(Photo courtesy of Debra Milne).
Kansas Smitty's, Ronnie Scott's, The Globe, Newcastle, - what do they all have in common? Answer is that, come hell and high water, not to mention pandemics, they're continuing to present live-streaming jazz to a virtual audience starved of the live music they love.
Tonight's Sunday night special from the Jazz Co-op's home base featured the Dean Stockdale Trio who stepped in at the last moment after the Leeds' band originally booked wisely pulled out. If the Covid-19 Cops (sounds like an American TV show) had pulled them over, The Globe could have become the jazz equivalent of Barnard Castle.
Fortunately, as a playwright who achieved a degree of fame at that other Globe once said, "All's Well That Ends Well".
And indeed, all did end well.
The three musicians are well known on the local scene so I had no doubts that what would enfold would be well worth the £7.50 up front although this in itself posed another question. Would audience numbers increase if solely dependent on donations as is the case with the other two venues mentioned? It would be interesting to know the percentage of those who donate as opposed to the freeloaders.
Back to the music. It was all done very tastefully and included a lot of my favourite numbers. If I have to be critical it is only to say I'd have preferred a few more uptempo workouts which I know is well within their powers. Nevertheless, that's just me, it was all played beautifully. Great to hear Girl Talk. Like another Neal Hefti Classic - L'il Darlin' - the harmonic structure just oozes class and makes up for the pedantic melody line.
The opening three numbers were by, arguably, three of jazz's greatest composers - Charles Mingus, Tadd Dameron and Duke Ellington - in the form of Nostalgia in Times Square; On a Misty Night and In a Sentimental Mood.
The standards - Moon River and On the Sunny Side of the Street - were followed by a Stockdale original, Another Time, which created the mood of Bernstein's Some Other Time and brought us to the finale which featured two "freedom tunes". Oscar Peterson's Hymn to Freedom and Billy Taylor's I Wish I Knew How it Would Feel to be Free. I wonder, which came first?
Academic! What matters is that we have such great jazz musicians plying their trade. like all of us, in the face of adversity.
We will overcome! How can we not with musicians like this on the scene.
Lance.
PS: Next week at The Globe it's Emma Fisk's Hot Club du Nord.
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