Tom Bancroft is a drummer, composer, bandleader and educator. He qualified as a doctor at Cambridge University Tom now makes a living from music and music education. He has drummed in a wide range fo music projects from funk, drum n bass through contemporary and New Orleans jazz, celtic traditional music, and free improv. He has played with musicians ranging from Sun Ra & Martyn Bennett to Geri Allen and Bill Wells and student and professional musicians in small and large ensembles, as well as composing music for dance, theatre, multi-media and film.
Since 2014 Tom has been a key member of the 80 piece Grit Orchestra that features many leading Scottish jazz, folk, and classical musicians, and is the only member who has played every concert with conductor, arranger, leader Greg Lawson. Tom is a key member of two musical collectives. He is a core member of the Playtime Collective -with Martin Kershaw, Graeme Stephen, and Mario Caribé – that performed every fortnight in Edinburgh for 6 years until it was forced online by COVID in 2020 and the returned to its live home in central Edinburgh and now is increasingly recognised as one of the most innovative creative jazz projects in the UK.
Tom is also a founder member of the Pathhead Music Collective , a group of folk, jazz, and electronic musicians based in the village where he lives in Midlothian, Scotland, where he curates (with Martin Green from LAU) the PIE series of free improvised/experimental concerts in a village hall.
He leads other irregular creative projects like Trio Red – with Tom Cawley and Per Zanussi, big band Orchestro Interrupto, In Common – a project finding common ground between Indian Classical and Scottish Jazz musicians, and jazz and traditional singers, African Groove Machine featuring Adie Baako Elias and Thomas Annang from Ghana, and Motian & Me a project featuring Tom and his twin brother Phil and some of the best young Scottish Jazz musicians playing half Tom’s music and half the music of his hero Paul Motian. Tom also plays drums in the Phil Bancroft Standards Trio and Fraser Fifield’s Secret Path trio.
After running Scottish Jazz record company Caber Music for 7 years between 1998 and 2005 and releasing over 40 albums of Scottish jazz, he now runs the music education company ABC Creative Music with his twin brother Phil.
