Notes on Past Gigs

Last night we had two deps at this gig due to illness in the band , but they were amazing. We wish Neville Malcolm and Robin Aspland quick recoveries.  Jerry Logan was the bassist: he was the pulse of the band, inventive and accurate. Carl Hudson played piano and keyboard with intensity and joy. This was a band with power and love throughout the evening. We loved Dave Lewis’s raw, yet lyrical sound on tenor sax. Rod Youngs is a brilliant and very powerful drummer. There are some jazz singers with “little girl” voices, and those singing from the throat,…

Peter Fairman said “John was Burning!”. Steve and Dave were away. Miles Dagnall wrote the following review of this gig. If a rock band only needs three chords and the truth, what happens to the man who knows three thousand? Can he still maintain the authentic feeling expressed in the blues and marry it with the technique necessary for accomplished jazz playing ? This is John Etheridge so the answer is of course, ‘yes’. Ably supported by this edition of his Blue Spirits with Pete Whittaker on keys and George Double on Drums, the trio delivered a set full of…

Now this was special. Wonderful material written by Alan Barnes, and edited by Mark Nightingale, eight of the best players about having a great time, Alan’s telling of the story of the book, and a very happy audience. It has been many years since I had read Dickens’ “David Copperfield”, but Alan did a lovely job in giving us synopses for each of the songs. Every song, at least for me, evoked my memories of the book. He had a script to work from, but he was very aware of the audience so that he could ad lib when he…

We had a great evening of proper bebop on Wednesday. The numbers are interesting. Three of the musicians were greats that we have not seen in far too long: trumpet and flugeler Steve Waterman, pianist Leon Greening and bassist Jeremy Brown. Jeremy was A12ed and M25ved, so we started a bit late. It was a delight to welcome Glen Manby to the club. Glen is an altoist, composer, arranger, teacher. Drummer Joe Dessaeuer was new to everybody. But Joe fit right in, played with excellence and accuracy in the first set. In the second set, he really loosened up, grinning…

If you are looking for joyous music, look no farther than Derek Nash and his Acoustic Quartet. Multi-(and mighty-)saxophonist Derek has been travelling with pianist David Newton, bassist Geoff Gascoyne and drummer Sebastiaan de Krom for some years. They played  at  Fleece Jazz in  2014. It would have  been apparent to anyone in  he audience that had not known the group, that the group were very top drawer musicians who knew each other very well. So every cue was spot on, obligatos in the mind of the soloist, all that professional stuff. But it was also as if it was…