The Long
Way Here

Dan Forshaw is a British saxophonist and composer. Born in Blackpool and raised in Fleetwood, he was playing gigs as a teenager, studied in New York with Branford Marsalis and Eric Alexander, and now lives in London.

The Long Way Here, released on his own 4shaw Music label on 5 February 2027, is his fifteenth album as a leader and his first devoted to ballads. It began with a conversation. Over lunch in 2016, Marsalis advised him not to make a ballads album until he was over forty, because a ballad leaves little room to hide: technique matters less than the experience behind each note. The decade that followed brought the breakdown of his family, years raising two children as a single parent in Cambridge, and a new life in London. The title measures that distance, and the perspective he brings to the music now.

The record sets Hoagy Carmichael, Billy Strayhorn and Wayne Shorter beside John Coltrane’s Central Park West, and closes with Ti Amo, Forshaw’s own composition, written for his wife, Lydia. Becca Wilkins sings Never Let Me Go. The quartet has a history of its own: pianist Lewis James, bassist Guy Dempsey and drummer Lewis Kentaro Isaacs were all his students as teenagers, and are now the musicians he wants beside him on stage.

A Coltrane scholar and educator, Forshaw has recorded and performed with Tony Kofi, Georgia Mancio, Juliet Kelly, Steve Fishwick and Graeme Flowers. He has presented the Foyer Jazz series at Saffron Hall since 2016, leads Jazz Vespers at Methodist Central Hall Westminster, and runs an annual jazz school in Taormina, Sicily. Few jazz musicians move as easily between the club and the cathedral.