Hedsor, and all that jazz (blog)!

Will be a shorter one than past weeks. 

I am beginning to regress to former days, where I once ran a youth club and was more involved with folk music that jazz (many young people were very good at that kind of vocal and guitar music). I was about to quote a line from a folk song, ("In this windy old weather, stormy old weather, boys when the wind blows we'll all go together") and Yes I did see Pete Seeger sing that at The Royal Albert Hall, but it aint jazz!

So to bring my mind into focus let me tell you that this week, Hedsor Jazz has a complete version of “The Clive Burton Celebration Quintet”.

This means that we will have with us Lester Brown on trumpet, Mike Wills on reeds, Ken McCarthy back again this week on keyboard, Martin Hart on drums, and a strolling bass player, who I know not! So expect some arranged tunes. “Cookham Bridge” perhaps?

Last week with Stuart Henderson and Kelvin Christiane on the front line and the strolling bass of Ester Ng we had a splendid session. The front line were superb, Ken McCarthy played a beautiful solo, and I had of keep reminding myself that this quality of music hasn’t always been available to me!! OR YOU for that matter. Once upon a time we had to go to a London Club to get the quality that Hedsor brings to us each week.

My pictures of last week are below, and the tune list. Many thanks again for the tune record keepers of Hedsor!

No Shoe Shots This Week!

Set 1
1. Sugar
2. All the Things You are
3. Cape Verdean Blues
4. Bluecette
5. I Wanted to Say   piano feature by Ken McCarthy
6. Alone Together

Set 2
1. Tin Tin Deo
2. The Nearness of You*    
3. Lullaby at Birdland*
4. Voyage

5. There is No Greater Love
6. Relaxin’ at the Camarillo

I must mention that the two tunes marked * had Lesley Christiane as our vocalist. In the past Lesley has been a folk artist herself, with commercial recordings to her name (now there’s a link to my opening lines I didn’t anticipate)!

Going back to those youth and folk club days of the 1960's, an LP came out in those days that I just had to buy, skint though I was. It was (and probably still is) a very unexpected release.

Stan Tracey was Ronnie Scotts house pianist for may years. Acker Bilk was a very popular trad clarinet player and part of the trad boom of the late 50’s. Back in 1968 the last combination you would expect would be Acker and Stan playing together on the same LP!

And then came “Blue Acker”. A brilliant joining of talents, so unexpected, but so good. It is available on CD now via Lake records (LACD218) and I would heartily recommend it.

Look at the cast list! Kenny Wheeler/Ian Hamer/Derek Watkins/Eddie Blair/Les Condon trumpets, Ian Carr on flugelhorn, Keith Christie/Don Lusher/Chris Pyne/Bobby Lamb/Chris Smith trombones, Tony Coe tenor sax, Stan Tracey of course on piano, Dave Green on bass and Barry Morgan on drums. ALL backing Mr Bilk! Also included is a little known Duke Ellington tune called “Lay-By” featuring Tony Coe.

Artwork for this gem is below.

TTFN

See you all Thursday!

and NO I dont know why sometimes the blogging software sometimes leaves out the background colour! Never mind, it's the words that count!

Another Tuesday, they come round as regularly as, well Tuesdays usually do.

And as it’s Tuesday, a little time to think about Hedsor Jazz, and in fact a little bit about some British Jazz Past.

BUT British Jazz Future, well this coming Thursday at The Hedsor Social Club, it is assured and exciting. Something to look forward to and something to look back on from the future as well. We have a very exciting session to look forward to this coming week, with a cast of stars

On trumpet and flugel horn, Stuart Henderson, on reeds various, Kelvin Christiane, on keyboard Ken McCarthy, on bass, Ester Ng, and our leader on drums, Martin Hart.

It might be a stellar cast, but our entry fee of £7 still applies, as does the start time of 8.30 pm. so put that in you diary for February 20^th and, as they used to say when I was young, “smoke it”!

Last week was an enjoyable evening, with some superb trombone playing (and charts) from Nick Mills, and the usual quality saxophone playing of Duncan Lamont Jr. Some of those charts included Miles Davis's "DIG", where they found it hard to hide "Sweet Georgia Brown" and "Tenor Madness".

My pictures from the evening are below.

Peter Hughes

Ken Thompson sat in for 2 tunes on guitar

Last week our bass player was Peter Hughes, and I had the opportunity, alongside 4 other Hedsor stalwarts, of seeing him again next day, this time with the Echoes of Swing Big Band at Cookham Rise Methodist Church. I have gone along to support this charity fundraiser for a number of years now, but this year I thought they were playing the best I had heard them and they were playing some very interesting charts too. All of the band are good readers and players, and usually only let down by a lack of solo improvisational skills. This year, it was all a very good listen. The end result was over £300 raised for a Methodist charity for needy children, “Action for Children”.

So, British Jazz Past.

These past few days I have been listening to some of the jazz that was around when I was a growing lad. Often, in my back bedroom in the upper reaches of our house in Hammersmith I would listen to Kenny Bakers Dozen on my bedside valve radio. This was a later evening event on the BBC Home Service, and I think it was preceded by a program called “Valentine Dyall, the Man in Black presents Appointment with Fear”. So a bit of smallish group jazz was very welcome coming after the dark!

Well, I have listened to some of the recorded output of Kenny Baker this week, but it drew me to look again at the playing of that wonderful innovator on the clarinet, Sandy Brown. No Sandy wasn’t part of the Dozen, but one thing leads to another!

Sandy started playing revivalist jazz in his university days and went on to become a leader in the trend towards British Mainstream Jazz. He had a unique clarinet sound, playing, as I remember, a simple system clarinet. He never went on to play saxophone as well, but was also an excellent pianist, as well as a bluesy singer with a wonderful gravely voice. He was one of Britain’s greats. He died too young in 1975 at the age of 46, sitting in his chair at home watching England play Scotland at rugby o his TV. He had a glass of Scotch in his hand at the time too!

He rose to fame in the mid 1950’s with a tune he wrote called “Go Ghana”. Although of Scottish parents, and definitely a Scotsman himself, he was born in India and had a great affinity with eastern and African rhythms. When Ghana became the first British “colony?” to be made independent in 1956, the tune “Go Ghana” became very popular. On the CD shown below, you will see that the original 10” LP is all there, but with many additional tracks as well. Well worth tracking down.

TONIGHT

Please be aware that Cookham Bridge will  still be closed. 

IF you usually use this bridge and were planning on coming to Hedsor Jazz TONIGHT please find yourself an alternative route.

https://www.maidenhead-advertiser.co.uk/news/cookhams/155602/overnight-cookham-bridge-closure-to-last-three-days.html

Tuesday February 11^th.  Blog Day!

But also a sad day, full of happy memories of our son Stuart, who would have had a 54^th birthday today!

So, to start today’s jazz nag, let’s look forward to this Thursday, the 13^th of Feb. We have that lovely saxophonist, last with us at our Christmas party, Duncan Lamont jr. on reeds and with him will be the wonderful sound of the trombone again, this time played by Nick Mills. Our bass player will be Peter Hughes (who will be playing on the following day for the “Echoes of Swing Big Band” at Cookham Rise Methodist Church, see a poster below). On the sampled keyboard (also see last week)will be Nigel Fox, and on drums our own Martin Hart. 

Well, really, they are all our own, as we are all a part of that great jazz fraternity and they have ALL have played for us at Hedsor before.

 The Poster for Cookham Rise Methodist Church's Big Band Concert

Last week we had some beautiful music played by Lester Brown on trumpet and flugel horn, and Robert Goodhew on tenor sax. Roberts 11 minute rendition of “Early Autumn” in the second half was heart rending and so well phrased you didn’t  want it to stop. He really does deserve more recognition than he gets.

We first heard Robert when he was brought along to one of our Thursday sessions by Vasilis Xenopoulos just to sit in. At that time they were both in the Ealing based big band “The Sound of 17” as was our bass player at the time, Ken Rankine. I know Clive Burton tried to encourage Robert as often as he could as Clive appreciated his ability. We are privileged to have people of that calibre coming to play for us. My photos of the last Thursday’s evening are below.

Just to carry on the foot thing!

Because of today’s significance to me, I have been looking backwards, and as this is a jazz nag, I have looked back on my jazz past.

Some years ago, I was invited to a U3A gathering in Amersham to talk about “My Journey Through Jazz”. Sadly I have lost my script for this talk, BUT I still have the compilation CD’s that I produced to accompany the it.

My first track in the second half was from a 1953 album by trumpeter Freddy Randall, “Riverside Blues”. My love of jazz came up through Dixieland and traditional jazz, and Freddy Randall had one of the early commercial bands playing in that style at the time. He was a punchy trumpet player, and as I was attempting to play the trumpet at the time, I enjoyed the occasional broadcast and I also had one or two 78’s of his band. Not quite hidden in this recording though is someone I followed keenly ‘till his death, saxophonist Bruce Turner. Maybe I will write more about Bruce at a future time, but if you don’t know of his work with Humphrey Lyttelton and His band, or with his own “Jump Band” do use your search engine to find out more. I know I went on to play one of my desert island disk choices during that talk, Bruce Turner playing “St. James Infirmary Blues” from the LP “Humph at the Conway”. I know I got through 2 LP’s of that concert and now have it firmly on CD!

Also played by me at that talk was what would have once been a familiar sound in New Orleans “back in the day”. The street cry of a man selling water melons from a barrow!  I also played Herbie Hancock’s version of “Watermelon Man”. Well, inspiration usually comes from somewhere!

More reminiscing another time, right now I can hear the cry of the coffee lady!

If you want to and have the technology, you can sample 3 of the recordings mentioned above through the links below to my DropBox folder:-

Riverside Blues 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/sv2t41qiocwbv15/F%20Randall%20Riverside%20Blues.mp3?dl=0

Watermellon Seller

https://www.dropbox.com/s/g8sy460q6pjxe9o/Watermellon%20Seller.mp3?dl=0

Robert Goodhew

https://www.dropbox.com/s/8qt373yp25h1mz9/Robet%20Goodhew%20Early%20Autumn.mp3?dl=0

Enjoy the past, but make sure of the future of Live Jazz, 

become and audience!

Another week, and another blog from Geoff!

In last week’s blog I copied in the tune listing of a gig from a couple of weeks previously. Inadvertently I left in a comment made by the person (even I don’t know their name) who supplied the information. It caused an interesting comment from “our” keyboard man, Nigel Fox which I thought quite interesting and worth sharing.

Us non players often use inaccurate descriptions of musical sounds, rhythms and even instrument names. Some of us are better informed than others, at least I can tell a trombone from a trumpet, but I thought I would quote from Nigel's email to me.

The copied comment was on Nigel’s piano feature on “Everything I Love” and said “too much Rhodes piano for me”

Nigel emailed me to say “I only had my normal Roland FP2 sample of an acoustic piano not a Fender Rhodes! I occasionally use the Vibes and Hammond Organ sample but not the Rhodes as it doesn’t sound very good!”

So now we know! I wonder what actual train Zane’s keyboard used as a sample for the occasional times he used a train sound? Probably a South African one!

 I will still try and add in gig lists when I can get hold of them, but I will also try and read them more thoroughly myself before blogging them out!

I am amazed at how good electric keyboards now sound and can clearly remember how bad some of the “real” pianos did sound in the days of the house pianos. Some were so badly out of tune that they were virtually unplayable. I can remember Fred Hunt of The Alex Welsh Band of the 1970’s trying to play the piano in Maidenheads “The Bell”. In the end he gave up! Most of the gig was then piano less!

Last week at Hedsor Jazz we were nearly piano less ourselves. Sadly Ken McCarthy was unwell, and eventually decided that he wouldn’t be able to be part of the tribute to saxophone led bands that we had at Hedsor last week. So with only 4 hours notice I think we were all very grateful that Martin Pickett was able to help us out on his keyboard, on which, if my memory serves me, he only used a piano sound! I don't think he had been to Hedsor Jazz before, so well done and thank you. I hope you enjoyed the Hedsor Jazz experience.

Martin P. did incredibly well, as all the tunes were arrangements, and unusually for us, every tune and every player had a chart to read. Mike Wills and Sue Greenway made a splendid noise. No that isn’t disrespectful word to use as the two tenor players blowing in harmony DID make a splendid noise. The tunes played, my helpful scribe informs me, were:-

The Opener
Cherry
On the Sunny Side of the Street
All the Things You Are
What’s New
Yesterdays

Blues Up and Down

Second Half

Guys and Dolls

Prisoner of Love
The Note
Bunny
If I Were a Bell

S’posin

The Four Brothers 

During the evening Sue and Mike often managed to bring to mind the sounds, yes the actual sounds, of Johnny Hodges, Paul Desmond, Gerry Mulligan, Zoot Simms, Al Cohn and Tubby Hayes, but not necessarily in that order!

My photos (without feet or shoes) are below.

Coming to us this week (Feb 6^th) we have two young players (most people under 81 are young to me!) who now play together fairly often. Maybe we were catalysts in that, I don’t know ,but Lester Brown (trumpet) and Robert Goodhew (tenor sax) have been to us fairly often in recent years and now do a fair bit of work together. Lester, as you must know by now, is a regular part of “The Clive Burton Celebration Quintet”  and Robert was introduced to us by Clive himself, who often used to encourage him by inviting him to play whenever he could.

With them this Thursday will be Nigel on his Roland FP2 acoustic sample keyboard, Martin Hart on drums and cymbals various, and Roger Davis on bass.

Do look back on previous blogs for a complete listing of who is on in February and March. In the meantime I will just have to sign off for this week.

TTFN