Sir Karl Jenkins was born in Penclawdd in Wales in February 1944. He studied music at Cardiff University and the Royal Academy Of Music, London, before joining jazz composer Graham Collier’s group and going on to co-found British jazz-fusion pioneers Nucleus with Ian Carr, playing on their first three albums. Jenkins joined Soft Machin in 1972 and went on to become the group’s primary composer until parting ways after the 1981 album Land Of Cockayne.
Jenkins’ breakthrough into the classical world came with his Adiemus series comprising five ‘cross-genre’ albums, released between 1994 and 2003 and topping classical charts around the world. His anti-war piece The Armed Man, first performed in 2000, was commissioned by the Royal Armouries Museum and dedicated to victims of the Kosovo cris and became one of his best-known pieces.
In 2015, Sir Karl Jenkins was named the most popular living composer by Classic FM. He was awarded a Knighthood in the 2015 Queen’s Birthday Honours for “services to composing and crossing musical genres”.
Speaking to The Big Issue for his Letter to My Younger Self, Karl Jenkinslooks back on what he admits has been a charmed life, albeit one he wished his parents had been able to share more of.
My mother died when I was quite young, when I was five. My father brought me up with his sister. I remember a happy childhood in a small village in south Wales. There were lots of people around. By the time I was 16, I’d learned to play a couple of musical instruments. My father was a music teacher, so I learned the piano at a very early age, and then later some woodwind like the oboe and the saxophone. I was in a few orchestras and I also started playing jazz music. But I was heading for university I suppose not knowing exactly what I wanted to do.
I was an only child and an introverted teenager. I’ve learned to deal with it, and I do talks and speeches in my work now. I don’t have an issue with it now. But I was introverted and quite taciturn. Not saying very much.
My father and I had a strong bond. He died just before I met my wife, funnily enough, I was in my late 20s. He had a heart attack when I was in the south of France playing a gig at a jazz festival. The British consul got hold of me and told me what had happened. So I missed the gig and they got me a flight home. That was quite a devastating blow and I had to adjust to that. I was pretty much on my own, but I met my wife soon after. And we’ve been together a long time now, 50 years.
I decided I wanted to do music but I had no idea which part of music. What direction? I liked so many kinds. I was born at a very good time, in ’44. I was 16 in the ’60s which was a mega decade in many ways. It was revolutionary. The Beatles and the Stones releasing albums, and many great jazz musicians like Miles Davis. It was very rich.
I studied music at university. Then I went to London and started playing jazz and got together with a band called Soft Machine. Soft Machine were termed prog rock but it wasn’t really. There was a lot of jazz in it and a lot of freeform music. There was no vocalist when I joined because it was only instrumental music.
1972: Playing the oboe as part of Soft Machine. Image: Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo
The band were formed in early 1966, but I didn’t join until about 1969. We played in The Proms, Carnegie Hall and at the Newport Jazz Festival.
The band got on OK. Sometimes we got on each other’s nerves. I’ve never been part of a big family so I don’t know if it felt like brothers and sisters. But I can imagine it was similar. You argue and of course, some people leave and come back. We started as a four-piece and finished with a five-piece as loads of different musicians came and went. Do I ever go back and listen to them? No, no.
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I wouldn’t want to change anything in my life because mine was a series of accidents. I found out what I was good at and that’s what I’m doing now. I did music for one feature film, a Kiefer Sutherland movie, a few years back [2005’s River Queen] and I thought I’d like to do more of that. But I didn’t like the experience with the director. So I was happy to go back to music for music’s sake. When up-and-coming directors were making adverts – Tony Scott, Ridley Scott, Alan Parker – I wrote some music for them [including for Levi’s, De Beers and Renault]. Those adverts were like mini works of art.
I learned a lot doing that. You never knew from one day to the next what kind of music would be required. I might have to research Indian music, the sounds and instrumentation. So I learned a lot about global sounds and percussion, as well as the different drums.
Soft Machine gave me a certain recognition but you don’t get a credit for an advert, the work is totally anonymous. My reputation spread a bit due to winning industry awards within advertising. Then I came up with a piece of music called Adiemus which crossed different cultures. It started off as something very spiritual as well and then it took off and became a kind of global hit with a few million sales so that laid the ground for me to keep doing what I’m doing now.
The Armed Man has been very popular. It has been performed 3,000 times since I wrote it on the millennium, hoping for a century of peace, but that didn’t happen. I get a lot of letters from people saying that piece has helped them through illness and grief. I find that very humbling and gratifying.
2015: Being knighted by the Princess Royal at Buckingham Palace. Image: PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo
If I could have one last conversation with anyone it would be my father. He’s survived by aunts and uncles but if something crosses my mind I realise he’s not there for me to tell him. There’s so much I’d like to ask him. I wonder what happened to my grandfathers. One of my grandfathers died in the colliery in Wales, the other was a Swedish sailor who came to Wales and met my grandmother in a market and stayed. So I’m one-quarter Swedish.
There’s a lot on that side of the family I’d like to know about but there’s no one left to ask. Because when he left Sweden and came to Wales, he left behind three sisters and they all lived into their 90s. All of them were childless so there’s no one in Sweden I could talk to and none in Wales either. I find that a bit frustrating.
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I respected my father a lot, and it was important to me that he respected me. If I did anything wrong, I could very easily say sorry. I don’t mean that in a facile way, I really mean it.
If I had one more day with my dad we’d maybe go abroad and go hiking and walking. I used to do that with him when I was at university, we went to Switzerland once. We enjoyed that together. We’d go round seeing tourist spots, that kind of thing. We also went to concerts together, we had that in common.
Many classical orchestras came to Wales. I remember we went to a very good concert hall in Swansea called the Brangwyn Hall. And he took me to concerts in London as well.
I played jazz for years but now it’s modern classical. I got some recognition for it, I’ve been knighted and all this type of stuff. But I’m still not respected in some quarters of classical music. I’m not what they consider serious enough. Because my music is accessible and memorable. One critic said to me that my music was emotionally manipulative and could change people’s moods or make them happy or cry or whatever. To me, that was a compliment. Not a criticism.
2023: Onstage at the Brucknerhaus venue in Linz, Austria. Image: Oliver Erenyi
Some recent music has no emotion at all. So I think I’ve found what I’m good at and maximised my talents.
I’ve made the most of what I am. I’ve got a son and a wife and two grandchildren at this point in time. They’re great and they’ve kind of given me a new life, getting to know them. I’m glad that I’m still around to see them grow up. 50 years married – that’s a good life in many ways.
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Stravaganza by Sir Karl Jenkins is released on 9 August on Decca Records, coinciding with its live performance at the BBC Proms (Prom 32, 12 August).
