As the painter Giorgio de Chirico (whose painting adorns the cover of Monk’s Misterioso jazz album) commented, "In the shadow of a man who walks in the sun, there are more enigmas than in all religions, past, present and future.”
As Misterosio’s creator on the stage, did you have much interaction with its writer?
I've been in contact with Stefano Benni right from the beginning and he has assisted in every step and development of the project. He's always been supportive and had a total respect for my directorial choices. He also gave me some very good feedback that I've used in the work in progress.

You directed, starred and sang in Misterioso, what was this experience like?
Sometimes I have to fight with the musician in me that would love to be on stage all the time with my colleagues, playing with them all the way through the show, but the director side of me has decided that this time I needed to be mostly off-stage in order to have a proper directorial look at the performance in its complex whole.

There were projected videos playing during Misterioso, as well as jazz-bar style tables for the audience. How visual does a musical performance need to be?
In Misterioso I wanted to engage the spectators' senses as much as possible, and recreate the atmosphere of a jazz club, a way to introduce people to jazz (who is totally neglected by the media, TV and radio), and also to create an experience where the story of Monk was proposed through many codes of communication, not only through the text and the music.

Misterioso is set in the 1950s. Would you consider your evocation of that period on stage to be one of detailed archaeology - digging up the exact styles and replicas of clothing etc?
The idea is to reflect on that period and what it represented for jazz artists and also to compare it to today, and if we think how still difficult it is if for most jazz musicians to earn their living,  having to teach or do other things to pay the bills, while pop artists have a very different 'status', then it means we still have some work to do. If we think of the racist groups developing in Europe at the moment, as artists we need to do as much as we can to raise awareness about it.

The elements that you see on stage- Thelonius at the piano, a video backdrop, the hanging drapes- where did these come from?
They were my ideas, as the original text consists basically of short monologues/poems. I've worked with digital artists Sdna for years and I love their creative and open  approach. The idea of the silks came after seeing Tamsin Shasha performing on the silks, in my mind that was a perfect and moving image of Pannonica 'Butterfly' [the rich heiress who was friends with the jazz greats, who features in the show as a character]- a surreal interpretation of her name and her life, always flying high as a woman in the 50's, challenging conventions and supporting black jazz musicians in the McCathy era when they were not accepted by the society.

Have you been involved in any other stage productions that make use of live music is so prominent a way?
I am a jazz musician myself , and in my theatre productions I've always used live music, it's part of my style. I love the energy and the chemistry that exists in the jazz gigs or music concerts, and I'm trying to use the same idea in a theatre production, fusing the two of them into a new form of performance. This is sometimes difficult for critics to label, but that's not our problem.