Seven months from now this year's Classic Jazz Party will be underway at the Village Hotel on North Tyneside. Musicians fly in from all over the world, the audience arrives from all four corners of the globe and it all happens but a stone's throw from the small village of West Allotment (as the crow flies a couple of miles from Whitley Bay). Amazingly, already more than 70% of the tickets have been snapped up.
Mike Durham's International Classic Jazz Party, to give the annual gathering its full title, runs for three full days from Friday 31 October to Sunday 2 November. For the aficionado and casual jazz fan alike, the festival programme embraces anything and everything from the dawning of the ragtime era through to the dangerously modern Duke Ellington of the 1930s.
A heavy rehearsal schedule leads up to the first concert on the Friday, beginning at 12 noon. From there on it's non-stop 'classic jazz' through to eleven at night (there is a dinner break from 5:00-7:30pm!) when everyone left standing retires to the hotel bar for the first of three nightly (late night) jam sessions. What about sleep? you ask. There'll be time for that on the Monday!
Concert themes range from a Kansas City Six session to a Cotton Club Orchestra set through to A Centenary Celebration: Louis Armstrong's Hot 5 to Artie Shaw, Irving Berlin in the Jazz Age and a weekend-closing Dorsey Brothers finale. If all this sounds like your kind of thing, take a look at the festival website: www.whitleybayjazzfest.com. Russell
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