Jeremy Jackman Musical Director

Jeremy Jackman has been a member of The King’s Singers, Chorus Master of the London Philharmonic Choir, and was for 20 years the Musical Director of the English Baroque Choir. Along the way he has sung for the BBC Northern Singers and the Tallis Scholars, and conducted at St Paul’s Cathedral, the Royal Festival Hall, St Mark’s Venice and St John’s Smith Square. He has worked with Julie Andrews, Placido Domingo and John Denver all at the same time, and once found himself (for TV) singing Christmas music on horseback at 8.30 am on a freezing cold morning beside a lake in Yorkshire – wearing a monk’s habit (don’t ask!).

But running like a golden thread through all of this is his love of – and immersion in – church music. ‘The trouble is, you can’t read,’ (he didn’t mean the music) said a young Barry Rose, telling Jeremy (aged 4¾) why he couldn’t immediately join the choir of St Andrew’s Kingsbury. The two years he did spend under Barry’s direction were seminal. His formative years thereafter consisted of one great musical experience after another; a chorister at St Paul’s Cathedral, a Junior Exhibitioner at the Royal College of Music, studying with Anthony Hedges (composition), and Paul Esswood and Mary Thomas (singing). Jeremy was a Lay Clerk at Westminster Cathedral (choirmaster, Stephen Cleobury) before joining The King’s Singers in 1980. With them he toured the world many times over, performing in the world’s most prestigious concert halls and making countless recordings and broadcasts.

On leaving the group in 1990 he founded Laudemus, a week-long Choral Evensong course in Dorset, England, in which the participants sing the office in a different church every day to different music. The course has now been running for more than 30 years. Jeremy’s compositions for church choirs include six settings of the Evening Canticles, five sets of Preces and Responses, introits, anthems, and a host of hymn arrangements and psalm chants. In early 2022 he was delighted to take up the post of Musical Director of the Saint John Singers.