Scott Yanow review

One of the songs I picked for my recent duo recording with Michael Kanan was Way Down Yonder in New Orleans. Written in 1922 by Turner Layton and Henry Creamer, the African-American songwriting team also responsible for the more well-known After You’ve Gone, Way Down Yonder seems to only really be played by more trad/Dixieland…

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…

I’m looking forward to playing some trio dates on a mini tour of South-Western England in February 2025. I’ll be joined by the award-winning Scottish double bassist Andrew Robb and first-call drummer Steve Brown (Scott Hamilton, Barry Harris) on drums and we’ll be playing my arrangements of songs by Gershwin, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Kurt Weill…

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.

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.  

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…