The drum kit arrived on a Tuesday. A basic five-piece — nothing special. I set it up in the spare room, sat down, and didn’t touch it for three days. I just looked at it. I wish I could explain what that felt like. Like meeting someone you used to know and not being sure whether you’re glad they came back.

When I finally played, I didn’t play rock. I didn’t play anything from the Redline years. I played a slow, quiet groove with brushes, the way the young woman in the jazz club had played. Just the tempo of breathing. No performance, no audience, no sixteen-song setlist. Just me and the kit and time passing.

I wish I had discovered jazz twenty years earlier. Not because the rock years were wrong — they weren’t. But because jazz gave me something that rock never had: space. Improvisation. The freedom to follow a musical idea wherever it went, without a producer saying again and without a crowd expecting song number seven. If only I had been listening more carefully in those years on the road. There was jazz everywhere — in every city we played — and I walked past all of it.

I started going to sessions at a small jazz club on a Tuesday night. The musicians were mostly older than me, and they were patient. They had no interest in who I had been. They cared about what I was playing right now, in this bar, on this particular Tuesday. I wish more of my life had felt like that.

Learning jazz brushes technique properly took two years. Two years of practising syncopation in the spare room until my wrists ached. Two years of sitting in on sessions where I mostly listened. I wish I hadn’t been so impatient in the Redline days. Jazz taught me that listening is a skill you have to practise as deliberately as playing.

By 2011, I had formed a quartet — drums, piano, double bass, and a tenor saxophone. We called ourselves The Clyde Sessions and played every Friday at a small venue in Edinburgh. The swing we developed together took months. It came out of long evenings, disagreements about chord changes, and the kind of trust you only build by playing together in the dark.

If only I had known what collaboration could really feel like. In Redline, we had played together but rarely created together. In the quartet, every night was a composition. We recorded an album in 2013 — no label, no contract, no producer telling us to do it again. Just the four of us in a studio in Glasgow for four days. I trusted my instinct for the first time in my professional life. The record sold slowly. Then it didn’t stop selling.

A review in a New York jazz magazine called it «the most honest drum record in a decade.» I read it three times. I wish I could tell the ten-year-old boy in the Glasgow flat — the one with the cracked bass drum and the gloves with the fingertips cut off — that it was all going to be worth it. That the silence was necessary. That the jazz club on a rainy Tuesday night was where he was always going.