Buster Birch
Buster Birch has a music degree from Goldsmiths College, London and a post-graduate diploma in jazz performance from The Guildhall School of Music & Drama. He also spent a year in New York, where he took private lessons with several great jazz musicians. He has now been a professional musician for over 30 years. From Ronnie Scott's to the Albert Hall, he has performed in virtually every jazz club and concert hall in London, toured in more than 30 countries and recorded nearly 40 albums. He is a member of ARQ - winners of the Parliamentary Jazz Award for "UK Best Jazz Ensemble" and the British Jazz Award public vote for "Best Small Group". His speciality is jazz, but as a freelance musician he has worked in a very wide range of musical settings, including The Royal Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra, West End shows, cruise ships, operas, chamber orchestras, big bands and many different jazz and Latin groups, performing at dozens of festivals all over the UK, Europe and the USA. He has his own critically acclaimed show, "Buster plays Buster" featuring his jazz quartet playing live and in sync to screenings of classic Buster Keaton movies, for which he scored over 4hrs of music. In 2023 Buster plays Buster won the Audience Award at The Chichester International Film Festival, a major UK film festival featuring 110 screenings over 22 days. For many years, Buster has performed and co-promoted several local charity concerts per year, raising a combined total of over £35,000 for good causes.
Buster has also been a dedicated teacher for over 30 years, working as a peripatetic teacher in local schools and colleges. He was also a professorial member of the jazz faculty at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music for 7 years, where he taught improvisation, musicianship, jazz repertoire and jazz history classes to undergraduate and post-graduate students, and he has lectured at The Royal Academy of Music, The Guildhall School of Music & Drama and Middlesex University.
Since 2006, he has been a director of the UK’s largest and longest-running jazz summer school for adult learners (www.theoriginalukjazzsummerschool.com), winner of the UK Parliamentary award for Jazz Education.
In 2017, he co-founded BYMT Jazz School (www.bymt.co.uk), where he teaches after-school jazz improvisation classes for junior and secondary school children at Bromley Music Hub. BYMT Jazz School received the prestigious Will Michael Diploma Award for Jazz Education, a national award recognising “outstanding commitment to jazz education” and “acknowledging the work of those field practitioners who are actually delivering jazz education and in many cases helping to combat the widespread jazz phobia among classroom music teachers and instrumental tutors.”
Buster has organised and taught hundreds of jazz workshops in village halls and local schools and is often invited to teach as a guest tutor at various jazz workshops up and down the country. His focus is on studying the original recordings, rather than generic real book lead sheets, and he always supplies transcriptions, full band parts and analysis of the original soloists in his lessons, helping the students to gain a deeper understanding of the music and develop a solid strategy for their own improvising.
Buster has published 27 books covering jazz improvisation techniques and musicianship skills, several of which have been Amazon best sellers.
During lockdown, like most people, he had to switch to online teaching but found he was excited by the potential reach and possibilities the new format offered, combining live Zoom sessions with pre-recorded supplementary lessons and easily downloadable resources. After lockdown, he continued to develop the format as he improved his website-building skills and amassed a library of learning resources and recordings of lessons from his regular live Zoom classes.
In October 2024 he launched www.learn2playjazz.com, a complete resource for anyone, on any instrument, wishing to learn how to improvise, study jazz and develop their core musicianship skills. Now featuring almost 100hrs of video lessons, courses, study modules and musicianship training, plus supplementary resources including transcriptions, full band parts and high-quality play-along tracks, through its endorsement deal with the brilliant new Quartet apps. Learn 2 Play Jazz has been shortlisted for the 2026 national Music Education Awards in the "Outstanding Music Education Resource" category, alongside industry leaders.