It's an unusual attitude for a pianist to have, but then Ali is unusual. "If I'm contradictory," he explains with a laugh, "it's because I'm human."

Ali has also been singing since the seventies, when he joined the CIC choir, but today he accompanies the Marionettes Chorale with piano, not voice. And most recently he's better known as the force behind Pro Musica, which mounted the highly successful two-night concert earlier this month, The Ring of Words An Evening of Song.

"Pro Musica is the place where I live and where I have rehearsals for the people I work with," he says.

To the public it appears as something grander, though, because following The Ring of Words, Pro Musica will be holding A Classical Recital on November 2^nd, featuring Ali and clarinetist Kerry Roebuck performing music by Brahms, Debussy, Saint-Saens and Weber; and on November 29^th A Musical Offering with Ali and cellist Danielle McShine performing works by Brahms, Bruch, Saint-Saens and Hylton Edwards.

Tall and thin, the 33-year-old musician seems designed for a piano, if not basketball. His fingers look as if they could span an octave and a half.

"My first love was literature - before piano, books," he admits. "I chose the piano because you discover a talent, it reveals itself over the years."

In Ali's case, talent revealed itself over two CIC Sixth Form years in the seven Music Festival trophies he won in almost all the adult categories: solo, duet, sight reading, recital. Introduced to classical music in early childhood through his mother's records, he'd fallen in love with it and has remained so ever since.

"It was a solitary love, personal - there were no concerts to go to," he recalls. Such solitude also suited the piano. "Pianists - not keyboardists - are a breed apart: it's a solo instrument. They practise by themselves and even with other musicians they're separate. It's how I see myself - an individualist."

So in 1984 he went to study for a BA in classical piano performance at New York University. There he discovered cheap records and learnt to love jazz, especially the vocalists Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan.

"Singers think of a phrase as an exhalation of breath as well as its musical and literal meaning," he says, arguing a preference for Vaughan over Fitzgerald. "Ella was so good it was almost inhuman; she used her voice like a virtuoso instrument."

Although he envies the freedom of the jazz idiom, he's remained faithful to his first love, classical music. However, The Ring of Words: an Evening of Song, also included negro spirituals with tenors Nicolas Boisselle and Raymond Edwards; baritones Brian deFereire and Celestine Joseph; and bass singer Barry Martin.

In 1994 Ali won a scholarship to study for an MA in accompaniment and voice coaching in Pittsburgh. Returning home, he struggled for two years to earn a precarious livelihood through Pro Musica. "I freelanced piano, voice and accompanying," he says. "It wasn't viable. Maybe it was before, but today music is a luxury that competes with the gym, French, dance - all sorts of things."

For all its inviability the Ring of Words concert grew out of the rehearsals by the vocalists Ali coached at his Pro Musica studio/home in preparation for this year's Music Festival.

"Because I love singing, working with singers gives me great satisfaction," he explains, adding another contradiction to his individualist personality. "And I like collaboration."

Ironically, The Ring of Words hardly featured Ali on piano, and then as an accompanist, supporting the vocalists. And yet he considers the concert to be his most personal, much more so than the two upcoming concerts.

"I chose the venue, the instrumentalists, all the music, designed the programme, created the entire evening - there were five singers, different people with different voices, so it was a very eclectic programme, also to please the entire audience, and it took a lot of thought," he says. "The other two concerts will be very different, much more collaborative. I might play more but it won't be my show."

As with The Ring of Words, they will be held in churches - Christ Church in Cascade and All Saints' Church on Marli Street, Anglicans having for some reason better pianos than Catholics and churches being the best, most intimate venues for small-audience chamber recitals.

"The Central Bank has bad acoustics and Queen's Hall is worse," he laments. "Trinidad is an amazingly musical place, people here are inherently musical, but while we're planning a super airport there's no concert venue with good seats, good acoustics and a good piano."

Fortunately for classical music lovers here, Ali is an individualist willing to swim against the current, but gregarious enough to encourage others to join him.

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