didn’t make the final cut this time.

What makes the Simcock-Rawicz partnership so compelling is not just their individual virtuosity, but how quickly they’ve developed a shared musical language and synergy. Their music balances technical brilliance with emotional depth, compositional sophistication with improvisational freedom. But perhaps most importantly, it radiates the joy and positivity both artists cite as central to their musical worldview.

As Simcock notes, “All these little signs led to just feeling like it’s the right thing and it’s a special thing. I think we both feel like that, and we’re still right at the beginning of that journey.”

With Big Visit, Simcock and Rawicz have achieved something rare: capturing the electricity of a new musical relationship in its first flowering. It stands not just as a document of two exceptional musicians finding common ground, but as a promise of even greater things to come from this inspired pairing.

The album’s true magic lies in how it manages to sound both fresh and fully formed – the work of two artists who have found in each other the perfect musical counterpart, even as they continue to discover new dimensions of their shared language. It’s a big visit indeed, a rich and inviting musical journey that listeners will wish to take again and again.

This feature originally appeared in the April 2025 issue of Jazzwise – Subscribe to Jazzwise today