Hi, I’m Jon, a 50-something long time bass player with no other musical experience until quite recently… I’ve played in a few bands over the years, from punk stuff in the late 70s and early 80s, through covers bands, and latterly was the bass player for The Storyville Mob in North Wales where I moved a few years ago.

I inherited my father’s baby grand piano in late 2016. Not being able to play it, initially I tried to sell it, but found there is a very limited market for large brown musical furniture. I had just moved into a house with an odd shaped living room, with a large alcove so that’s where the piano went. After a couple of months, I thought I’d better learn to play it, because it’s there, and in memory of my Dad kind of thing, so I enrolled for a weekly half hour piano lesson.

Which led to a totally unexpected byproduct….

I thought I was learning to play the piano. But what I was actually learning was chord structure.

As a bass player, with no musical training, I’d been used to playing just root notes with perhaps a bit of a fill. You just look up the tabs off the tinterweb and off you go – sort of painting by numbers. I never gave theory a moment’s thought. But now this totally blew my mind – what, you can play other notes that sound good with the same note on another instrument?? Why did I not know that till now??

I’d got some old GarageBand tracks I’d done on the computer – pretty basic stuff – just some drum patterns and bits and bobs that I could use to give a bass line a context (one of the drawbacks of bass I find is that it’s not great playing on your own at home). I started to play around more with these, with my new found musical knowledge and a bit of basic keyboard playing ability. I bought a USB keyboard and an interface and started to experiment. Some of those old tracks started to morph and grow, and alongside I found I was creating new tracks, often starting life as an exercise I’d been given by my piano teacher (“e.g. pick a chord and then find the nearest inversion of another chord”).

Around the beginning of 2019, it became clear that the band I was in was coming to a natural end, so I found even more reason to push ahead with the new songs. I started to write some lyrics, and started to enlist the help of other former band members, and other musician friends, to record things I couldn’t do well myself, like vocals and guitar.

Lyrical themes started to develop, mainly around the increasingly troubled world we live in, where views are polarising, and there is an air of danger. It needed a name… I settled on the word Polyglot, which means someone who speaks several languages. I like the word because it works as a metaphor for inclusion and togetherness, things which we seem sadly to be drifting further away from if anything. In my view, we are just out of the caves in evolutionary terms, and we are just not programmed to trust or accept people who are different to us yet. Maybe one day, but not in our lifetimes I fear.

The debut EP, Factions, was released on 30 Sept 2019, and the album, Even Animals Learn By Experience, is released on 20th February 2020.