I Bought Some Blue Notes...

Another GIJF has been and gone and, as always, there were some wonderful moments and, as is the case at any festival of this magnitude, some not so wonderful moments. I won't go into the latter, suffice to say the good far outweighed the bad.

And, quite often, for those of impoverished means, the free concerts on the concourse often compared favorably with some of the top dollar ones. For many, I know that the concourse set by the House of the Black Gardenia was the highlight of the weekend and deservedly so.

I too found much delight on the concourse even away from the stage. No, I'm not referring to the engaging sales patter of the hucksters on the Jazz Co-op and Jazz North East stands or even the Cajun and Creole Pizza stall. I mean the CD stand.

Suddenly, I was a kid in the candy store again!

All those Blue Note CDs at 3 for a tenner!

I indulged liberally, without tummy ache and most certainly without earache! Grant Green, Kenny Burrell (Midnight Blue!), Joe Henderson, Hank Mobley, Stanley Turrentine (and what an underrated trumpet player his brother Tommy was), Horace Silver, Lou Donaldson, Sonny Clark, Kenny Dorham and so on. This was truly a golden era and how I wished there'd been a band playing in this vein at the festival. Good as Tony Allen's Art Blakey Tribute was it didn't quite match the original Jazz Messengers on Blue Note. Maybe that wasn't their intention.

In previous years we've had The Cookers mining that seam and maybe next year Serious will produce something. On the home front, a Brandon Allen/Quentin Collin band could fill the bill or Leo Richardson, Paul Moran and Paul Booth could also recreate the goings on at Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey and New York's West 63rd Street.. Come to think of it, even as I type, there's a band playing in Bishop Auckland Town Hall that might just be the answer...*

Lance.

PS: Not a Blue Note, nor American, but I've also been listening to a rather good CD recorded live at Wavendon in 1981 by the Daryl Runswick Quartet with Daryl on bass, Ray Warleigh, alto, Mike Pyne, piano and Spike Wells drums.

Play this in a blindfold test and few would say British!
* The Mick Shoulder Quintet.