The Musical Journey

I started playing saxophone as a teenager.

The instrument connected me immediately to my father, but I never thought of it as continuing a family tradition. I wanted to find out whether I could make my own living with it.

Very quickly, the people I’d grown up hearing about stopped being names on record sleeves — they became real.

At fifteen, I went with my family to see Frank Sinatra at the Royal Albert Hall. Afterwards, my father suggested we go backstage and say hello.

So we did.

I met Frank Sinatra.

Even now, it sounds faintly ridiculous when I say it.

A few years later I was eighteen years old and playing saxophone with Jeff Beck. Working, playing and getting to know Jeff was incredible. As an artist and an encouraging and generous friend throughout my life, he was truly one of a kind — I miss him terribly.

Aged 19, I was playing saxophone in Jerry Lee Lewis’s band.

That sentence probably tells the story better than anything I could add to it.

I was young enough not to understand quite how extraordinary some of these experiences were. I was concentrating on the music: listening, watching, learning how great performers occupied a stage and discovering that the world behind famous records was made up of real people doing a job.

That education couldn’t have happened in a classroom.

In 1993, I wrote a letter to Van Morrison.

There was no strategy behind it. I was a young saxophone player and wanted the opportunity to play with someone whose music mattered enormously to me.

I sent the letter.

And, extraordinarily, something happened.

That first opportunity became a musical relationship spanning years of performances and recordings. I found myself working alongside musicians I had previously known from records, learning repertoire from inside the band and discovering what happens to music when it is played night after night rather than preserved on an album.

A letter had opened a door.

I’ve never forgotten that.

Years later, another letter changed things again.

This time I wrote to Sally Greene.

Following the acquisition and refurbishment of Ronnie Scott’s, I became Artistic Director of a club whose name had been part of my family’s life long before I ever imagined working there.

Suddenly I wasn’t only thinking like a musician.

I was thinking about artists, audiences, programming, marketing, ticket sales, budgets and what made somebody leave home and buy a ticket.

It changed the direction of my career.

I still played.

But I had discovered that I was fascinated by what happened on the other side of the stage.

There was another part of my father’s life that eventually found its way into mine.

Broadcasting.

At BBC Radio 2 I began writing and presenting programmes about music — eventually scripting and presenting more than 250 hours for the network.

Later came Jazz FM, where I joined the station at its 2008 relaunch and where I still present The Leo Green Show every Sunday evening.

I discovered that broadcasting used many of the same instincts as playing.

Listen.Know when to come in.Know when to leave space.And have something worth saying when it’s your turn.

By then I knew I wanted to create things rather than simply be hired to work on them.

I co-founded Full Circle Live in 2009.

In 2011, I created BluesFest London.

That same year, Live Nation acquired Full Circle Live and I became Director of Live Events.

BluesFest grew from London clubs into major venues, then the Royal Albert Hall and ultimately The O2. My work at Live Nation expanded far beyond the festival into touring productions and large-scale outdoor concerts.

I spent eleven years there.

Those years taught me something fundamental: a great live idea has to work twice — once creatively and once commercially.

If either side fails, it isn’t sustainable.

Leaving Live Nation after eleven years was another turning point.

For the first time in a long time, there wasn’t a large company around me determining what happened next.

That was liberating.

I began thinking about everything I’d learned from being a musician, broadcaster, promoter and business operator — and whether those experiences could be combined to create entertainment that I actually owned.

Not another job.Something that could grow.