Matthew Bourne was chosen by the British Council and PRS for Music Foundation to take part in a six-week music residency in Xiamen, China, which starts in March 2012. We interviewed him during a Vortex City Session at Bishopsgate Institute on 28 October 2011, where he opened for the Marc Ribot Trio.

I’m a pianist and composer and primarily make improvised music. Recently I’ve been working with classical ensembles, e.g., the London Sinfonietta, so a lot of my music has to do with fusing written and unwritten elements, particularly of late.

Jazz is why I got into the piano when I was 15. I wanted to play like Bill Evans and wanted to be the archetypal pianist. That was the model. So I went to Leeds College of Music and studied with some great teachers and soaked up knowledge from the fantastic library there.

I really got into contemporary classical music and British free improvised music from the 70s, composers such as Michael Gibbs and Mike Westbrook, and players such as Mike Osborne, John Taylor and Kenny Wheeler.

The musicians were still alive and you could go and see them play if you made the trip down to London. It made more sense to me than it did having this weird romantic idea of playing like Charlie Parker or somebody from the bebop era that was happening in a city 3,000 miles away several years ago.

I grew up in the Cotswolds, went to boarding school and studied in a post-industrial Northern town, which had nothing in common with bebop. I loved listening to it, but had no aspirations to recreate that scene, so I just gravitated towards things that seemed closer to home.

I suppose that’s my pedigree, and I’m an avid film watcher. I spent many years sampling things from film, TV and classical music and putting it into a sampler for live gigs.

It’s a funny one, though, the jazz thing, because within college and within education people constantly ask themselves ‘What is jazz? What does it mean?’ and the more traditional thinkers would say that jazz died in 1975, when Miles retired.

That’s the Ken Burns vision of jazz. And then, Dexter Gordon brought it all back and Wynton Marsalis has since become the torch-bearer for real jazz again. What a load of nonsense.

I’m not slagging off Wynton Marsalis or any of those guys. They are great, but it was so narrow, it was unbelievable.

The city I’m going to is Xiamen. What attracted me to it is that a part of the city is Gulangyu Island, which is also known as ‘piano island’. There’s a very large piano museum there and they have their very own orchestra.

I’ve previously done projects where I’ve used broken pianos or pianos at various states of repair or disrepair, so I like the idea of this bustling city with this annexed, colonial architecture and a piano in every household.

I’m sure it’s not actually like that, but I started to imagine it that way. I want to find out more about the people who live in the city and explore the enclave of the island, this culture and reputation. It’s an interesting contrast.

My aim is to engage with the people who live on Gulangyu and find out what relationship they have to music or the piano, and similarly on the mainland. I have a rough idea of what I want to go and do, but the way I work is usually to get a feel for it when I’m there. I think it’s a much more open way to be.

I’m teaming up with the university and envisage working with some students and local musicians, but I’m not really interested in creating an East-meets-West thing, a weird cultural silo. I hate it. I don’t want it to be this tokenistic thing. I’d really like to engage with their music more than anything.

It’s about a process, and I’ve never been to China. I’ve never been immersed in Chinese culture. It’s a different situation, and I think, working in a different situation, you get all kinds of different results.

Find out more about the China residencies