PAUL EDIS (piano and flute), MICK SHOULDER (bass), ROLY VEITCH (Guitar and vocals).
Crook rarely features in "Be-bop….", this 150 year-old hall had probably never hosted a jazz gig before and things seemed to start inauspiciously when Paul was attacked by his own flute a few bars into Have You Met Miss Jones! Although the flute came Out of Nowhere (well, off the top of the upright piano, actually), never a beat was missed and the evening seemed to get thematically sunnier as the darkness fell outside. Then, when Roly (nice vocals) said I’m Old-Fashioned, we all agreed to be old-fashioned too!
Eden Ahbez’s Nature Boy then brought an air of wistful enchantment with soft vocals and a magical flute solo (it was worth bringing it, after all) from Paul. Next up, My Funny Valentine took us from wistful to whimsical with some fine interplay between piano and guitar.
The mood changed again with the tender, what I thought was an Edis original but turns out to be by Johnny Mandel (see comments), Emily, which opened with solo flute echoing around the beautiful, high-beamed hall and which featured an excellent bass solo with flute long-notes in the background – a new combination on me! The set closed with Jerome Kerr’s Look for the Silver Lining exhorting us to "find the sunny side of life" which, with such tunes (and pizza to come at half time), is pretty much where we were at anyway!
After the interval Roly performed two dialect songs – one for the Mags and one for the Mackems – which went down really well considering we were so far south! Then we REALLY swung into the second set with It Don’t Mean a Thing…..where the bass solo again got deserved applause. After which it was back to sunshine (sitting on a rainbow) jazz with I’ve Got the World on a String, followed by Bye Bye Blackbird on which Roly crooned and Paul trilled and soloed as if four and twenty piano styles had been baked in a pie and turned out hot!
Crook rarely features in "Be-bop….", this 150 year-old hall had probably never hosted a jazz gig before and things seemed to start inauspiciously when Paul was attacked by his own flute a few bars into Have You Met Miss Jones! Although the flute came Out of Nowhere (well, off the top of the upright piano, actually), never a beat was missed and the evening seemed to get thematically sunnier as the darkness fell outside. Then, when Roly (nice vocals) said I’m Old-Fashioned, we all agreed to be old-fashioned too!
Eden Ahbez’s Nature Boy then brought an air of wistful enchantment with soft vocals and a magical flute solo (it was worth bringing it, after all) from Paul. Next up, My Funny Valentine took us from wistful to whimsical with some fine interplay between piano and guitar.
The mood changed again with the tender, what I thought was an Edis original but turns out to be by Johnny Mandel (see comments), Emily, which opened with solo flute echoing around the beautiful, high-beamed hall and which featured an excellent bass solo with flute long-notes in the background – a new combination on me! The set closed with Jerome Kerr’s Look for the Silver Lining exhorting us to "find the sunny side of life" which, with such tunes (and pizza to come at half time), is pretty much where we were at anyway!
After the interval Roly performed two dialect songs – one for the Mags and one for the Mackems – which went down really well considering we were so far south! Then we REALLY swung into the second set with It Don’t Mean a Thing…..where the bass solo again got deserved applause. After which it was back to sunshine (sitting on a rainbow) jazz with I’ve Got the World on a String, followed by Bye Bye Blackbird on which Roly crooned and Paul trilled and soloed as if four and twenty piano styles had been baked in a pie and turned out hot!
It was all good, but my favourite number was when the Caribbean sunshine came to Crook via Roly’s original, Calypso Jim: beautiful guitar and flute on this one and, thanks to a tricky ending which caught us all out, TWO lots of applause! Roly crooned us through The Wee Small Hours of the Morning culminating in a piano lullaby before the tempo went up again (way up in the middle-section) On the Sunny Side of the Street. "…Of life…" in the first set, "Of the street" in the second – but always the sunny side! Prolonged applause demanded an encore and the evening closed with more melodious flute on All the Things You Are.
I’m due in Nice tomorrow – but there’s so much sunshine in Crook that I might just cancel!
Jerry.
2 comments :
Sadly, Emily is not an original - it was written by Johnny Mandel. I wish I had written it though...Thanks for a great review!
I think I have heard Tony Bennett singing "Emily" lovely number!
Liz
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