Jonathan Crayford

Multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Crayford has contributed much to New Zealand music, but is best known as a jazz pianist and film composer. Growing up in Wellington, Crayford began studying piano at age three, and was composing for the screen by the time he was 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