TOM Bancroft gets about. He could be seen, not so long ago, careering about the stage of the Sage at Gateshead, his burly frame clad in an Elvis suit, much to the delight of the young audiences of his Kidsamonium enterprise. More recently, at Edinburgh's Lot jazz venue, he was beating the living daylights out of his drum kit alongside twin brother Phil on sax and Kevin MacKenzie on guitar, in their much-fêted Trio AAB configuration.
The past week has seen him in Tobermory with pianist Dave Milligan, writing and playing tunes for the Mull metropolis's waterfront shops.
Balamory had better look to its laurels. The commission, from Tobermory's An Tobar arts centre, culminates today with recitals in said shops, a concert at An Tobar, and should eventually result in an album.
With a Trio AAB live album plus another of his Creative Scotland award-winning big band, Orchestro Interrupto, also in production, not to mention his wife Gina Rae's album with guitarist Sandy Wright due out shortly, Bancroft, grand animateur of the Scottish jazz scene, is busy - and that's before we even get anywhere near the education work which he rates as vital.
Hence Kidsamonium, which arose from his interest in encouraging children - our potential jazz tyros - to improvise musically.
The Sage offered a commission and the result was a manic band of top-rate jazzers with a propensity for flying guitarists, trombone-playing mystic chickens and inciting mass kazoo madness.
Ros Rigby, The Sage's programmer, described the show as "one of the most successful music events for children I have ever seen".
Bancroft is yet to bring the organised anarchy that is Kidsamonium north of the Border, though it is due for an airing in Easterhouse, Glasgow, on 30 June and he hopes to run it in the Assembly Rooms during the Fringe (if someone can meet the kazoo bill). "If you take kids to grown-up improvisation gigs, things go on too long for them," says 40-year-old Bancroft, "but present it with costumes and masses of interaction, they find it very joyful and they understand how the musicians are doing stuff in the moment, and they think, 'Wow!
That's amazing.'"
His time is further consumed by the ABC Creative Music programme (see applebananacarrot.com) which he and brother Phil devised and which is now used by more than 600 schools in Scotland.
Sadly, what he hasn't been doing of late is running his Caber Music label. Launched in 1998 with Lottery funding, Caber became a cornerstone of the burgeoning Scottish jazz scene, a cornucopia of classy recordings by the likes of Nikki King, Colin Steele, Brian Kellock, Dave Milligan and, of course, Bancroft's own outfits such as Trio AAB. However, despite these releases frequently attracting awards and critical plaudits, and after a series of short-term funding bale-outs from the Scottish Arts Council (SAC), the label finally expired in 2005.
"We got locked into a cycle of chasing funding and not having any resources," says Bancroft, who now contents himself with his "family" label and music education business, Interrupto Music (www.interrupto.com).
Nevertheless, the demise of Caber clearly irks: "It was a very difficult time. I'm very proud of what we achieved, but I was also very angry that it was allowed to wither."
Part of the problem, he believes, was the lack of any overall strategy through which the SAC could help the label - and jazz enterprises in general - more effectively.
The Scottish Jazz Federation, recently established with arts council help, could have the potential to bring about such a strategy, he suggests. "Jazz needs a strategy in Scotland. There's a good audience here, and a lot of very talented musicians - we've got something that can stand up alongside other European countries.
We should be exporting jazz across the world. But for that to happen, we need a strategy..
. and something like Caber is totally necessary.
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