I was kindly invited to be interviewed on Radio 3’s Jazz Now programme a few weeks back. Emma Smith asked me some questions about influences, my album with Michael Kanan and our forthcoming tour, as well as playing a few tracks. You can listen to the whole show, which also features a broadcast of a…
Very happy to be welcoming Michael Kanan to the UK for the album release tour of our album, Golden Earrings. We’re playing eight gigs across a week in September. Hope you can join us! The dates are: 7th: Café Jazz, Cardiff 8th: The Verdict, Brighton* 9th: Norden Farm Centre for the Arts, Maidenhead* 10th: Seven…
I’m really looking forward to playing a set at the Vortex Jazz Club in Dalston this Tuesday 1st August, opening for incredible pianist and fellow Norfolk boy Kit Downes. Can’t wait to hear Kit’s set – he’ll be joined by Sam Lasserson on bass and Colin Stranahan, who’s over from New York, on drums. I’m playing with Conor Chaplin…
Very happy to say that my debut album, Golden Earrings, is being released on Fresh Sound New Talent Records on September 1st 2017. It’s a duo with the amazing New York pianist, Michael Kanan, and features compositions by the likes of Nat ‘King’ Cole, Duke Ellington, Jerome Kern, Victor Young, Irving Berlin, plus one original…
Born in 1928, Hampton Hawes was a pianist from Los Angeles who played with Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, Wardell Gray and Art Pepper. I just finished reading his autobiography, Raise Up Off Me, written with Don Asher, himself a jazz pianist as well as an author. I’d rate it as perhaps my favourite book about…
Some nice pictures from a few recent gigs: This photo of Guillem Arnedo’s band was taken by Eros Alvarez with a film camera at El Refugio Jazz Club in Alicante. This one is by Tom Saunders, who regularly takes photos at Dereham Jazz Club, where I played a set of Richards Rodgers songs. With…
Very much looking forward to playing some gigs this month with an international quintet put together by young London drummer Phelan Burgoyne and featuring the great Jorge Rossy on vibraphone. Best known as a drummer (and particularly for his role in Brad Mehldau’s trio from the mid ’90s to the mid ’00s), Jorge has, in more…
I have recently been listening to and reading about the work of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, one of the great writing partnerships of the American Songbook.
Bud Powell’s solo on Celia, the pianist’s own composition named for his daughter, is one of the great bebop performances. A real one-chorus-wonder, it appears on the album Jazz Giant, which comprises two trio sessions: one recorded in 1949 with Ray Brown and Max Roach, and one from 1950 with Roach and Curley Russell.