Natchez Festival of Music performer David Shenton didn’t have any plans to become a musician.

What he loves now was initially thrust upon him.

“I got into music kind of accidentally,” Shenton said.

Born in the United Kingdom, the laid-back Shenton was initially placed in a music class to fulfill his public school’s music student quota.

“They took three students out of each class,” he said. “I was told I would play the violin.”

His parents were not initially enthusiastic about his being placed in music lessons.

“They said, ‘We already have cats, we don’t need another one screeching,’” he said.

As he pursued his training, and wrote a symphony at the age of 12, his parents took on extra work to support his music.

“Private lessons were quite a bit more expensive, and they ended up working weekends,” he said.

By the time he was 14 — having already performed violin with an orchestra — his parents told him if he was going to pursue music further, he needed to learn piano for the technical hand-eye coordination training, he said.

It was with piano Shenton first found jazz.

“When I was about 21, I was playing piano in hotels for extra money,” he said.

“The problem was all I knew how to play were slow classical numbers that weren’t really appropriate for hotels or restaurants.”

Shenton said it was about that time he heard Oscar Peterson — who he calls his hero — play a jazz number on the radio.

After he bought a book of old ragtime standards, Shenton taught himself how to play jazz over the course of two years.

“The technique is very different,” he said. “Classical pianists play with their fingers very arched, and jazz players almost hold them out completely straight.”

Shenton said he now plays classical and jazz with equal merit.

His jazz performance with the Natchez Festival of Music Saturday included an arrangement of Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies” in which he played both piano and violin at the same time.

Shenton lives in New York City with his wife Erin.