Swanage Jazz Festival has the most stunning setting with the Mowlem Theatre sited at the water’s edge and the lovely greenfield site of Sandpit Field overlooking Swanage Bay.  Last year was blisteringly hot and the mix of Jazz, sea, and boats anchored in bright sunshine was irresistible.

As an organiser I get to see short fragments of the 60+ bands we have in the Festival programme. For me there are three things I relish; putting together a well-balanced diverse programme of quality music, making sure the Festival is well organised and runs to time and thirdly, hearing and feeling the love and joy from artists and audiences. You can’t beat it!

Full Programme by Day

Friday 7 July From 4pm

James Taylor Quartet

Tony Kofi’s Inside Straight

The Alan Barnes Quartet

Rainey’s Ragtime Band

Fletch’s Brew

The Philip Clouts Quartet

The Damian Cook Quintet

Saturday 8 July From 10.30am

Festival New Orleans Parade with James Emmett’s Ragtime Revellers

Claire Martin and her Trio

Alina Bzhezhinska Hip Harp Collective with Vimala Rowe

Alyn Shipton’s New Orleans Jazz Friends

The Arun Ghosh Band

The Nigel Price/Alessio Menconi Quartet

The Norma Winstone Trio – with Nikki Iles and Mark Lockheart

The Rebecca Nash Band

The Isobella Burnham Sextet

The Martin Dale Quartet

Perfect Houseplants

The Craig Milverton Quintet

Jon Lloyd’s European Quartet

The Roger Beaujolais Quartet

Yetii

Thokozile

Soldoro

James Emmett’s Ragtime Revellers

Tad Newton’s Jazz Friends

The Dart Valley Stompers

Sunday 9 July from 10am

Methodist Church Jazz and Gospel service with Alyn Shipton’s New Orleans Jazz Friends

Zara McFarlane Tribute to Sara Vaughan

Issie Barratt’s Interchange

Get The Blessing

Chris Hodgkins’ Salute to Humphrey Lyttelton

The Re-Birth Octet Plays Miles Davis

The Dave O’Higgins/Rob Luft Band

The Misha Mullov-Abbado Sextet

The Leo Richardson Quartet

The Corrie Dick Sextet

The Sound of Blue Note with Mark Nightingale

The Dylan Ross Jazz Collective

One Good Scandal – Nicki Leighton-Thomas sings Fran Landesman

Invisible Apples

Julia Titus as Ma Bessie with Mike Denham and Steve Graham

Tony Waller’s Prohibition Jazz

Chris Walker’s Pedigree Jazzmen

Ticket prices are £130 for the Weekend stroller, £80 for a Saturday or Sunday Stroller and £40 for a Friday Stroller. Heavily discounted tickets are available for accompanied Under 16s.  Residents of BH19 (Swanage) will be entitled to a 10% discount and details of how that will run will be advertised in the Dorset press in March.  A weekend stroller ticket will give access to over 40 bands.  As in 2022 the Festival will also be staging a free Fringe Festival in local pubs and hotels.

The post Swanage Jazz Festival 2023 Programme Announced first appeared on UK Jazz News.

In 2015 Lawry released ‘Taking Pictures’ a well-produced album of nicely shaped, well, pop songs really. Her 2017 album ‘The Bathtub and the Sea’ was in a similar vein. And now, six years later, Lawry has returned to her jazz roots (she came second in the 2005 National Jazz Awards of Australia), stripped everything back and recorded an album of just voice, double bass and drums. When I caught her at Poole’s Sound Cellar on the first night of her brief European tour she told me, ‘I did ten years of rock and pop and I wanted to get back to my jazz roots. I also wanted to challenge myself’. 

Challenge herself she has done on ‘Acrobats’, with New Yorkers Linda May Han Oh on double bass and Allison Miller on drums. To sing without the support or accompaniment of any form of harmony instrument puts the vocalist in a naked and potentially scary place. There is little to fall back on and much to go wrong. It requires a particularly good voice, a fine-tuned ear and a great deal of flexibility, especially to sustain it over a whole album. ‘Acrobats’ proves that Lawry has the necessary voice and technique and she approaches the challenge with confidence and imagination. 

The ten tunes on ‘Acrobats’ are mostly standards – with three by ‘Guys and Dolls’ composer Frank Loesser, but all done in a way that you probably haven’t encountered before. Lawry has an appealing voice at the upper end of the vocal spectrum and she sings with little vibrato. She lacks some of the earthiness of some jazz singers, but makes up for it with a clarity and precision that is impressive especially on the faster numbers. Live she can scat as well as the great Annie Ross, and possibly better. She also has considerable range and has the technique to take phrases across that awkward vocal bridge from upper to lower registers. She can also sing a nice story.

‘Acrobats’ opens with Travelling Light, not the 1959 Cliff Richard hit (heaven forbid!), but one of the lesser known Frank Loesser tunes from ‘Guys and Dolls’ (as Sebastian writes in his interview with Lawry, link below, the tune is little known on account of it being cut just before curtain up on the show’s opening night!).

On Vernon Duke’s Taking a Chance On Love, Lawry pushes the harmonic centre so it seems to slip into one or more keys in the opening section. It could easily pass for a mistake. It’s anything but and demonstrates considerable skill. She takes Cole Porter’s You’re the Top at a brisk pace starting with just voice and brushes with Allison Miller’s drums dancing behind skittish vocals as if she were Fred Astaire. On Deed I Do, Miller’s percussive accompaniment creates delightful near harmonies with Lawry’s voice. The brilliant and mercurial Lennie Tristano seems to have dropped off the jazz repertoire. Jo Lawry treats his 317 East 32^nd St as if it were a long, winding avenue rather than a fixed place, scatting his twisting theme and then improvising wandering bebop phrases, slurring them across bar lines so you can never quite tell whether it’s in three or four time. 

Underlying all of this is Oh’s fleet double bass playing. It provides periodic harmonic reference points. But on some numbers rather than play that traditional bass role of anchoring the music to a particular place or sequence it seems to be more of a conversational partner. That’s also the feel of Miller’s delicately placed drums, mostly snare and brushes with occasional delicately struck cymbals. But if this suggests a complete deconstruction of loved jazz standards, rest assured much of this is well-crafted embellishment and the core of the songs remains there to hear and enjoy.

Taken overall, ‘Acrobats’ is the sort of jazz equivalent to a fasting weekend, with all those rich and sugary harmonies and accompaniments put aside, allowing the listener to focus on the melodic line – and of course the words. I can’t think of any other singers who have done a whole album in this vein. It’s a refreshing and impressive feat and more listenable than the format might suggest. It’s also a CD that every aspiring jazz singer should listen to. 

‘Acrobats’ closes as it opens with another Frank Loesser tune from ‘Guys and Dolls’. Jo Lawry’s If I Were A Bell starts with just the rhythm section and is bracketed on the CD as “soundcheck”. If that’s a soundcheck, then it’s a pleasure just to hear this trio warm up. 
 
Acrobats is released on Whirlwind Recordings on 10 February.

The post Jo Lawry – ‘Acrobats’ first appeared on UK Jazz News.

The evening kicked off with a fast paced ‘Dear Johnny B’ from Hayes’ celebrated Mexican Green album, crisply performed with Alan Barnes soloing on alto and a screaming trumpet solo from Mark Armstrong. The first set continued with the swinging ‘As Close As You Are’ with a snaking sax solo from Spillett and further solos from trumpeter Freddie Gavita and Alec Dankworth on bass. ‘Pedro’s Walk’ was a cod-Spanish flavoured piece by Ian Hamer with a fine but under mic’d tenor solo from Alex Clarke. Milt Jackson’s ‘Bluesology’ featured a piercing brass intro leading to a Rob Barron piano solo and a rich and languid alley-cat tenor solo from Robert Fowler accompanied by Pete Cater’s lightly swinging drums. ‘Soft and Supple’, which emerged from Hayes’s partnership with Ellington saxist Paul Gonsalves, featured Alex Clarke on flute and a richly warm baritone sax solo from Karen Sharp. A swiftly paced ‘Milestones’ featured a blustering and near unstoppable trombone solo from Mark Nightingale, while ‘She Insulted Me in Marrakesh’ (where did Tubby get these titles from?) was a foray into early 70s jazz funk that started with a Billy Taylor-ish brass chorale and led to a bluesy alto solo from Simon Allen. And that was just the first set.

Before each number Simon Spillett gave us a fluent and authoritative background to the pieces, talking about Tubby Hayes and the times he inhabited. Spillett is not only an outstanding tenor sax player but has grown into one of Britain’s leading authorities on the history of British Jazz. He punctuates his research and scholarship with wry humour which makes it very palatable.

The Big Band’s second set featured numbers from Ian Hamer, Jimmy Deuchar, Harry South, Victor Feldman and Tubby Hayes himself. These were stellar jazz composers and arrangers of that period, something we have perhaps forgotten as other writers and styles emerged in the 1970s and beyond. The performances featured crisp ensemble work and outstanding solos from this top quality ensemble. In particular Mark Armstrong played a filigree flugelhorn solo on Horace Silver’s ‘Peace’, Ian Bateman provided tailgate trombone on the Bond-ish ‘Russian Roulette’ and on ‘Seven Steps To Heaven’ bandleader Spillett gave us a blasting tenor solo backed by huge descending ensemble phrases. The night finished with a fast paced ‘Sonnymoon For Two’ with a roaring tenor battle between Alex Clarke and Robert Fowler, youth versus experience.

Simon Spillett’s Big Band has all the ingredients for an excellent jazz evening; great charts, superb players and a show informed by deftly imparted expert knowledge. The music itself is not pushing any boundaries in the manner of say, a Maria Schneider. This is repertoire jazz, very well chosen and very well delivered. But if that seems a put down, the classical music world has been trading off repertoire for the last 250 years and has done quite well in the process. Our British Jazz repertoire also needs celebrating and this band does it to a tee.

The post Simon Spillett Big Band play the music of Tubby Hayes at the Concorde Club first appeared on UK Jazz News.

Poole’s Sound Cellar was established by local guitarist Rob Palmer 10 years ago, and among the leading names who have appeared there are Jason Rebello, Laura Jurd, Phil Robson, Theo Travis, Jim Mullen, Henry Lowther, Julian Siegel, Martin Speake, Kit Downes, Michael Janisch, Mike Outram, Becca Stevens….

During the pandemic it kept musicians going with a series of streamed events, and it now live-streams many of its concerts. Having started out in an atmospheric brick cellar bar – now lost to fine dining – Sound Cellar now operates in the homely high-ceilinged upstairs function room of a large Edwardian pub. The room will hold about 50 or so (it was packed for Mike Outram and Ross Stanley a fortnight ago) so has all the advantages of intimacy.

Last Thursday saw the debut of a new group, guitarist Nick Costley-White’s top-flight quartet featuring Ivo Neame on Fender Rhodes, Conor Chaplin on bass and Lewis Wright on Drums. Their set was a mix of Costley-White originals and standards like ‘Maiden Voyage’.

Following a loping mid-tempo blues opener, the band launched into Costley-White’s Brazilian-inspired ‘Chóro No 1’, a colourfully intense piece with unison guitar and piano lines that faintly reminded me of Egberto Gismonti’s wonderful ‘Loro’. It segued into what seemed like a purposefully disjointed samba with ostinato closing lines.

They took Fran Landesman’s classic ‘Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most’ at an elegantly stately pace. Costley-White’s new tune ‘Must It Be’ that followed seems to shape-shift between 6/8 and 4/4 and featured an intense Ivo Neame Fender Rhodes piano solo. That distinctive sound takes you right back to Joe, Herbie, Chick and our own, much-missed, John Taylor.

Resonating guitar chords opened the second set and were a prelude to ‘Maiden Voyage’ one of Costley-White’s favourites with a fine arpeggiated guitar solo full of leaping phrases. ‘Sputnik Sweetheart’ another original featured a fine Bass solo by Conor Chaplin and a fleet guitar solo. For those who have not had the pleasure, Costley-White is a fluent clean-toned guitarist whose playing and compositions use a post-bop harmonic language with rich harmonic changes and periodic ambiguous uses of rhythm.

The second set finished with new Covid-produced original drily titled ‘Staying at Home’. A fast-moving boppish start led, after solos, into a concluding series of ziggurat-like harmonic ascents. It was a satisfyingly intense way to end a fine debut concert.

At the very start, before launching into the night’s first tune, Nick Costley-White described getting an extreme case of stage fright on his first post-Covid gig after a considerable layoff. Audiences possibly don’t fully realise that artistic confidence comes not just from practice and skill but from public engagement. Costley-White’s honesty was endearing. His and the quartet’s performance was engaging. A fine combination. Put this new quartet on your watch list.

Future Sound Cellar dates include Nigel Kennedy Band guitarist Sagat Guirey’s Known Unknowns, (27 Jan) The Adam Glasser/Hans Riepler Quartet (3 Feb), and John Law’s Congregation (17 Feb), with more to be announced shortly. 

Sound Cellar also has a substantial video archive, including Nick Costley White from 2018, and the “In Our Own Space” series from lockdown.

The post NCW4 (Nick Costley-White 4) first gig at Sound Cellar first appeared on UK Jazz News.