Born in Staffordshire in 1963, he was drawn into jazz almost before he could walk, shaped from infancy by a father who lived and breathed the music. By his early teens he was already performing live. By his late twenties he had packed up and moved to London, building from the ground up everything that followed.

Now based in West Sussex, Pete Cater leads his own band, runs his own label and continues to champion independent music on his own terms — as a performer, a producer and an outspoken voice for the artists the mainstream tends to overlook. This May brings his most ambitious statement in years: the West Side Story EP, released May 1st 2026, recorded with an exceptional lineup of musicians and showcasing Cater at his most commanding. He’ll also be taking the music live — to Pizza Express in Soho on May 17th and the Concorde Club in Eastleigh on May 20th as part of The Great Drum Show. We caught up with him to find out what drives a musician at the very top of his craft — and why he’s just getting started.

Pete, great to have you here. You recorded West Side Story in a school hall. Summer break, empty building, zero studio pedigree. A school hall carries its own resonance, its own air, its own ceiling height, and all of that ends up on the record whether you want it to or not. How much of the final sound on this EP belongs to that room rather than to any mixing decision made after the fact?

Good acoustics, good microphones and a great engineer. Chris Traves who engineers for me turned me on to the location, and just because there isn’t a famous name on the door or a zebra crossing outside doesn’t mean you can’t get a fabulous result. Listen to West Side Story and the other track on the EP, Don’t Rain on My Parade. One was recorded in a school hall, the other in Abbey Road studio 2. Same musicians, same engineer. There really is no discernible difference in quality. People often get carried away by the ‘big name’ mind set and succumb to the groupthink that something they haven’t heard of is by definition of a lower quality. The flipside of this is that if you took an awful band into the world’s best equipped, most expensive studio that doesn’t mean that you are going to get an adequate result.

The West Side Story material comes loaded with history — Bernstein, Broadway, Sondheim‘s lyrics, the 1961 film, the Spielberg remake. Every musician who touches it inherits all of that weight. When you sat down to arrange these pieces for a jazz ensemble led by drums, what was the first thing you decided to throw out from the original?

The Spielberg analogy is actually very apt. The origin of West Side Story in this kind of big band context goes back to 1966 and Buddy Rich. Rich had debuted his new big band in Las Vegas and one evening happened to be in the Casino de Paris at the Dunes Hotel, where the floorshow was a dance routine set to West Side Story. Rich approached the Dunes hotel musical director Bill Reddie, who adapted the arrangement for Rich’s big band and it would be his grand finale of choice for the entire twenty year life span of his band. What’s that got to do with your question you may be wondering. Well, it’s this.  In 2017, the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra did a run of concerts to mark Buddy Rich’s centenary. They commissioned arranger Florian Ross to take the essence of Rich’s West Side Story, pump it full of steroids, and take it to a whole new level. The SNJO didn’t record it for commercial release. I heard a few extracts from the arrangement and thought it had my name written all over it, and I am indebted to SNJO’s Stephen Duffy and Tommy Smith for enabling me to add this extraordinary arrangement to our repertoire.

So in just the same way that the Spielberg reboot of West Side story was new, different, but unmistakably West Side story, our version owes a great deal to what Buddy Rich did half a century ago, it stands on its own merits, honours the original source, but takes it to another level, and I like to think that we have put our own stamp on it.

You brought together a specific group of musicians for this EP. Was there a moment during the West Side Story sessions when the band locked into something you hadn’t planned or rehearsed?

The band on West Side Story is my regular working band apart from one player who had to be substituted as he was recovering from surgery. About half the guys in the band have been with me for nearly twenty years. I’m very particular about who I hire. They need to be absolutely on top of their game musically but they also need to be particular kinds of people. It’s a lot like casting a play or a movie. It’s so much more than having highly skilled players on every chair. How people interact offstage is critical too.

There is such depth and breadth of talent among my musicians. You have to have the right people for a specific role, none more so in this instance than Andy Panayi who is the featured tenor saxophone soloist on West Side. I felt very strongly that he would be a perfect fit to play that part and the results speak for themselves.

Incidentally it’s worth noting that when you listen to West Side Story you are hearing the band playing it for the first time. It was done in a single three hour session. We had a read through, followed by some pretty forensic rehearsing, and then it was time to roll the tape. I have such a level of confidence in the people I employ that I was sure we would get the right result. The guys know what I expect, and they always come up with the goods.

We don’t need to be in the studio for weeks on end running up massive bills. I can (and have) make a world class big band record for under twenty five grand. That’s everything from soup to nuts: sourcing the music, going into the studio and recording, all of the post production, design and manufacture. From a business point of view records like these are incredibly good value for money. You get great people with a great attitude, put them in the studio and they deliver. We don’t have preening egos turning up hours late and throwing a wobbler because it’s the wrong kind of salami on the lunch buffet.

A five-track EP is a very deliberate format. You could have made a full album. You could have released a single. Five tracks means you’re asking the listener to sit with the material for a specific amount of time — long enough to build a world, short enough to leave them wanting more. Walk me through the sequencing: why does the EP open where it opens and close where it closes?

It’s actually two tracks. Originally it was going to be a single release, but for practical reasons mostly to do with radio airplay I added ‘Don’t Rain on My Parade’. Just three minutes long and a tune that everybody knows, so much more likely to get to air than an eleven minute tour de force. It’s hard enough to get any kind of a platform for our music at all, so adding a shorter alternative track was a pragmatic move. I should point out that it is a two track EP, not five, and that it is a precursor to not one but two future album releases. We have a number of tracks already in the can and will be back in Abbey Road in June to lay down the rest of the material.

Jazz EPs tend to live or die by the rhythm section — and on West Side Story, you’re the rhythm section’s centre of gravity. Which track on the EP forced you to rethink your approach to the kit the most — where you had to find a completely different way in?    

Obviously the music I make is very much drum centric in a variety of ways. I think West Side Story is one of the most involved and sophisticated big band scores I have ever attempted and it was just a matter of preparation. We have been playing it live a few times recently and I’m still refining my approach to various sections of it. That said I am as happy as I am ever likely to be with the drumming on the recording. Being a perfectionist nothing is ever really good enough, but I would say that I am reasonably satisfied with what I did on the day.

To make a wider point, big bands live or die according to the calibre of the drummer. Big bands are like buses, you can manage perfectly without a conductor, but if nobody is driving you’re not going to get anywhere.

You left Staffordshire for London at twenty-nine. In jazz years, that’s late. By twenty-nine, a lot of musicians have already burned through their first wave of ambition and are settling into whatever career shape they’ve got. You were still building the launchpad. Looking back from where you are now, do you think arriving in London later gave you an advantage that someone who moved there at nineteen would have missed?

That’s a real swings and roundabouts type of question. Had I been fortunate enough to be, for instance, part of the National Youth Jazz Orchestra and/or attend a top London music college that would have enabled me to establish a peer group of musicians of a similar age and with similar career objectives.

The advantage of arriving late was that I had spent my twenties amassing all kinds of valuable professional experience, so while I would hesitate to describe myself as fully formed when I got to London I do feel that I had a distinct advantage over younger drummers on the scene who were also trying to get a foot on the ladder.

I did feel like a bit of an outsider to begin with, and that I had a lot of catching up to do. I often think that afforded me a different kind of determination, a need to really put my head above the parapet and say to everybody, ‘Look, I’m here!’, and starting the big band in February 1995 was a consequence of that determination.

Running an independent label while being an active performer means you spend part of your day thinking about royalties, distribution, release schedules — the bureaucratic architecture of music. That’s a fundamentally different headspace from playing. Some artists say the business side poisons the creative side, that knowing too much about the machinery ruins the magic. Has running the label changed the way you hear your own records?

When I started the label it was with the specific intention of recording projects that I was involved in. Projects which although very successful on the live circuit were not getting any traction in the record industry. Specifically tenor saxophonist Simon Spillett’s big band which has brought the big band music of Tubby Hayes back in front of the public more than fifty years after Hayes’s untimely passing. I put my money where my mouth is and produced an album, an album that got a five star review in Jazzwise magazine. Jazzwise magazine virtually never give five star reviews, so my instinct was right.

I haven’t let the label be an all-consuming occupation. I don’t want it to take up all of my time or money. It’s there in the background, the only deadlines are set by me, and the emphasis is very much on the quality of what gets released rather than the quantity.

I have produced and coproduced several albums I have been involved with dating back to the late 90s and my big band debut album ‘Playing with Fire’. I’m no stranger to the production process and I know exactly how I want a big band to sound on records. When I have recorded as a sideman for other jazz artists I have sometimes been quite disappointed with the finished results, but that’s far from the case with my own output.

You’ve spoken openly about fitness and physicality, and you’re in your sixties playing one of the most athletic instruments there is. Drumming at a high level is a full-body event — legs, arms, core, lungs, all of it working simultaneously for extended periods. Most athletes your age have already retired. What does your practice routine look like on a physical level — do you train for drumming the way an athlete trains for competition?

I’m in the gym every day. I like to stay fit and feel good. Whilst there isn’t a direct connection with playing per se I can see real advantages in terms of strength and stamina. I don’t want to be up there on stage out of breath and overweight. I try to look good as well. It’s more than just being a jazz drummer. I consider myself to be in show business, an entertainer if you will, and if you can create and convey that kind of rapport with the audience they will be far more accepting of the music you play, even if some of it is a little on the advanced ‘uneasy listening’ side.

What is the single biggest structural problem facing independent jazz musicians right now that almost nobody in the industry is talking about publicly? 

Two words. Media coverage. I refer to what we do sometimes as ‘music from the dark side’ by which I mean that we exist in a world where the limelight doesn’t shine. You won’t hear our music played on mainstream radio and you certainly will not witness it being performed on television. I was reflecting on this after a show the other day, and it occurred to me that almost nobody has ever heard the music that we play, and how much they would like it if only they got a chance to hear it.

To that end I invest time every day trying by whatever means possible to reach outside of the jazz niche, to connect with people both inside and outside the music industry who might look favourably upon what we do. It’s a thankless task sometimes, but I’m on a lifelong mission and regularly remind myself that you only have to get lucky one time.

We’re like a sleeper cell, hiding in plain sight, and almost nobody knows we’re out there until such time as the big moment arrives, if and when it does of course.

Your father was a semi-professional drummer. You’ve spent your entire life inside this instrument, from birth to now, over six decades. Where do you think jazz drumming is heading next, and does West Side Story point in that direction?

I couldn’t possibly say. I have spent a lifetime absorbed by the possibilities that we can explore on the drums and continue to break new ground with every practice session. A lot of what I do is very different in approach to how other drummers operate, but I do it within a long established musical genre, rather than any kind of cutting edge new music. Sometimes though I do find myself contemplating the prospect of a completely different direction, something very removed from what I have been doing for the last half a century.

I have absolutely no clue as to what that might be, but if I ever come up with anything I’ll be sure to let you know.

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