Philip Clark is a music journalist who has written about classical music, modern composition, jazz, free improvisation and rock music for many leading publications including The Wire, Gramophone, Classic FM Magazine, MOJO, Jazzwise, The Guardian, Financial Times, London Review of Books, Prospect and New York Review of Books.

He trained as a composer (and in that capacity worked with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the percussionist Orphy Robinson), but has more recently preferred to produce his own sounds playing piano as part of a weekly free improvisation workshop. Philip has interviewed many leading musicians of our age – including Pierre Boulez, Ornette Coleman, Trevor Pinnock, Simon Rattle, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Anita O’Day, Dave Brubeck, Ray Davies, Laurie Anderson, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Humphrey Lyttelton (the last two on the same day) – and also the writers Iain Sinclair and Will Self, and the comedians John Cleese and Stewart Lee.His biography of Dave Brubeck – A Life In Time – was published in 2020, and he worked with legendary guitarist of The Kinks, Dave Davies, on his autobiography, Living On A Thin Line, published in 2022. Philip is currently writing Sound and The City – due for publication in March 2027 – a history of the sound of New York City. He was co-winner of the 2022 Eccles Centre and Hay Festival Writers Award, which gave him a year-long writer’s residency at the British Library.

He lives in Oxford with his wife, two children, two cats and more recorded music than he can ever listen to.