Pianist Gwilym Simcock is to deliver a keynote address at next month’s Leeds international jazz education conference. The pianist whose most recent album released was January’s duo album Reverie at Schloss Elmau will also perform with his quintet.

The Leeds event, held at Leeds College of Music, an early pioneer of jazz education in England, is an annual gathering of educators from all over the world now in its twenty-first year focuses in the jargon “on practice-based jazz research, education, performance and composition”. It's part of the new International Festival for Artistic Innovation.

Papers this year concentrate on what the organisers are calling the “seductive menace of jazz recordings”, and there's a improvisation contra composition presentation by Steve Tromans of Middlesex University, and a workshop by saxophonist Tori Freestone, as well as a consideration of “teaching music as a foreign language” among the topics and events. The conference takes place on 11 and 12 March. Gwilym Simcock, above