Dan Forshaw Quartet with Becca Wilkins

Ten years after Branford Marsalis told him to wait, Dan Forshaw brings his fifteenth album to PizzaExpress Live, with special guest Becca Wilkins.

Saxophonist and composer Dan Forshaw launches his new album, The Long Way Here. Vocalist Becca Wilkins joins the Dan Forshaw Quartet for the night, the only date of the tour on which she appears. The launch closes a circle that began in Fleetwood, on the Lancashire coast. As a teenager, Forshaw would listen to Dinner Jazz on Jazz FM and imagine playing the great ballads to a full room in a Soho jazz club.

The album itself was ten years in the waiting. Over lunch in 2016, Branford Marsalis advised Forshaw not to record a ballads album until he was over forty. A ballad is the most exposed thing a jazz musician can play: at slow tempo, every note carries. Forshaw waited, and recorded The Long Way Here at Curtis Schwartz Studio in Sussex in August 2026.

The record pairs standards with an original. It includes Hoagy Carmichael's The Nearness of Y ou, Billy Strayhorn's Chelsea Bridge, John Coltrane's Central Park West and Forshaw's own composition, Ti Amo. Becca Wilkins sings on the lead single, Never Let Me Go.

At PizzaExpress Live, Forshaw leads Lewis James (piano), Guy Dempsey (bass) and Lewis Kentaro Isaacs (drums). All three are his former students. James and Dempsey are Royal Academy of Music graduates. Isaacs made his debut with the band at Saffron Hall aged 15 and is now a masters student at the Academy.

Dan Forshaw said: " As a teenager I'd listen to Dinner Jazz and picture myself playing these songs in a Soho club. Branford told me to wait until I was over forty. I did. Launching the record at PizzaExpress, with this band and with Becca, is the night I had in my head back then."