“For the last two or three years that’s all I’ve been playing”, he says. “I’m more interested in a linear approach, like playing a sax, and it’s very difficult on trumpet to hold back those flashy tricks.. they’re just too tempting. It’s like the pianist Bill Evans having fantastic technique but the good taste not to use it. Maybe I’m more concise in the funk stuff, but I learned that kind of discipline playing in big bands when I was younger, so that you don’t show all your technique in one go. With Stan Tracey’s quartet, where I’ve got more time and an open canvas, I’ve built on interesting little quirks that I might have learned in pop stuff.”With Platypus, Presencer plays the larger, more mellow-sounding, flugelhorn rather than the trumpet. I’ve had this kind of alter- ego career doing Seventies-style funk and acid jazz, and I like that music as well as ordinary jazz It’s not as if I change that much either.

Now I can enjoy being an old bastard at 25.”The idea for Platypus, both band and album, emerged, Presencer says, “because I’ve had such a schizophrenic musical experience so far, and the main criterion is now to do what I like. It’s good now – there was a time when I felt like a novelty act because my dad put me on the stage very young and I was paranoid about it for years. When they asked me to play on the follow-up record I asked for a decent fee and a percentage and they said no.”But it got me known all over the world and it may well be the biggest thing I ever do. “I was 19 and they said, `Can you do a Freddie Hubbard?’ Now, I don’t think I’d do it. “I was bitter about it for a long time, but that’s the plight of the session musician,” he says.

You may even be able to dance to Platypus, but you’ll have to think on your feet as you do so.Presencer looks back at the US3 experience with a mixture of stoic acceptance and understandable chagrin. It is a great album, but the group is perhaps best heard live, when the combination of Presencer’s flugelhorn and Jason Rebello’s Fender Rhodes electric piano is stunningly effective.The governing aesthetic may be partly retro (and there’s nothing wrong with that), but the tunes are all Presencer’s own, and the result offers that all-too-rare experience in British jazz, a middle way between the head, the heart, and the body. But after being encouraged from an early age by his jazz-fan father and playing with the National Youth Jazz Orchestra since his early teens, he long ago tired of his wunderkind status.In the meantime, he has served his apprenticeship as a sideman with various groups, including those of the veteran British pianist Stan Tracey and the Rolling Stones’ drummer Charlie Watts, while playing sessions to pay his bills.Even if you don’t know Presencer’s name, you will certainly have heard him on records by Jamiroquai and the Brand New Heavies.The new album is especially welcome as it represents an accommodation between the straight- ahead jazz he has tended to play by choice, and the funk stuff that he does for a living (and which he insists he loves just as much). The veteran hard-bop trumpeter Freddie Hubbard (to whose old “Blue Note” licks the solo was partly a homage), even thought for a while that he must have played on the session himself. Herbie Hancock, whose composition “Cantaloup Island” formed the basis for “Cantaloop”, also voiced his approval.
Now, six years older and a little wiser, Presencer is releasing his own debut album, Platypus (which is also the name of his group).It seems to have been an awful long time coming: Presencer has been the rising new star of British jazz for years. It did not pay many bills but Presencer did earn serious respect from his peers, an important currency for jazz musicians. US3 got seriously rich and then broke up, while Presencer receivedabout pounds 300 – the normal fee for a session musician.

The track was later used for numerous television commercials around the world, the BBC made it the theme music for Late Review and the album it was from sold millions. WHEN GERARD Presencer was 19 he played the now-famous trumpet solo on “Cantaloop”, the debut single by a then new group, US3. You know how it is: people go to the office the next morning, ask their colleagues whether they heard the concert on the radio, and can then say, with pride, `Ah, but I was there!’”. “Five years ago, they played only rock and pop, but now the station El Dorado devotes the last 15 minutes of every hour to classical music.”We have organised for Balticus Radio to broadcast live concerts direct from Philharmonic Hall, and ticket sales for these concerts has risen by around 30 to 50 per cent. “More and more of our radio stations are moving towards classical music,” confesses Getman. They’re here every week, because they want to hear something new.”And there’s yet another side to St Petersburg musical life: its 25 FM radio stations, two of which – Orpheus and Classic FM (no relation) – are purely classical. And they, like students, have a right to a musical education.”I personally know of an extremely wealthy middle-aged couple who attended their first Philharmonic concert two years ago, and who have now become regulars.

“But they certainly have the notion that it is prestigious to be seen at our concerts – perhaps by a Governor, or someone similar. But it needs to attract new audiences, especially among the prosperous. “Many rich people have no idea what `classical’ music is about,” says Getman. Now, people are leaving and the salaries are miserable.”And yet, listening to the St Petersburg Philharmonic in concert confirms that it is still one of the great Russian orchestras.