Architect of jazz's electronic future | Mark de Clive-Lowe

Mark de Clive-Lowe is a pianist, composer, producer, and interdisciplinary artist whose work moves fluidly between jazz improvisation, electronic production and long-form conceptual storytelling. Well-known for performances that unfold in real time, juggling piano, synthesizers, live sampling and beat construction, his practice treats technology not as accompaniment but as an active collaborator in the creative process.

Born in New Zealand to a Japanese mother and New Zealand father, Mark’s musical language was shaped early by jazz records at home and later by the sample-based worlds of hip-hop, drum’n’bass, and electronic music. These parallel lineages - acoustic tradition and beat culture - have remained in dialogue throughout a career spanning more than 25 years.

A formative decade in London placed him at the center of the city’s underground music community, where he became a key figure in the emergence of broken beat and a new, improvisation-led approach to electronic music. Releases such as Six Degrees and Tide’s Arising established a sound that bridged jazz harmony with club dynamics, prompting Jazziz to later observe:

“Way before jazz hybridity became a worldwide phenomenon, de Clive-Lowe was busy designing its blueprint.”

After relocating to Los Angeles in 2008, Mark’s work expanded beyond the club into broader artistic and cultural contexts. His long-running CHURCH project—described by him as “equal parts jazz club, dance floor, and live remix experiment” - became a platform for intergenerational collaboration, community-building, and live reinvention, while his compositional focus deepened toward ancestry, memory and identity.

Projects such as Heritage, Motherland (a 40-minute audio-visual film) and experimental short films Tiger and Dragon mark a shift toward immersive, concept-driven work that integrates music, image, place and history. His recent album Past Present (Tone Poems Across Time) moves further into this terrain: a meditative, ostensibly rhythm-free body of work built from analog synthesizers and field recordings, exploring grief, reconciliation and posthumous healing.

Across contexts - whether remixing Blue Note recordings live, performing solo piano, creating ambient sound environments, or collaborating with artists such as Kamasi Washington, Harvey Mason, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, DJ Spinna and Daito Manabe - Mark de Clive-Lowe’s work is unified by a single through-line: an ongoing exploration of how music, technology and art can express culture, reflect society and reframe our understanding of past and present.

He has released over twenty albums, contributed to more than 300 recordings, and performed worldwide at venues including the Lincoln Center, Smithsonian, SFJAZZ, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Equally at home in concert halls, museums, and underground spaces, his practice continues to evolve - less concerned with genre than with creating experiences that invite deep listening, connection, and reflection over time.