Good Morning blog readers. We have escaped January, and have reached into February, and a whole new month of Thursdays, with excellent jazz for you to listen to every week.

At Hedsor Jazz we are trying to establish variety and consistency!! Consistent quality, and a pattern of performers, so this coming Thursday, 6^th Feb, we have, as the first Thursday of the month (as in January) the bringing together of two huge talents. Stuart Henderson and Alam Nathoo, trumpet and saxophone respectively.

Over recent months we have found that bringing these two together more than doubles the enjoyment of listening to them singly. There ability to feed off of each others thoughtful, but high speed, improvisations, is almost uncanny and tremendously exciting. 

Joining them this month will be Stuart Barker on bass. 

So do come and hear them for yourselves. Photos of them at Hedsor in January are below.

 

Last week we had two tenors for a ..... tenor!!

Tenorist Frank Walden was to have partnered the trumpet of Bruce Adams, but sadly Bruce had to postpone his visit as he is having his cataracts operated on and wont be able to blow that trumpet in anyway for a few weeks. That is something he usually does in a spectacular fashion, and when fully recovered we will invite him back to Hedsor Jazz to demonstrate just how well he does it!!

But last week Frank was paired with another tenor player, Ollie Weston. This turned out to be a fantastic joining together, which produced a few catalytic reactions! Everyone played past there best. Ollie is a wonderful find. For his solo feature he played “Isfahan” from Duke Ellington’s “Far East Suite”, one of my favourite saxophone improvisations. I had only listened to a recording of Alan Barnes playing that the day before. And Ollie did it superbly, as the applause at the end showed.

It wasn’t just the two at the front that excelled. Ken McCarthy was back from his holiday break and fresher than ever. Al Pirrie on bass and Martin Hart on drums seemed inspired as well.  In the second set, as part of a series of “breaks”, Al and Martin traded 5’s, with Martin playing his drum skins with his hands. This, not just for a couple of 5’s, but for series of 5 bars! Something Hedsor had not seen before. This produced a relatively new phenomenon, the Hedsor Roar!

Such was the adventure of our evening that everyone was inspired! One of our audience said that the whole evening reminded him of nights at The Bull’s Head at Barnes!

Pictures of the evening are below:-

 

I for one need evenings like that, as earlier in the day I had attended the funeral of a neighbour and friend that I had know since 1969. Yesterday I attended the funeral of a friend I had known since 1963. So for me our Thursday evenings are a great encouragement. If music, (even jazz music I hear you mutter) is the food of love, play on.

We are planning jazz events at Hedsor into the future, so do keep any eye on this blog. We can’t always keep to our advertised program (as we couldn’t last week) but we do promise you quality live jazz and enjoyable company at Hedsor.

So perhaps we will see you, and a friend, at Hedsor on Thursday. I look forward to it.