Jazz from Geoff

The blog is a day late this week, but this time for a very good reason.

Yesterday The Jazz Angels held a meeting!! We do keep meetings and administration down to a minimum, and obviously for 15 months we have been “dissuaded” from having any anyway. With another 4 weeks of a limited ability to gather for Hedsor Jazz kindly donated by our government , we thought a little forward planning might be useful!

Over this past month we have been able to resume live jazz at The Hedsor Social Club with a limit of 30 attendees. We have pretty well achieved this target, we do have a bit of flexibility still so if you are thinking of coming do please let Tracy Georgiades know before you travel. We do have to keep a log on who comes, so we will need to know your contact details, and Tracy can let you know if we have room for you on any given Thursday evening.

I think our return to live Hedsor Jazz has, bye and large, been a great success. We are gradually getting used to coming and going within the club with masks on and generally behaving with practiced covid sense. I know most of us have had 2 jabs, but do please keep to at least some of the rules, face masks when away from your table, space, clean hands etc.

The music has been of a very high quality. All of the musicians were only too pleased at having the opportunity to play in front of an audience again. Our future plans will maintain our aim of being a small club with a high quality jazz performance. Even with the restriction in place at the moment we can still accommodate 2 or 3 more of you, and if you haven’t yet experienced Hedsor Jazz, do request the pleasure. Tracy’s email address is tracy.georgiades@gmail.com

This Thursday, June 17th, we have another pair of jazz musicians who have played for us before with great acclaim. Trumpeter and raconteur Ian Smith is coming with saxophonist Ollie Wilby. Ian and Ollie were two of the last guests at Hedsor before the lockdown of 2020. With them this time will be pianist Martin Picket from Oxford, who was last with us in January 2020. Martin Hart will as ever be leading from the rear on drums

Over the past few years, prior to 2020, we have tried a number of different means of making Hedsor Jazz a better known venue. I am pleased to say that Tracy has volunteered (yes, nothing was twisted, she genuinely volunteered) to take on this task. My blog will continue, but other forms of advertising will be tried.

As soon as the covid restrictions are lifted, and we are able to raise the number allowed in the room, we are planning to invite a well know jazz name to come and play for us at Hedsor at least once every quarter.

Many names have been mentioned, many of them have been before and have enjoyed playing in our unique venue. When we stared having well known names some years ago, a number of the London based players commented on the lack of street lights at Hedsor, but I think they are getting used to it now! However some famous jazz musicians still haven't found the joy of playing Hedsor Jazz, so do watch this space for the names.

I think it is an exciting time for Hedsor Jazz. One of those musicians who were used to the bright lights of London will in fact be moving to Cookham very soon, and as he said to me yesterday “you may well find other well known musicians walking around Cookham during their visit to me very soon”. Lets hope they can be persuaded to come on a Thursday!!

The list of future gigs has a lot of “to be finalised” in it at he moment, but on June 24th we have a return of Duncan Lamont jr. He is bringing with him trombonist Mike Innis, I think it will be his first visit. You can check him out via his trombone reviews on Dawkes Instruments website.

July 1st has yet to be finalised, but the following week, July 8th we have the return of 2 other great Hedsor favourites Al Nicholls on tenor sax, and Max Brittain on guitar. As usual our front line guests will be accompanied by keyboard and bass and our leader Martin Hart on drums.

One of the additions to the audience at Hedsor Jazz since our return a month ago has been Alex and his wife Nicole. Alex is a keen videographer, and has filmed many of our recent gigs, do check them out, his files from last week can be found at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgQGeBz5da0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7CpjCl5uQ0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Sn6z5-AmtY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1ImcI6C54I

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERySpg29sqU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5Skj_IE-RU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ej0Zxef4Vqw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqhQTzLjoeM

And my previous blogs have the links to earlier weeks.

My photos of last week, dedicated to the music made famous by guitarists, are below.