Jamie Savan has performed with many of the world’s leading period-instrument ensembles, including Concerto Palatino, Oltremontano, La Fenice, the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra, and Cantus Cölln to name but a few, and continues to be in great demand as a freelance player of the cornett, mute cornett, and the oft-neglected ‘lizard’ or tenor cornett. Jamie’s main passion is in discovering previously unknown music in old manuscripts and original printed part-books, and in bringing it to life though the process of transcribing, editing, performing and recording – both with The Gonzaga Band, and with His Majestys Sagbutts & Cornetts, for which he has researched and directed a number of innovative new programmes.

Jamie began his musical life as a trumpet player: as an undergraduate in Music at Oxford University he studied with Michael Laird (the renowned pioneer of both the natural trumpet and cornett), and passed the ARCM diploma in trumpet performance with honours. After graduating from Oxford with first class honours, he went on to specialise on the cornett as a postgraduate student of Jeremy West at the Royal College of Music in London, funded by a Leverhulme studentship, and with Bruce Dickey at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, funded by the Countess of Munster Musical Trust and the Musicians’ Benevolent Fund. Finally, he completed a PhD on the cornett and performance practice at the University of Birmingham in 2005.

His playing has received considerable critical acclaim: one reviewer recently described him as like a ‘cross between the young Michael Palin and the late, lamented David Munrow… he plays with the verve, and obvious love of his instrument, of the latter; and in his own, gentle scholarly way… he showed the wit of the former’ (Music & Vision). A reviewer for the BBC Music Magazine had ‘rarely heard mellifluous swing to match cornettist Jamie Savan’s’, while the Telegraph, in an echo of Mersenne, described his ‘ superb technique and truly singing tone’ as a ‘glorious ray of musical sunshine’.