“I’m in the business of moving people,” says Richard Adams, before adding, after a brief pause, “emotionally, you know.” Though, as one of New Zealand’s most gifted jazz musicians, Richard is certainly in the business of getting people to move to his groove, too.
This most creative of multi-disciplined Kiwis is probably most well-known as the violinist and vocalist and driving force behind iconic jazz ensemble The Nairobi Trio, but he is an accomplished, internationally exhibited abstract artist who began his career first as an actor, then as a scenic artist and art director in the burgeoning New Zealand film and television industry, and has also published a book of poems.
“It’s not an easy job being an artist and musician and managing your own career,” he muses. “Early on, I thought I’d be a Renaissance artist—if you roll back the camera a few hundred years, they did everything! Nowadays, you almost have to be multi-disciplined. Joni Mitchell for example, she’s a fantastic painter. I met her once, when she was touring down here. She said that she liked my violin playing, that you don’t often see them in the jazz and blues scene. We had afternoon tea at The Regent, and she said to look her up if ever I was in the US. Never made it over there though. I had a teenage daughter at the time, among other commitments.”
Richard’s daughter, now in her 40s, has carved out a successful acting career across the ditch, while his teenage son has inherited the musical genes, as Richard did from his classically trained violinist mum (she gained a scholarship for the UK’s Royal College of Music). I ask Richard, who was born in the UK to Kiwi parents, if music was just always part of his childhood, or if he remembers the moment that he became aware of his mother’s art.
“I do remember, actually,” he says. “She used to have a chamber music group, and she would take me to rehearsals. I would sit under the grand piano and watch them play. It was then I remember thinking that the violin was for me, and it was obviously a given that my mother would teach me.”
Moving back to Wellington from the UK was, back in the early ‘70s, “quite the anti-climax” for the then 14-year-old. Within a couple of years, he was playing in the Wellington Symphonia but would fail his audition for the National Orchestra due to his poor sight-reading having learnt to play by ear. This inadvertently turned him on to rock and jazz, laying the foundations for his idiosyncratic style.
“The violin is a tricky instrument,” says the musician. “Vocals aside, it’s the lead sound in an orchestra—a melody, rather than a chordal instrument. And it’s emotional, like a voice. I used to listen to the guitars of Uriah Heep and wonder how I could replicate that on a violin. I had the dexterity thanks to my classical background—and then discovered the wah-wah pedal which made it far more exciting!”
Richard says that Stéphane Grappelli’s tour of New Zealand around that time had a massive influence on him, too. I ask what his mother thought about his reinterpretation of her beloved instrument.
“She knew I had something, because she said that I always used to make the fiddle sing, but she always hoped that I would join the orchestra. Though she thought it was fantastic, she wondered if there was a future in it. Fortunately, she lived long enough to just see us start out, which was great.”
In true Renaissance style, Richard had plenty of irons in the fire. 1979—the same year he published his first book of poems and etchings, Translations—saw the release of Artman, a surrealist film that he co-scripted, co-directed and starred in with the film maker and great friend George Rose, and which was shown at the ninth International Wellington Film Festival. For most of the 1980s, he continued to act before serving as head scenic artist for the New Zealand Film Industry, working on the likes of Heart of the Stag, Came a Hot Friday, Sylvia, in which his then 12-year-old daughter played the lead child role, and Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence starring David Bowie (outside of filming, Richard even had a chance to jam and play soccer with Bowie, as well as Ryuichi Sakamoto).
It was such an exciting time, with the NZ film industry really just starting up.
Richard first began exhibiting his paintings in Wellington in 1982 and has since been shown in galleries around the globe, gracing cities such as Tokyo, Sydney, London, New York, and Dubai. Richard Wolfe from Art NZ describes the painter’s work as hovering between the “natural” and “non-representational” forms of abstract art.
But it is music that remains Richard’s first love, co-founding The Nairobi Trio in 1989 and, pandemics aside, touring New Zealand, Asia, Europe, and Australia pretty much every year since.
“The incredible thing about music, like live acting, is that it happens, it takes place, it’s instant, and the audience responds,” he says. “Painting is a far more individual kind of creative process, so different from performing.”
Richard says that he still gets butterflies before taking to the stage, and enjoys feeding off the audience’s energy and “feeling what they feel”. The best music he ever plays he says that he almost doesn’t have to play: “It’s as if the violin just plays itself, the instrument and I become one.” Looking back over his three-decade-plus career, it has, muses the musician, been a “remarkable journey”, “constantly in demand” and playing alongside some of his heroes such as Stéphane Grappelli, John Scofield and James Morrison. Though he does add, somewhat wistfully, that there’s been some artistic flak for playing gigs for the corporates over the years.
But even those Renaissance artists had to pay the bills, I say, hired hands for the Catholic Church who were the largest corporation of the day.
“Exactly, crossing the board to make ends meet,” says Richard. “One has to make sacrifices in order to do the things that one loves—as 10cc sang: ‘Art for art’s sake, money for God’s sake’.”
