Happy New Year to ALL Readers of Jazz from Geoff

And I do hope you all had a great Christmas time, with perhaps some space to listen to jazz, both live and recorded.

Our pre Christmas Party on December 19^th was a very enjoyable gathering, a nicely filled room, and at half time nicely filled plates to go with it. Thanks to all who took part, and all who provisioned the plates.

My pictures of the musicians are below

 

 

2025! 

How did 2024 manage to escape so quickly?

But we do have plans for this New Year, and Hedsor Jazz’s first month on 2025 is listed below for you to print and place, both for your memory and for others to see.

 

One or two notes about Jazz at Hedsor.

We do plan to keep going weekly during 2025, and we will be booking The Hedsor Bar every Thursday for 3 months ahead at a time. We are also aiming to charge just £10 per person per entry, and if you actually become a Hedsor Bar member you will get a discount on your bar bill as well.

We also plan to have just as many named artists as before, and one or two familiar favourites on a more regular basis.

The pairing of Stuart Henderson with Alam Nathoo appears to be a stroke of genius (well, they both are really), so we hope to pair them together around once a month. Thursday 9^th Jan is the first this year.

We are also going to introduce one or two innovations to broaden the appreciation of the word “JAZZ”. January will see an evening celebrating the Tradition tunes of jazz. To do this we are inviting clarinettist (and recent Mayor of Windsor and Maidenhead) Richard Kellaway to join us. He used to co lead “Cookham’s Fabulous Shirtlifters” and we hope that maybe some of their fans will join us for an evening of “nostalgia”.

Richard with "Our" late Mike Wills

We plan to feature one evening this year of the more French guitar led jazz, perhaps you could call it “Montmatre” style jazz, with a selection of musicians led by Nigel Price. We are in discussion with him at the moment about this.

We will also be continuing with the suggestion of an evening or two of sponsored jazz, where YOU  can put your money into hearing the musician you want to have at Hedsor. Look out in August for saxophonist Alan Barnes dueting with pianist David Newton. An example of sponsorship. 

We continue to plan to present at Hedsor Jazz the musicians and styles of jazz in the future that have gained everyone’s respect in the past. We will ALWAYS determine to keep the quality of the musical content at Hedsor Jazz as high as we can be achieved. 

We will be helped in this aim in 2025 by Ken McCarthy and Mike Jeffries who are both taking on a more active roll in booking our weekly cast of musicians.

But the biggest help pf all will come from you, our audience. May you ever grow in numbers!

Recorded Jazz

With the long Christmas break many of us have turned to doing more listening at home, and I have discovered a couple of things, one new to me, and one from Times Past.

I have listened many times to Alan Barnes and David Newton dueting, but my first experience of just two jazz instruments playing like this was in fact the trumpet of Alex Welsh with pianist Fred Hunt. That was back in the days when I played jazz (badly) on the trumpet and rehearsed regularly with just a pianist. I realised how difficult it was with no banjo chunking alongside to hide the errors or gaps! 

Then came my experience of hearing Alan Barnes and Dave Newton dueting late at night in the Castle Hotel, Brecon. Something I’m looking forward to hearing again in August but this time here at Hedsor.

Over recent years I have come to appreciate another sax/piano pairing, that of Tommy Smith and Brian Kellock. I have not heard them together in real life, having only heard Brian live once of twice. They are both Scottish musicians of high calibre, and I was surprised to discover that I had missed a CD released by them in 2002 from a live session at The Edinburgh Jazz Festival.

 

Bezique is that recording, of a superb paring of gifted musicians, both combining and competing without a safety net. I highly recommend it.

The item listened to from times past was from an LP of the Johnny Dankworth Band from 1964, appropriately playing a suite of music written by JD on Dickensian Themes.

 

Yes, the cast included Tony Coe AND Ronnie Scott AND Tubby Hayes.

I have been very fortunate in hearing musicians like that for real.

Just look up the latest list for Hedsor Jazz and come and build your own memories of superb music played by talented jazz musicians!

 

GC