Here’s that Blog again!

At the moment I do my blog regularly every Tuesday, mostly nowadays just to chivy on support for Hedsor Jazz. It was initially to spread more interest in jazz over a wider area, but as time has gone by, and I have got older, there is less energy for such tasks. Sadly there is now also less jazz events to nag on about too. Jagz in Ascot ran its last gig last Sunday, and I am told that its last lunchtime session ran to about 20 people.

To try and counter some of this shrinkage, and to improve both the jazz and Hedsor Jazz profiles, for the next 2 or 3 weeks we have the help of two students from Brunel University. Ines and Azuz are using Hedsor Jazz as part of their business studies module for a Masters degree. They came to Hedsor last Thursday with the aim of placing Hedsor Jazz on Instagram. They took lots of photos, and are busy agitating on Instagram amongst the student fraternity.

They are not particularly jazz fans, but I did run a series of jazz tracks past them during their afternoon with June and me. They enjoyed them, and genuinely enjoyed the evening at Hedsor. So, let us hope that their involvement will give our kind of music a small boost. This blog is apparently linked to our Instagram page(?), I have yet to get it all to work on my desktop computer as it is mainly a mobile phone app. but you never know, my blog may well become totally redundant!

Last week the session Inez and Azuz watched was one led by clarinettist Martin Nickless and Max Brittain. My photos of this set are a below.

This coming week (June 6^th ) it will be Stuart Henderson and Duncan Lamont jr who will stand in front of the Clive Burton Celebration Quintet Rhythm Section! This Thursday is June Cronin’s birthday, and as she is a well know non-lover of all things jazz, I may not be there!!

BUT I will not miss the following week, and I really hope you don’t either. June 13^th has that wonderful guitarist Nigel Price coming to us. He plans to be the soul member of the front line, but our regular quintet rhythm section will be with him, and on bass for this one we have Stuart Barker. Usual start time of 8.30pm, and our usual entry fee of £7. Do cajole your friends to come out for this one.

In my discussions with the Brunel Students I said that I thought that people who had not experienced live jazz in the kind of friendly and close atmosphere of Hedsor Jazz would really appreciate our overall event.

Most people these days think of a live music event as being in a crowd of many thousands, with the sound conveyed via mega watt speakers, with the image of the musicians before them on some large screens. Yes, they are at a live music event, but to really see the instruments being played, the interaction of players, the skill of those same players able to play tunes called only by name, key and tempo and then have the ability to talk to those same players during the evening is a totally different experience. AND, dare I say, one that is vastly more valuable than the £7 entry fee.

So, if your friends say they don’t really like jazz, just bring them to Hedsor Jazz, and see if they still don’t like it after the experience Hedsor Jazz has given them.