Tuesdays Blog from Geoff

And this Thursday is a performance day! If you have given us your email address, and permission to use it! Then you will already have had a reminder of who is playing this week.

Tracy has done a great job of describing who is coming out to play this week. For those who haven’t got Tracy’s write up, then this week on trumpet a long time associate of Hedsor Jazz, Lester Brown. On tenor sax, the only jazz musician who can walk to Hedsor Jazz and still play, Alam Nathoo. Alam is a real find, and lives in Bourne End! 

With them and behind them all the way pianist Ken McCarthy , Al Pirrie on bass and John Sergeant, guesting in place of Mike Jeffries, on drums.

8pm start. £12 cash only (I’m afraid) entry.

 

On March 12^th in front of our regular rhythm section will be another local resident living slightly further away to make it a long walk to Hedsor, Vasilis Xenopoulos. And for this top international musician we are charging....£12! Yes our usual entry fee.

Come along one week and you will hear why we want to keep live jazz alive, at HEDSOR JAZZ.

At the beginning of the month we had trumpeter Bruce Adams with Mark Ridout on guitar. A wonderful evening of music, some pictures from the night are below.

 

In recent blogs I have been recapping on some of the music I listened to in my formative years. Believe it or not one tune I liked a lot as a small child was “The Teddy Bears Picnic”. We had it as a 78!

But in the trad revival years of the late 1950’s, that tune was actually played on a LP by  Kenny Ball’s Jazz Band!! Yes, that LP is somewhere in my loft still.

As the trad sound became pop music in the late 1950’s early 60’s one of the bands I followed, as I have recently described was Humphs!

He managed to turn away from what was just becoming popular (its all about timing!), and became much more “mainstream” (which wasn’t) with a band that had some of the UK’s best musicians in it. He released a 12 inch LP, of which I had a very second hand copy, called “Blues in the Night”.  This is now available on a LAKE CD (LACD216). 

In 1960 you could hear arrangements from the Humph Band, often arrangements by Eddie Harvey, played by Tony Coe, Jimmy Skidmore, Joe Temperly, John Pickard, Ian Armit, Brian Brocklehurst and Eddie Taylor, all led of course by Humph himself.

What a band, and what a way to leave his revival styled small band behind. If you can do try and track it down. If you can still play CD’s Lake Records can still be bought, or try Spotify. You may then find out why I loved that band.

See you Thursday

Geoff C