Neil Ardley

Neil Ardley was one of the most distinctive composers and arrangers on the British scene of the 1960s and '70s. His original music embraced classical music's ambitious compositional outlook refracted through jazz, aspects of folk, sacred and film music, and prog rock. Ardley directed the New Jazz Orchestra on the 1969 classic Le Déjeuner Sur L'Herbe. His own catalog is defined by a quartet of '70s albums: Greek Variations and Other Aegean Exercises (1970), A Symphony of Amaranths (1972), Kaleidoscope of Rainbows (1976), and Harmony of the Spheres (1979). All showcased strikingly original charts and complex motifs performed by the U.K.'s best jazz talent. During the '80s he formed electronic jazz group Zyklus, whose Virtual Realities appeared in 1991. During the '90s, Ardley wrote choral music and in 2000 re-formed Zyklus. He was also a prolific author who wrote more than 100 popular books on music, science, and technology.