Tom Bancroft is an improvising drummer, composer, educator and creativity researcher based in Pathhead, Scotland.
Tom has had a diverse 40 year+ career engaged with music creativity .
This is partly as a musician – from being: a top level jazz drummer and composer for 40 years, and an innovator on a traditional instrument (the bodhran). Tom has played with a huge range of classical, jazz, and traditional musicians from a wide range of European and North American countries -from Sun Ra to Geri Allen to Martyn Bennett – as well as rich music collaboration experiences in Ghana, Vietnam, Taiwan, and India.
As a collaborative creator Tom has: either produced, mixed or mastered over 50 music releases; composed for film, dance and theatre; and worked in two long term artistic collectives – the Pathhead Music Collective and the Playtime Collective.
As an educator Tom is: vastly experienced in all types of classroom; an expert on teaching drums, improvisation, composition and creativity; and with teaching a wide range of ensembles. He is currently the Drum Tutor at Edinburgh Napier University and is the most often invited mentor/tutor at the prestigious Distil programme for developing creativity skills and mindset in elite Scottish professional traditional musicians over the last 25 years.
Tom has also been involved in the industry as an organiser, collaborator, and entrepreneur – founding and releasing 40+ albums with award-winning Scottish Jazz record label (Caber Music) before his life fell apart, and then founding and running the pioneering creative music education company ABC Creative Music since 2001 with his twin brother Phil. This gave Tom an intense 25 year exposure to the realities of implementing creativity-centred education in thousands of schools in a wide range of settings across Scotland and experiencing the multiple layers of barriers to implementation in the real world. Whilst co-leading this company and becoming a skilled coder of creative music interactives in HTML2/Javascript/React Tom has developed, in partnership with his brother, a Theoretical Framework for Creativity in Music and Music Education, for which they are now is demand as consultants, trainers, and mentors.
This career experience across the breadth of music creativity and creative practice has led to Tom completing a PhD on Improvisation, Creativity and Pedagogy at Edinburgh Napier University – he graduates in July 2026. This is a culmination of a 25 year programme of theoretically-driven collaborative action research with Phil at ABC, and practice-based research around his own teaching, playing and creating which has produced a radical set of theoretical ideas representing a paradigm shift in the academic definition of pan-domain creativity, and innovative and detailed research on the role of emotion, metaphor and embodied language in music improvisation and creativity.
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Detailed Bio here