At least three possible solutions spring to mind:
a): Grandpa's died and the family are getting rid of his most treasured possessions.
b): Grandpa hasn't died yet but his kids have transferred them to his smartphone.
c): Grandson tells grandpa to 'get rid of all that shit and listen to it on YouTube. Oh and, btw, I hear that that record shop you used to hang out in looks like it's closing'.
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| (© Pam) |
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| (© Ken Drew) |
Those were the days my friend apart from the fact that wages were only around £10 a week so you didn't really have it so good!
Richard Wetherall (piano); Ed Harrison (bass); Dave
Walsh (drums)
A lot of tunes were played tonight, some familiar and some not so. They were all given an interesting workout in the very capable hands of the three musicians involved in spite of the notice board outside showing a quartet line-up. Sometimes it did seem there were more musicians on the bandstand especially during the faster numbers when the energy level moved up a notch and drummer Dave Walsh let loose with some fiery stick-work.
The third volume of the albums recorded at Seattle's Penthouse Club by the Ahmad Jamal Trio, this double CD covers the period between 1966 - 1968 and, like other two, shows the trio once again in splendid form with Jamal a little more adventurous than previous.
Erroll Garner's Misty is far removed from the composer's version. Played over a Latin background it features an amazing dialogue between piano and bass that goes on so long that I began to wonder if the disc was, so to speak, 'stuck in the groove'! Definitely a case of less is more although I guess that if I'd been in the club that night I'd have applauded as loudly as anyone.
Saturday Sessions is a new series of concerts staged at St George's Church, Jesmond in Newcastle. The one jazz event of the season featured a vocalist of some renown, honorary Geordie Alice Grace. Accompanied at short notice by guitarist Ben Helm (Pawel Jedrzejewski was indisposed) and the redoubtable bassist Paul Grainger, the trio opened with something seasonal...Autumn Leaves.
Aycliffe Radio is now available on DAB in County Durham & Darlington Area
Playlist 29/10/23. (Repeated Tuesday 31/10/23)
Requests from the Durham Alumni Gig (Band & Audience): Wynton Marsalis, David Murray, Quentin Collins Sextet, Clark Terry, Django, Quintette du Hot Club de France, Ahmad Jamal, Osaka Jazz Channel.
Preview of Mike Durham’s Classic Jazz Party: The West Jesmond Rhythm Kings/Mike Durham, Spats Langham, Frans Sjöström (RIP).
Carla Bley RIP.
What’s on in the NE: TJ Johnson.
Requests (cont.): The Silver Leaf Jazz Band, Jamie Cullum, Santa Fe and the Fat City Horns.
MJQ + Freddie Hubbard, Stan Kenton.
A welcome return
from Greg Abate who will perform with some of the region's top musicians Dean Stockdale (keyboards), John Pope (double bass) and Abbie Finn (drums).
Greg Abate jazz saxophonist,
flautist, composer continues as an International Jazz/Recording Artist
with 225 days a year touring the world.
In the mid 1970’s after finishing
a four year program at Berklee College Of Music, Greg played lead alto
with the Ray Charles Orchestra for two years.
In 1978 Greg formed his group Channel One which was a favourite in the New England area and from there had the opportunity to play tenor sax with the revived Artie Shaw Orchestra under leadership of Dick Johnson from 1986 to ’87.
My memory may be playing fanciful trucks but I'm sure that, when he was in town and I was working in J.G. Windows Ltd., enquiries about pocket trumpets would go up the following day! I seem to recall we sold one or two.
Ellis, along with fellow MDs Reuben Fowler and Al Wood, remains at the helm for a program of contemporary charts as well a few originals one of which was a specially commissioned composition from renowned big band composer Tony Kubis. The title, You Know it Makes Sense, seemingly one of Ellis' favourite expressions.
Think Thad Jones and Mel Lewis or the Clarke Boland Big Band and you're in the ball park with the soloists hitting as many home runs as their illustrious predecessors.
This was a concert of
music for the twenty-first century nomad including songs from Germany,
Scotland, the Balkans, all four corners of the Mediterranean and on further
south into Africa. Songs from across the ages as well; the oldest piece is from
Egypt in the 1300s. Duni’s rich voice is set against a palette of Rob Luft’s psychedelic
space folk from that hitherto unexplored point where Pat Metheny, John Martyn
and Steve Hillage meet. Using more
pedals than the Raleigh factory, Luft and his trusty Gibson semi-acoustic
archtop uses echoes, loops and reverb to create an orchestra behind Duni as her
voice rises through the scales to a full force impassioned wail and drops back
to a whisper.
Duni treats each song as a dramatic vignette as she inhabits each character at the heart of the lyric. Thus, during the second song, Bella Ci Dormi, a tragic Italian piece she is passionate, singing of yearning and loss, dramatically reaching out. On another she is a Parisian boulevardier, scatting her way up the scales indulging in a little call and response with Luft’s guitar.
You can listen to the show anytime from noon on Saturday October 28 by heading to www.mixcloud.com/hive_radio.
Plus, you can request tunes for future programmes by emailing
Colin at jazz.tyne.hive@gmail.com
or heading to www.jazzonthetyne.org.
Misha
Mullov-Abbado (bass); Matthew Herd (alto sax); James Davison (trumpet and
flugelhorn); Sam Rapley (tenor sax); Liam Dunachie (piano); Dave Ingamells
(drums).
Here we are of a Sunday lunchtime beneath the fabled streets of London for the Return of the Misha Mullov-Abbado Group. Whilst MM-A has been busy with a number of other projects this group has been largely dormant since 2019 when they released the Dream Circus album and he’s been able to bring most of the line-up from the album for this gig, with only the manga cat t-shirted Ingamells in as the new face.
Vega, at the age of 14, fled from the war in Nicaragua and emigrated to the United States where he ultimately studied and worked with such greats as Billy Higgins, John Clayton, Francisco Aguabella and Al McKibbon.
That study has certainly come to fruition in this collection of originals.
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| (© Jeff Pritchard) |
This gig had no keyboard player or pianist in the line-up but it did not matter because Suzanne had brought along the wonderful guitarist Jim Faulkner - a musician who sounds better every time I hear him. He has the sound that I like to hear and his solos are always interesting and creative. Suzanne is well known throughout the north west and can play in all styles but with her quartet she has become very popular with the Railway regulars who like her melodic approach. Her repertoire consists mainly of familiar standards and she likes to give some of them the bossa nova treatment which she did tonight with Stella By Starlight.
I unearthed about a dozen copies which I'm perusing daily over a pint. For authenticity it should be Guinness but please allow me a little poetic leeway.
James Hudson (vocals, arranger); Tom Smith
(arranger, musical director, sax); Luke Tomlinson (drums); Jack Tustin (bass);
Nick Fitch (guitar); Joe Hill (piano); Dan Oates (violin 1); Rosie Judge
(violin 2); Jordan Sian (viola); Susie Blankfield (cello 1); Bryony Moody
(cello 2)
A different kind of review from me this time, simply a single track which I gather is available digitally. James Hudson is a British vocalist who has featured on Jazz FM. He performs here with musicians who have appeared with the 'greats' such as Ariana Grande, Michael Bublé, and Gregory Porter. And the song? A popular musical theatre number Feed the Birds.
Aycliffe Radio is now available on DAB in County Durham & Darlington Area
Playlist 22/10/23. (Repeated Tuesday 24/10/23)
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| (© Malcolm Sinclair) |
My wife and I made it to the Gala through wind and rain, wondering if audience numbers might have dwindled due to storm “Babet.” Nothing of the sort! It was sold out well in advance and nobody was going to miss such a duo at this anniversary gig. Toni Kofi explained the song choices as being themed under the heading, “Piano Masters” and included Paul Edis (with two originals today) in this list – praise indeed!
The result was that I finally discovered a full length version of that great Swedish film Sven Klang's Kvintett!
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| (© RAI) |
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| (© Pam) |
Sam Toulson (alto sax); Edgar Ho (piano); Oscar Ho (bass); Ansel Bayly (drums)
Sold out concert today! Storm Babet, unfortunately, had other ideas
disrupting the travel plans of some of our regulars. However, the intrepid 60
or so of us who made it were rewarded with a storming set by the Sam Toulson
Quartet .
They kicked off with Charlie Parker's My Little Suede Shoes - a really impressive opening - followed by Salme til Duestrasten (composer Duetrost) and The Impossible Gentlemen's Laugh Lines.
Paul Taylor
(keyboards and bass pedals)
Some of you may have heard some of this music if you went to any of the gigs in this year’s Newcastle Festival of Jazz and Improvised Music. You may also have heard part of it ringing out if you found yourself near Newcastle Civic Centre on recent early Friday afternoons. It was commissioned by Festival leading man, Wesley Stephenson, to be played as interval music before and in between performances and, arranged for the Edith Adamson Carillon at the Civic Centre, to be played across the City. The Carillon, at 22 tonnes, is probably the heaviest instrument to be included on a jazz album anywhere, ever.
A pleasant semi-jazz album by Singapore pianist, vocalist, Monteiro - he was reviewed HERE a couple of years back - who has a nice King Coleish voice as well as being an okay pianist albeit not quite in the latter's league although on Let's Fall in Love and others such as Walking my Baby Back Home, he runs Nat close on both counts.
There's also some nice blowing from Lakatos on tenor and Softly as I Leave You has an impressive, lyrical solo by Poh on bass.
Nauta met at Newcastle University and established themselves as a trio. Jacob Egglestone on guitar; Jamie Watkins on bass guitar; Bailey Rudd playing drums. The group quickly found themselves playing across the North East – including Hexham Jazz Festival, The Black Swan and Cobalt Studios.
For a proper attic is
a place to store memories - letters, photographs, old tapes, newspapers and
magazines, Christmas decorations and old toys - and then forget about them for
the next thirty years until a house sale or aged curiosity encourages one to take
a last look.
By attic I don’t mean a little space above one bedroom but rather an area underneath the roof that ran the whole length of the house. Mostly they could only be accessed by a small trapdoor on the top landing or in a back bedroom. In my case this would involve balancing on top of a step ladder and then hauling yourself up into the roof space. As our attic wasn’t boarded out you had to move around carefully, tightrope style, from beam to beam trying to make sure not to fall through the ceiling into the bedroom below.
Having been mightily impressed by Mr Pope’s 2023 album, Mixed With Glass, I made a point of booking to see one of the gigs at the Star and Shadow cinema where this album was recorded back in April. And here we have Citrinitas, only six months after the recording dates with the same musicians on the bandstand as for the previous album.
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| (© Roly Veitch) |
A refreshing take on the legacy of gypsy jazz by a London based guitarist who has well and truly captured the spirit of those Hot Club days without any suggestion of plagiarism.
A new name to me, Diplock knows his way around the 'Macca' and manages to maybe bring it closer to the present without any disrespect to the past. He is aided and abetted by Thomas on bass, Oswald on rhythm guitar and an assortment of friends who make cameo appearances.
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| (© Jeff Pritchard) |
The drummer for this gig should have been Eryl Roberts but, unfortunately, he had been struck down with flu so Dave Walsh stepped in as a last-minute replacement. For the rest of the line-up, this was most likely their second gig of the day and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that this may have had something to do with the larger than normal Sunday night jazz audience.
(Press release): Unfortunately, tonight's Panharmonia gig is postponed due to Covid, but check out our great upcoming jazz programme at The Globe:
The full big band sound of Louis Ferrar's composition Domino gave the night a great start, followed by South Of The Border (Down Mexico Way) and the Sammy Nestico arrangement of Good News.
Bridget then came to the stage showing us what a top class singer she is with From This Moment On and Neil Hefti's Girl Talk that included fine work from the trumpet section and an excellent guitar solo by Paul Donnelly.
Whether measured by the number of venues presenting jazz & related styles or increases in online listening by generations Y and Z, jazz is hip, cool and very much in the vanguard in the UK. A growing audience, rising international profile and recognition in the form of this year’s Mercury Prize is further testimony to that!
In
the midst of this thriving scene sits the 606 Club, which has been owned and
run by musician Steve Rubie since 1976. Combining the best of old and new, it’s
‘USP’is presenting musicians based in the UK. As such, artists including Jamie
Cullum, Gwilym Simcock, Claire Martin, Liane Carroll, Ian Shaw and more played
here when they were first coming through.
For this EFG London Jazz Festival season, the Club has put together a lineup that honours tradition, while celebrating the present and tipping its hat to the future.
