This band began a long time before anybody knew…

Mark Buckingham and Theo Buckingham have been making music together for most of Theo’s life. Father and son.

Mark, a woodwind player across clarinet and saxophone and a familiar face to many on London’s jazz scene, always had a feeling that putting time into developing great musicians around him might eventually lead somewhere interesting. Theo happened to be one of them.

Years later Theo has become a renowned drum teacher in London in his own right, as well as an active performer across the jazz circuit and many other projects. Despite all of that, father and son still regularly find themselves back on stage together in groups including Groove Warriors and now The Brubeck–Desmond Experience.

In the early 2000s they met Australian pianist Tom Donald, newly arrived in the UK.

For years they played together in the back tent at Café Cairo in Brixton with a rotating cast of local musicians. People would bring tunes in, stretch things, improvise. It was local, grassroots and full of the sort of musical conversations that stay with you long after the gig itself disappears.

Twenty years later everybody had gone off and built their own worlds.

Tom had moved further into performing and later founded the London Contemporary School of Piano. Mark and Theo continued developing their own bands, projects and teaching work.

Then in 2024 Mark called with an idea.

Why don’t we get together and play some Brubeck and Desmond?

The more they spoke about it, the stranger it seemed that despite how celebrated this music is, there weren’t many places to actually hear it being played.

So they started rehearsing.

Joined by bassist Wun Chen, they worked through the famous repertoire first and then kept going. Alongside music from Time Out, they found themselves pulled into some of the less explored albums including Jazz Impressions of Eurasia and Jazz Impressions of Japan.

Very quickly it became obvious there was something here.

The first concert at The Bull’s Head sold out.

The next one did too.

And since then audiences have continued turning up large numbers. No extra advertising. There seems to be a community of listeners who already loved this music and were simply waiting for someone to put it back on stage.

The show stays close to the spirit of Brubeck and Desmond but it isn’t trying to recreate records.

Part of what made that music special in the first place was that it wasn’t afraid to look elsewhere. Different rhythms. Different countries. Different ways of feeling time.

So every now and then that appears in the performance too.

You might hear moments that move slightly further into the Turkish influences that sat behind some of Brubeck’s rhythmic ideas, or moments where Theo Buckingham takes the drums somewhere more contemporary than pure West Coast cool.

Not to update the music.

At the end of the day this is simply four musicians getting together to play some of their favourite jazz.

We hope you enjoy it.

You can watch videos from the project here on the website.