A band for the concert hall but also for the mosh pit: that's how Chris Lyons describes his trio. As the 20-year-old pianist from Dalkeith prepares for his opening-night concert at the Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival, he wonders about the possibility of a spot at another event in future, T in the Park.
"Why not?" he says. "If you're going to play music, you owe it to yourself to let as many people as possible hear it, and serious music doesn't have to be inaccessible. I'd love to play to an audience that big and see how they responded to us."
For the time being, Lyons is confined to the more intimate surroundings of the Lot, down the bill from the festival's main attractions this weekend, which include the first collaboration between saxophonists Courtney Pine and Tommy Smith, and regulars Georgie Fame and Chris Barber.
A young man who thinks deeply about music and the arts in general - he won a Pushkin prize for poetry while still at school and is working on a novel - he files away the notion that his trio might be a suitable project for a marketing student. His other idea for making a splash is to include an essay with his next CD on the state of jazz, although this, he concedes, might alienate people in a relatively small audience rather than help him to break out into the world at large.
"I really feel that the smoking ban in pubs should do away once and for all with the image of jazz as being music for the lounge bar," he says. "People seem to have this preconceived notion that jazz consists of a certain sound that doesn't change or develop during a piece of music. And to some extent, they may have a point. The music I want to make has dynamic shifts. I want it to be exciting. The biggest thrill I get is when people come up to us after a gig and say, I normally hate jazz but I like you guys.'"
A former pupil at the City of Edinburgh Music School, Lyons has an enormous frame of reference as well as the prodigious keyboard technique of the world's youngest student to pass the classical piano diploma. He was winning national classical composition competitions at the age of seven and had a composition performed at an Edinburgh Contemporary Arts Trust concert at the age of 10. His conversation can go off into the intricacies of European musical history or the brilliance of Oscar Peterson, Art Tatum and Keith Jarrett. Equally, he'll enthuse about what Nirvana brought to the rock scene.
It's a rock band from a previous age, as well as recent jazz groups including the popular Swedes EST, that Lyons's trio echo for me at times on their debut album, The Ill-Tempered Klavier, and in concert. When I mention the name Gentle Giant, half expecting either a slap round the ear or a profession of bewilderment, Lyons breaks into a huge grin.
"That's an enormous compliment," he says. "Just to be mentioned in the same sentence as these guys is a real thrill because I know they were dismissed as the worst example of prog rock but actually there are none of prog's excesses in their music. They didn't go in for long solos or 20-minute compositions. They created really interesting, angular melodies and drew on references from all over the place and yet their music can really get into your brain and stay there. They also really rocked."
It's the dynamics of Gentle Giant combined with the improvising tradition going back centuries that Lyons is after with his trio. For him, the notion that jazz and classical music come from different traditions is wrong. After all, he says, it was normal practice for Liszt to improvise on operatic arias - the pop songs of his day - in concerts; and from where would composers have derived their ideas down the years if not from improvising?
"People seem to think that I'm being destructive towards the conventions of jazz but, in fact, I'm a real reactionary, a conservative," he says. "I'm a huge fan of Oscar Peterson and Art Tatum but it's just that my methods are fairly radical. I'm trying to find a way of making the improvised elements and the composed elements fit seamlessly while keeping the rhythms as exciting to listen to as they are challenging to play."
The Chris Lyons Trio play the Lot, Edinburgh, tonight. The Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival runs from tonight to August 5.
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