Dave O'Brien has spent twenty-five years in and around jazz — both the classical repertoire and the contemporary end of it — with a working musician's appetite for everything alongside: European classical music, Latin American song, funk, rock, and the folkloric traditions of Cuba and South India. He plays piano, double bass, bass guitar and keyboards professionally, sings, and turns his hand to a little percussion.
He read music at the University of Oxford and took a Bachelor of Music in jazz performance at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama; before either, he spent a decade studying double bass and piano in the junior department of the Royal College of Music. In 2006 he won the Peter Whittingham Award for a project in avant-garde jazz — earlier recipients include Soweto Kinch, Gwilym Simcock and Errollyn Wallen — and in 2008 he became a member of London’s F-IRE Collective.
Rhythm has been the long study: advanced M-Base concepts with Barak Schmool and Stephan Payen, Afro-Cuban batá and rumba including three weeks in Havana and Matanzas, and Carnatic rhythmic systems with B.C. Manjunath and Ned McGowan — first on Utrecht’s International Rhythm Course, then in Bangalore playing alongside his teachers.
On stage he led the award-winning Porpoise Corpus, toured Europe with the Sephardic singer Mor Karbasi, and played King’s Place and BBC Radio 3’s In Tune with the Man Overboard Quintet, including work with the Aurora Orchestra at LSO St Luke’s. He was music director, pianist and on-stage band leader for the National Theatre’s A Taste of Honey across a ten-week UK tour and three months in the West End. Since 2012 he has been part of Tongue Fu, the improvised-music poetry show, at the Roundhouse, the Edinburgh Fringe, Cheltenham and Glastonbury.
He writes for his own groups and well past them — choir, solo voice, chamber ensemble, orchestra and big band — including a symphonic poem on the old jazz song Travlin’ All Alone for the Aurora Orchestra with the Man Overboard Quintet, and a recent commission for the Latin Big Band at Trinity Laban.
He has taught since 2003: privately, at the North London Music Academy, at the Charterhouse and Falmouth summer schools, and with the 51st-State Band at the World Heartbeat Music Academy. Since 2023 he has taught jazz, contemporary and classical piano at Ecolint in Geneva, and through 2025 and 2026 has been deputising at the AMR — jazz repertoire classes, workshops and big band rehearsals. In 2026 his new quartet made its debut at the AMR and at Jazz in Bess, Lugano.
