A better than never late, but late, blog this week. I was enjoying the sunshine too much!

But the weather and the pandemic now seem to be clawing us back into the winter of our discontent. The hopes of summer, of restarting Live Jazz at Hedsor, or anywhere else indoors, are now fading into a winter with not only no live music, but it looks like no live Christmas either.

It has made me realise how important some of our fairly casual friendships are. Seeing people at Hedsor Jazz every week meant a variety of contact. No, not close friendships, but a steady companionship. Most of us don’t know where the people we always chatted to on a Thursday actually live, and certainly we hadn’t shared visits in homes with many of the “Hedsor faithful” as our treasurer likes to calls us. But I’m sure we are all missing that light friendship between us all engendered by our liking for a certain kind of music. One day we will all meet up again, and wont that be fun!

Well we can still share what we can find of that jazz music that is accessible, do check out the links I put up later down the blog.

It hasn’t gone unnoticed by some of you that Ronnie Scott’s was open again last week. I’m going to quote from an email I had from one of my friends who had to be there for his job!!

The Ronnie Scott’s gig on Friday was fun, but I was a bit surprised no one in the audience - or the staff - had to wear a mask. It was a bit busier than I’d expected as well - they’re allowing 110 people in, which is 50 per cent capacity.  The streets outside were packed - restaurant tables everywhere.

Here’s the Ahmad Jamal TV clip that I mentioned. I think it’s from the same show you saw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oA9GhIyP_zI&feature=youtu.be

It really is no surprise that with crowded London night life as he experienced, the virus is on the increase.

So his link to Ahmad Jamal, dated as 1959, does seem to be from the same broadcast as in one of last weeks blog links. Some of the bystanders are in the same places!

I have discovered this week on YouTube an in depth series of recordings by an American pianist and a British clarinet player of the works of Jelly Roll Morton. As you may recall, Mr Jelly claimed to have invented Jazz (which he didn’t) but one way or another he did record or write a lot of Jazz tunes before his death in 1941. (I was 3!!). He was certainly in “on the ground floor” listening when very young in places he shouldn’t have been in to some of the early jazz creators, and eventually playing piano himself in some of those same naughty places!

He became one of the names that jazz history is founded on. So, to find on YouTube a collection calling itself the “Complete Morton Project” was an irresistible click! The pianist is Andrew Oliver, and the reedman David Horniblow. The videos were recorded in London in 2018.The sound is pretty good, and it is always interesting to see the inside of someone’s home. Everyone tends to forget the bits visible behind the person being filmed. It has become one  2020’s covid joys to see the interviews for what there is in the background, and here and there in this series of duets, you can see the odd box of , is it “Laithwaites”, visible, and of course a quick scan can be made of the bookcase.

Seriously though, it is a pretty special attempt to play through the Morton repertoire, and I do believe it looks like it was all being done from memory. Ether that or they hid the scores very well.

So go to https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4NF-ejj1Y434jiGQ5q5z8A and select a few at a time to finish off your evening of TV repeats.

Now it is time for afternoon tea, so TTFN

Geoff C

Don’t forget comment on the blog and jazz in general can be made to 

octogeoff@gmail.com

Go one, you know you want too.