Bill Wells: 'I've more in common with indie'

'I like to think I can do things over a very wide musical range," Bill Wells says. "Even if you're just a session player, you like to think you can be recognised in some way. But if I'm collaborating with someone, I try and find out what's the best thing to do to make the music work. I also enjoy taking control. I like to think there's enough identity there in my own music so that people will recognise it, but I also want to do different things. I like stuff that's very free and very melodic as well."

Wells is a jazz pianist – he's won jazz awards and led his own octet and trio. He's also a session guitarist and a key contributor to Scotland's indie scene. You might also see him popping up on stage with different artists, filling in on keyboards. His discography lists collaborations with Phantom Engineer, Future Pilot AKA, Isobel Campbell, Maher Shalal Hash Baz and – most recently – the former Arab Strap vocalist Aidan Moffat. He's also worked with the Pastels, the German electronica artist Stefan Schneider, the Canterbury Scene legend Kevin Ayers and saxophonist Lol Coxhill. Add in live performances and the list would go on forever.

Wells was born in Falkirk in 1963, and would make his own musical entertainment as a boy. Falkirk's location between Glasgow and Edinburgh meant few groups played there, although he enjoyed Sunday lunchtime jazz sessions in the town. But he reckons one of the most important factors in the development of his musical character was learning to read and arrange music in isolation. That meant he needed to find musicians who could read his scores, which in turn drew him to jazz players. He describes the music that resulted as "jazz by default"– a fair description of his signature style.

He looked to be the rising star of Scottish jazz in 1996, when he won the Scotrail award for the best Scottish-based performer at the Glasgow jazz festival, but even the people who gave him the award didn't seem to care. "It took ages to get to play there in the first place," he says. "I went back the year after I won the award and they wouldn't give me another gig. I was so frustrated with them. I'm playing with Aidan at the Glasgow jazz festival this year, with my trio as support, and the only reason for that is that we are using a venue where one of the programmers is a friend, who offered us the gig. I feel like I've been snubbed for about 15 years. It's insane. There are not even that many interesting people up here. That's one reason I got into the indie scene. I feel I've got much more in common with these guys anyway. Most of the jazz musicians I know have too much respect for jazz and don't listen to much else."

His album with Moffat, Everything's Getting Older, stands at ease, with one foot each in the jazz and indie camps. Moffat sings and recites his typically salty, red-blooded lyrics, while Wells's settings feel like jazz twice removed, influenced more by composers who were themselves influenced by jazz, like Burt Bacharach and John Barry. The album features his trademark strong, spare, melodic piano lines, with subtle use of guitars, trumpet, strings and electronics.

Wells was a fan of Arab Strap – also from Falkirk – and played piano on their 2003 album Monday At The Hug & Pint. Moffat takes up the story: "Bill told me yesterday how we met, that we found ourselves sitting at a table in a pub in Glasgow. I knew his music, but we didn't know each other and apparently I approached him, and before we'd even had a conversation, asked him to play on our record. I've no recollection of that at all, but if it happened in a pub at the turn of the century, then it's very unlikely I'd have had much recollection."

In return, Wells offered to collaborate with Moffat on a separate project, though it's taken eight years for it to be completed. "We didn't really know that it was going to be an album for the first few years," Wells  says.

Everything's Getting Older addresses the universal cycles of birth, life and death, unfolding in a series of cinematic vignettes and vivid snapshots. Copper Top finds the besuited protagonist leaving a funeral reception and repairing to a pub, thinking of a forthcoming christening: "Birth, love and death: the only reasons to get dressed up," they muse. "All of it is autobiographical," confirms Moffat. "Copper Top is a true story. The strange thing is I can remember the details of that day and I can remember what happened, but I can't remember whose funeral it was. There had been a few about that time."

Ballad of the Bastard pushes this autobiographical approach to the limit. "The song's kind of about me amplified to the nth degree," Moffat says. "I thought it would be fun to write a song that sounds like a romantic, sad, love song, but from the viewpoint of the bastard for once. We did a gig on Valentine's Day this year and I was happy to see that people were laughing at it. The guy in the song is pretty pathetic, but the humour is very dark."

Now a father, Moffat no longer concentrates solely on characters who "drank and fought and fucked" their way through life. So the album concludes with And So Must We Rest, where his lullaby is followed by soft susurrations of breath from his infant son, all recorded on a microphone set up in the bedroom: "The lucky thing was I managed to stay in tune without music and Bill wrote the piano part around the vocal."

That song, in particular, sees Wells wandering far from his jazz roots. He operates on the periphery of a number of musical areas, but his role as the perpetual outsider has resulted in him following a singular course, exemplified by Ghost of Yesterday, his 2006 collaboration with Isobel Campbell, on which the duo took songs originally recorded by Billie Holliday and audaciously recast them with spartan electronic backing.

He allowed his own compositional structures to be tested to near destruction on Gok (2009), an album recorded with shambolic Japanese group, Maher Shalal Hash Baz, led by the so-called naivist Tori Kudo. "Intonation is not one of their primary concerns," says Wells. "Basically I thought of tunes that were really solid with generally simple chords so that they could withstand this attempt to destroy them – although not in any deliberate way. Tori is very aware of what he's doing, a real inspirational musician to work with."

Back in the musical areas in which he exerts greater control, Wells is working with his trio and pursuing a number of more experimental projects. There's Lemondale, a forthcoming solo album recorded in Tokyo with Japanese musicians. There's also his provocatively titled National Jazz Trio of Scotland album. "Obviously that is slightly poking fun at people," Wells says. In the first instance, it's not a jazz album. And nor was it recorded by a trio. "It's gone from a band playing standards to a vocal band playing original songs; basically three girl singers and myself. It's the most pop thing I've done," he says.

There's something on the National Jazz Trio of Scotland album, though, that does fit in with everything Wells does, and the way he has manipulated samples of his own playing to make it sound new. "It doesn't sound like any other guitar," he says. "I'm actually trying to make a record that doesn't sound like any other record."