Ron Gessin

Ronald Frederick Geesin

17 December 1943 - Stevenston, Ayrshire, Scotland

Musician • Composer • Writer

https://www.rongeesin.com/

I was born on the 17th December 1943 at 6.10 am (Scottish birth certificates give the time). My Birth certificate says ‘Stevenston, Ayrshire’, but my mother always said that wasn’t quite correct: it was Kilwinning Maternity Hospital! Stevenston was where I was gestated. We moved to Bothwell, Lanarkshire when I was about 3: my father built a bungalow there. Music was not a big part of life: we did have an upright piano on which he stumbled through simplified bits of Gershwin’s Rhapsody In Blue and popular melodies from the 1930s and ’40s, “Red Sails In The Sunset” and “A Little Bit Independent” for instance, moving back to ragtime later.

My main musical influences were, and still are, classic Afro-American jazz from the 1920s and ’30s (actually musical surrealism), and most of the ‘classical’ composers’ works, except those of Britten, Shostakovich and Stravinsky. I never embraced any kind of ‘Rock’ – it came to me in the form of Pete Townshend, Peter Gabriel and Pink Floyd – I embraced these creators as individuals, but not their music.

Ron Geesin.

It's Psychedelic Baby Magazine 2016

Collaborations

With Pink Floyd

1970 Atom Heart Mother.

Orchestration, co-composition (uncredited)

With Roger Waters

1970 Music From The Body.

Composer, musician, producer

David Gilmour with

Ron Geesin on piano performing "Atom Heart Mother" at Cadogan Hall, London in the Chelsea Festival Event, 15th June 2008.

With David Gilmour, Mun Floyd, brass ensemble from the Royal College of Music, cellist Caroline Dale, the 40-strong chorus Canticum conducted by Mark Forkgen.

Discography

1967 A Raise Of Eyebrows.