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SINGAPORE: One of Singapore's living jazz legends, Jeremy Monteiro has spent more than half of his life in the music business.
But the 49-year-old pianist is not about to sit back and rest just yet as he’s about to set up a music school to groom future jazz talents in Singapore.
His latest project is a collaboration with a group of Singapore classical musicians, the Tang Quartet for the Singapore Arts Festival 2009.
He said: "Where playing is concerned, I've never stopped except once in the eighties I worked too hard when I was doing jingles and playing jazz at night that I collapsed from exhaustion and was in hospital for a few days and had to take a few weeks off because I just got too burnt out from working too hard.
“And then I've had tendonitis problems, I've got surgery twice on my elbow and wrist and also a bad tendonitis case about two years ago when I had to stop playing for two months. That's the only time I've stopped."
So what does the pianist do in his free time?
“I recently discovered the joys of cycling. I used to be an avid cyclist in my teens until my early twenties. I used to ride across Singapore sometimes from Jurong to Seletar Hills. And I left it in my early twenties and about three or four months ago, I started cycling again.”
Jeremy said before that there are only two kinds of music – good and bad music. But this perception of his has changed.
He added: "I don't believe that there's only good music and bad music anymore. I've reached a stage where there's just music I understand and music I don't understand.
“I do listen to some music by bands like Coldplay and actually a little bit of Beyonce. Not a big Kylie Minogue or Britney Spears fan though.
“Right now because I listen to so much music when I'm practising that when I get in my car, I hardly listen to music. I switch it off so I can have silence and I think silence is also a very important part for musicians because silence is the wellspring of creativity.”
Jeremy Monteiro has been conferred academic titles by the London College of Music and Singapore's LaSalle College of the Arts.
But that has not stopped him from thinking about grooming the next generation of jazz musicians in Singapore.
He said: "I've just registered the Monteiro Music School and basically to being certified by the London College of Music and to be a teaching and examinations centre.
“You can start from zero and learn jazz. You don't even have to learn classical music if you don't want to and then go all the way to grade 8 and do your diploma levels. My reason for it is because there's not enough feeder entities to feed good potential jazz musicians so I want to go to where the lack of training is. No one is addressing this. So I want to help these students who will then feed into SOTA, LaSalle and other tertiary institutions that have jazz programmes."
Jeremy said that he is only going to be 49 years old but people think he’s in his mid-50s because he’s been in the music business for a long time.
“I first started out as a professional musician and as a producer in 1977. But then one starts to think more and more about legacy and what have you done to make a difference in the place you call home, and so I think this would be it," he said. - CNA/vm
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