Jazz on the Tyne – January 2022

(Press release)

From Saturday, January 29, you can listen to this year’s first edition of Jazz on the Tyne.

Presenter Colin Muirhead will be playing new music by Wendy Kirkland, Shirley Smart & Robert Mitchell, and Pat Metheny.  He will also look ahead to some upcoming gigs in the North East, with tracks by Emma Fisk’s Hot Club du Nord, Rafe’s Dilemma, Paul Taylor, and the National Youth Jazz Orchestra.  Plus, there’s a listener’s request for a classic tune, performed by Yusef Lateef.

You can listen to the show anytime here from noon on Saturday or to request tunes for future programmes, please email Colin at   jazz.tyne.hive@gmail.com.

Preview: The Velvet Fog meets Shirley Bassey (tonight, Friday)

(Pic by Lance)

The Shirley Bassey Show on BBC 4 this evening (7:10pm) should be worth watching. Mel Tormé appears, as does Clive Westlake, songwriter for many famous names, including Elvis, Cilla Black, Vera Lynn, Tom Jones and Ms Bassey. For a while in the fifties, Westlake worked as a music teacher at a school in Ryhope, near Sunderland. Russell

Knats featuring Holly Flo Lightly / Swannek @ Hoochie Coochie - Jan. 27

(Pic by Russell)

Holly Flo Lightly (voice); Josh Mitchell-Rayner (keys); Stan Woodward (elec. bass); King David Ike-Elechi (drums).

The first of Knats' "last Thursday in the month" jazz gigs at Hoochie was different - no surprise there! Every time I've seen the band they were different. However, the difference tonight was even more pronounced due to the absence of outstanding trumpet prodigy Ferg Kilsby. So what did they do - find another horn player? Nah! Instead they co-opted the vocal talents of rapper Holly Flo Lightly.

It worked amazingly well. She rapped the words with the rapidity of a speeded up Michael Brecker solo and when she moved out of the fast lane the voice was as mellow as a cello.

Tonight @ Hoochie

 

Four @ The Exchange, North Shields - Jan. 26

Bernie Ranson  (saxes); Barbara Wilcox (keys); Harry Husaini (electric bass); Alan Wann (drums)

This wasn’t a night for tender ballads no But Beautiful (a personal favourite) nor, sadly, any vocals from Bernie Ranson this evening. Perhaps wisely he  did not try to compete with the crowd, noisier than usual and augmented by a  party of wild swimmers and  filmmakers celebrating their BBC documentary.

What we got instead was a selection of upbeat standards including  Autumn Leaves, Soultrane, There Will Never be Another You, Black Orpheus, Yardbird Suite …all matching the mood of the evening... and Wayne Shorter’s Footprints showing this quartet is not frightened of a challenge.

Album review: Soho Scene ’58 Jazz Goes Mod

A double CD package featuring British modernists and their American counterparts. The British, make that ‘Soho’, modernists of the time, including John Dankworth, Tubby Hayes, Don Rendell and Ronnie Scott, are represented in various combinations on disc one (15 tracks), the Americans are heard on disc two (14 tracks), Donald Byrd a notable exception, appearing on a London Blue Note recording session in August 1958.

The BSH reader will know all about Art Blakey, Kenny Burrell, Bill Evans and Horace Silver, with classic recordings in various formats sitting on shelves, perhaps gathering dust. Is the music heard on one disc better than the other? No. Is one disc more interesting than the other? Yes.