Joep Beving

At nearly six foot ten, with his wild hair and flowing beard, Dutch pianist Joep (pronounced “Yoop”) Beving resembles a friendly giant from a book of children’s fairy tales. But his playing – understated, haunting, melancholic – marks him out as the gentlest of giants, his delicate melodies soothing the soul. Beving’s music is a soundtrack for a kinder, more hopeful future; a score for the unmade film of lives yet to come. Beving first formed a band at 14 and made his live debut in his local town’s jazz festival. He left school torn between a life in music and a career in government. When a wrist injury forced him to abandon his piano studies at the Conservatoire and focus on an economics degree, it seemed that music’s loss would be the civil service’s gain. But the draw of music was too strong. Reaching a compromise between his two conflicting paths, he spent a decade working for a successful company matching and making music for brands. In his spare time, he played keyboards with successful Dutch nu-jazz outfit The Scallymatic Orchestra and self-styled “electrosoulhopjazz collective” Moody Allen, and dabbled in electronica with his one-man project I Are Giant. During a trip to Cannes for the Lions Festival, it all changed after playing one of his compositions at the grand piano at his hotel and people started to cry. Encouraged by the response, Beving organised a dinner party for close friends at his home in Amsterdam, where he played them his music on the piano left to him by his late grandmother in 2009. A month later a close friend died unexpectedly, and he composed a piece for his funeral service. Inspired by the reaction, he wrote more tunes and recorded them in single takes over the course of the next three months in his own kitchen, playing at night while his girlfriend and two young daughters were asleep. The result was his debut album Solipsism. He was besieged by concert promoters offering shows, including a prestigious solo recital at Amsterdam’s famous Concertgebouw and his album found its way to Berlin when another friend played it in her local bar. By chance, one of those night owls was a Deutsche Grammophon executive and after meeting at his performance in Berlin’s Christophori Piano Salon, Beving signed with the world’s foremost classical label.