Tom Bancroft is a drummer, composer, bandleader and educator who has been working professionally in music for over 30 years. You can explore his previous projects in the Archive section of this website.
BIO:
Tom Bancroft is a drummer, composer, bandleader and educator. He qualified as a doctor at Cambridge University Tom now makes a living from music and music education. He has drummed in a wide range fo music projects from funk, drum n bass through contemporary and New Orleans jazz, celtic traditional music, and free improv. He has played with musicians ranging from Sun Ra & Martyn Bennett to Geri Allen and Bill Wells and student and professional musicians in small and large ensembles, as well as composing music for dance, theatre, multi-media and film.
Since 2014 Tom has been a key member of the 80 piece Grit Orchestra that features many leading Scottish jazz, folk, and classical musicians, and is the only member who has played every concert with conductor, arranger, leader Greg Lawson. Tom is a key member of two musical collectives. He is a core member of the Playtime Collective -with Martin Kershaw, Graeme Stephen, and Mario Caribé – that performed every fortnight in Edinburgh for 6 years until it was forced online by COVID in 2020 and the returned to its live home in central Edinburgh and now is increasingly recognised as one of the most innovative creative jazz projects in the UK.
Tom is also a founder member of the Pathhead Music Collective , a group of folk, jazz, and electronic musicians based in the village where he lives in Midlothian, Scotland, where he curates (with Martin Green from LAU) the PIE series of free improvised/experimental concerts in a village hall.
He leads other irregular creative projects like Trio Red – with Tom Cawley and Per Zanussi, big band Orchestro Interrupto, In Common – a project finding common ground between Indian Classical and Scottish Jazz musicians, and jazz and traditional singers, African Groove Machine featuring Adie Baako Elias and Thomas Annang from Ghana, and Motian & Me a project featuring Tom and his twin brother Phil and some of the best young Scottish Jazz musicians playing half Tom’s music and half the music of his hero Paul Motian. Tom also plays drums in the Phil Bancroft Standards Trio and Fraser Fifield’s Secret Path trio.
After running Scottish Jazz record company Caber Music for 7 years between 1998 and 2005 and releasing over 40 albums of Scottish jazz, he now runs the music education company ABC Creative Music with his twin brother Phil.
MUSIC EDUCATION:
Tom is largely a self taught musician but has studied drums with Joe Morello, Andrew Cyrille, Billy Hart, & Joey Baron in the US, Okoe Ardyfio in Ghana, Suresh Vaidyanathan in India, and Asaf Sirkis in London. He also studied composition and arranging at McGill University, Montreal for a year. He has taught drums privately and at a wide range of jazz workshops and masterclasses and music and creativity in a wide range of all types of education establishments from primary schools in Morocco to Conservatoires & Universities in Glasgow, Birmingham, and Rochester. Tom co-led the National Youth Jazz Orchestra of Scotland with Laura MacDonald for 2 years.
Tom has been the drum tutor at Edinburgh Napier University since 2022 and is due to complete a PhD there in March 2025.
Tom has a particular interest in the interface between jazz and traditional music – he has played extensively with traditional musicians in Scotland. This has also led him to become an innovator on the traditional Irish/ Scottish drum the bodhran – he has also studied, taught, and performed with traditional musicians from Burkina Faso, Ghana, India, Vietnam, and Taiwan including the FAMLAB Seaphony Orchestra project in Vietnam, and working with the TenDrum group from Taiwan.
Along with his brother Phil he developed the Apple Banana Carrot Method for teaching improvisation whilst they were running the Grampian Jazz School in the 1990s. This was so successful they started the music education company ABC Creative Music in 2001 which develops creative music resources for mainstream schools, nurseries, and special needs centres and has been used by over 10,000 teachers and parents across the world. Tom & Phil have since the start of 2024 been publishing and sharing their theories on music education and the psychology of creativity and in January 2025 hosted a conference on Creativity in Music Education in Glasgow.
Within ABC, Tom leads the company’s financial and marketing management, has wide experience in classroom teaching, resource design and development, project management, and leading large-scale performance projects, bringing together children from several schools to perform together in an end-of-project spectaculars (see here and here)
He has developed a passion for coding to produce interactive on-screen games and apps allowing children to create their own music as part of educational programmes – becoming skilled in coding in Flash/Actionscript 3 and then HTML5/Javascript.
Tom won the BBC Jazz Award for Innovation in 2007 and the Creative Scotland Award in 2004.
PLAYED WITH LIST:
List of people Tom has played with includes:
Sun Ra, Martyn Bennett, Grit Orchestra, Bill Wells, Geri Allen, Bobby Wellins, Tommy Smith, Satoko Fuji, and a host of other leading British & European folk and jazz musicians, Karen Mathieson, Donald Shaw, Zapp 4 String Quartet, Laura Jurd, Furio Di Castri, Ernst Reijseger, Martin Taylor, Marilyn Crispell, Raymond MacDonald, Shooglenifty, Julian & Steve Argüelles, Iain Ballamy, Oliver Lake, Hamlet Bluiett, Sam Newsome, Billy Jenkins, Branford Marsalis, Thi Rho Cham (Vietnam) Sheila Jordan, Fionna Duncan, Martin Green, George Colligan, Nguyên Dúc Minh & Quyền Thiện Đắc with Seaphony Orchestra (Vietnam), Mai Khoi (Vietnam), David Berkman, Reid Anderson, Nguyen Lê, and many more…..