I am a writer who writes about music, rather than a musician who likes to write. Apart from lacking the aptitude (and the application) to really master an instrument, the touring musician’s life style would not suit me in the slightest. In that sense, I have no axes to grind or unfulfilled ambitions -- right from when I was a small kid, I wanted to be a writer of some description, and to not only write for a living, but to write about music for a living, seems like the best of all possible worlds.

Encouraged by my friend and now well-known writer and broadcaster, Brian Morton (one half of the Penguin Guide duo), I began writing about jazz around fifteen years ago, for the UK jazz magazine The Wire, which had recently been launched by its founder editor, Anthony Wood, and is still around, albeit in rather different form.

I had written a bit about rock music prior to that time, but my principal topics then were literature and film. I grabbed the chance to write about music with both hands, and have written pretty exclusively on that subject since the early-90s, although that includes classical, folk and country music as well as jazz.

The first three jazz records I ever owned were a Fats Waller compilation and the Roulette issue of the Ellington-Armstrong collaboration, both picked up for pennies in a local shop, and Charles Lloyd’s Live in Denmark, closely followed by A Love Supreme. Although that was an entirely random polarity, I’ve tried to maintain a similarly open-minded appreciation of jazz in all its shades.

I have been a freelance writer since finishing university. I am the jazz critic of The Scotsman newspaper in Edinburgh, and have held a similar position at a couple of others papers in Scotland, The Glasgow Herald (now simply The Herald) and Scotland On Sunday. I wrote for The Wire for years, and later the now-defunct Jazz On CD. Currently, I write regularly for Jazzwise, and occasionally for Jazz UK.

I wrote five chapters in Masters of Jazz Guitar (Balafon Books/Miller Freeman), a book which, as it happens, was published on the same day as Giant Steps in the UK. As of March, I contribute a quarterly column to All About Jazz, and I look after The Last Post section on the Jazz Journalists Association’s web site (www.jazzhouse.org/gone). I also maintain my own personal jazz site (www.kenmat.dircon.co.uk/).

Giant Steps (and its planned successors) rose out of an idea I had been carrying around for years, but could not identify a publisher likely to run with it until Jamie Byng resurrected Canongate Books in Edinburgh, a well-known imprint which had gone to the wall in its previous incarnation. I knew Jamie was a jazz fan, and the launch of Payback Press, which was dedicated to reprinting African-American literature, created a perfect niche for the books (okay, I wasn’t African-American, but the music mostly was).

I pitched the proposal to Canongate, they said yes, I wrote the first book, they published it, and now I’m writing the second. If only life was always that straight-forward.

When I’m not working, I like to be out walking in the hills with my wife, which is the primary reason why we moved north from Edinburgh to the small Highland village of Boat of Garten last year, within sight of the Cairngorm mountains. It’s a long drive to the gigs in Edinburgh and Glasgow, but it’s worth it.