Jonathan Crayford

The son of jazz legend Terry Crayford, multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Crayford is best known as a jazz pianist and film composer. Wellington raised, he began studying piano at age three, was playing gigs with his father as a teen, and was composing for the screen by age 18. After getting his start on Gaylene Preston films like Making Utu and Mr. Wrong, he spent time in the New York jazz scene. Splitting his time between international projects, solo work and composing for Kiwi screens, Crayford has scored the Pork Pie remake, documentary The Garden of Evil, and co-composed the award-winning score for TV's The Panthers.

I’ve been travelling for years and it’s the excitement of new projects and the risks associated with being in unfamiliar places that lures me. I like being in a new place, an exotic place, somewhere outside of my life’s experience. It is like a rebirth ... The grist of creativity comes directly out of this. Jonathan Crayford in an interview for website JazzLocal32, 21 April 2015