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Michael Kanan is coming over from New York this January for another tour! Can’t wait to play with him again. We’re playing together in Europe for the first time too – as well as the UK we have gigs in Switzerland and Holland. We’ll be doing a mixture of duo, trio and quartet performances so see my gigs page for more info on personnel as well as ticket links.

Pleased to get this nice review from great American jazz critic Scott Yanow. Album still available here!

Looking forward to some gigs coming up in this year’s EFG London Jazz Festival:

Friday 16th and Saturday 17th November: launching Introducing REBOP at Toulouse Lautrec, Kennington. REBOP is an international quintet featuring the great Jorge Rossy on vibraphone. We recorded our first CD near Barcelona earlier this year. It is released this month on the Swiss label Unit Records.

Monday 19th November: duo with Will Arnold-Fortster (guitar), also at Toulouse Lautrec. We’ll be playing some selections from the American Songbook before a set from some great European jazz musicians plus our own Steve Fishwick and Matt Home: they’ll be presenting a set of music by the underrated composer/pianist Elmo Hope. This gig is part of Bopfest, a mini festival within the London Jazz Fest, which celebrates London’s straight-ahead/Bebop scene, as well as a few international names. They’re at Toulouse Lautrec every night from 19th to 25th Nov.

25th November: playing with the London Jazz Orchestra at the Vortex, celebrating the music of the great Canadian composer John Warren, who recently turned 80. I play in John’s nine-piece band and we’ll be doing some more gigs next year to mark the milestone, and hopefully record an album too.

I recently read two great books about jazz that paint vivid pictures of important and fascinating times and places in the history of the music.

A.B. Spellman’s Four Lives in the Bebop Business is divided into four sections, each one portraying a key figure in the 1960s jazz avant garde: Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Herbie Nichols and Jackie McLean. Each section acts as a mini biography, featuring interviews with the musicians in question and with family members and musical associates.

The interviews were conducted in New York City in the mid 1960s, a time when jazz was starting to be hit economically by the popularity of rock ‘n’ roll and pop music, and when the scene was still dealing with the impact of Ornette and his followers’ new and innovative music.

The book gives an interesting snapshot of what life was like as a jazz musician at that time, and how things have changed. I was struck, as jazz musician in 2018, how a couple of the profiles described how barren things had been for the artist in question, save for the odd four or six week-long run at a particular club. I have no doubt that those guys had things infinitely tougher than I do in a multitude of ways, but most jazz musicians I know nowadays could only dream of even a week-long engagement in a single jazz club!

The section on Jackie McLean was of particular interest to me, with its tales of his encounters, as a fawning youngster, with Bird, and of McLean’s time as a teenager in Sugar Hill, Harlem, where he attended the same high school as Sonny Rollins. The area was an incredible hot house of jazz during the 1930s, ‘40s, 50s and beyond: Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, Billy Strayhorn and plenty of others lived in the area at various times, and the book describes how McLean and Rollins would go round to Bud Powell’s apartment to learn from the great pianist: Bud was around a six years than the two saxophonists and also a Harlem resident.

Louis Armstrong  would eventually come to live in New York too, and he is considered to be a figure in the ‘Harlem Renaissance’, but his book Satchmo: My Life In New Orleans deals with an earlier period in a place that was just as important in the development of jazz. Armstrong dropped out of school aged 11, and the conditions he describes are fairly shocking: Jim Crow laws were in operation and he was surrounded by poverty, prostitution and violence. But his writing style is distinctive and likeable, and he exudes nothing but warmth and generosity whilst describing the larger-than-life characters who inhabited his youth. New Orleans was of course central to the birth of jazz as ragtime fused with marching band music and other varied musical forms in the early 20th Century, and other key figures from the city around this time included Sidney Bechet, Buddy Bolden and Jelly Roll Morton. The book is filled with wonderful anecdotes and takes the reader up to 1922, when Armstrong moved to Chicago to join the band led by his idol, Joe ‘King’ Oliver.

As an aside, for more of an insight into Pops’ life and work, the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens, New York (where he settled with his wife Lucille in 1943) is extremely worth a visit!

And here’s an interview with A.B. Spellman, author of Four Lives.

The May issue of Jazz Journal features an interview I did last summer with David West. It’s mostly about my duo album with Michael Kanan, which was released shortly after David and I had this conversation. Hoping to have some more concerts scheduled with Michael soon!

I’m recently back from a fun trip to Spain recording with an international quintet featuring Jorge Rossy. We recorded in Jorge’s studio in Begues, a small town outside Barcelona, and the resulting album should be here in the not too distant future. The band (now called Jorge Rossy’s ‘Rebop’) also features Linus Eppinger on guitar, Tilman Oberbeck on double bass and Phelan Burgoyne on drums.

Jazz fan and photographer Joe McCarty documents the gigs at the White Horse in Bedford, which drummer Mark Hale presents to a faithful crowd each Monday. Here’s one Joe took of me. Check the rest of his photos here.

 

Happy to have some nice trio dates coming up this March and April. Check the flyers above for more info (click twice for full size), and click on the links in the list below for venue details/tickets. And here’s an interview/preview with London Jazz News. Hope to see you at one of them!

7 March – Hampstead Lounge & Jazz Club
16 March – Burdall’s Yard, Bath Spa Live
19 March – The White Horse, Bedford
21 March – The Flute & Tankard, Cardiff
31 March – The Bear Club, Luton
4 April – Kansas Smitty’s, Broadway Market

I was flattered to have my album included in a few jazz journalists’ ‘Best of 2017’ end of year lists recently, including these two really nice ones from Simon Adams and Dave Gelly in Jazz Journal:

I was also very happy to be included in Nick Lea’s list for Jazz Views and Tim Stenhouse’s list for UK Vibe. And I’ve updated the ‘Press’ section of this website with some other reviews the album received.

My album release tour with Michael Kanan seems like ages ago now, but we had great time and I’m finally getting round to putting up some videos from the album launch we did in Dalston, London.

There are four videos: two short promo clips (an extract from Cole Porter’s You Do Something To Me and an extract from Harry Barris’ Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams) and full length videos of The Sweetest Sounds and There’s a Small Hotel (both by Richard Rodgers). All videos filmed/edited by Palle Nodeland of Banquet films. Find out more about mine and Michael’s duo album here.