The concept was to take well-loved standards which had all been originally written as instrumentals (though some have had words added subsequently) and to write demanding arrangements for this particular rhythm section and group of soloists. The idea worked for me, more than a recent gig I went to whose concept was to play little-known tunes by great composers … maybe they are little known for a reason!

The band opened with “Straight No Chaser”, after which Mark kindly explained that the arrangement included no less than 18 quotes from other Monk numbers. I felt ashamed – I think I caught three. Bebop imbued the arrangement and the solos throughout (and indeed much of the rest of the gig); “A Night in Tunisia” came next followed by “Round Midnight”, then a brief excursion into Herbie Hancock territory with “Cantaloupe Island”. “Ornithology” closed the first set; I was grateful for Mark’s explanation beforehand that “there are so many notes to fit in that the bars are 6/4 instead of 4/4”! For me the idea worked brilliantly and typified the originality and creativity which musicians of this calibre can deploy on a tune they must all have played literally hundreds of times before.

The second set opened with a fast version of “Desafinado” with James Davison on flugel. This was technically brilliant, especially the ensemble bebop version of the head as the outro, but I personally would rather have heard it played slower and the tune caressed – exactly as Alan Barnes did beautifully with “Take Five”, mainly accompanied just by Graham Harvey. “Skylark” and Kenny Barron’s “Voyage” followed, and the set closed with a rip-roaring “St Thomas”, with Mark’s trombone doing a great job of imitating the hooter of the steamer entering the island’s harbour.

Alan Barnes unselfishly asked Mark Nightingale to announce most of the tunes, which he did with typical wit and erudition, but took over the mike himself occasionally to ensure that the audience appreciated Mark’s arrangements. They clearly did, and also his remarkable command of his instrument, surely unmatched in this country. Alan Barnes is of course equally a master of the alto sax; it gave me enormous pleasure to see the much younger James Davison (ex-NYJO, like Mark) holding his own in the front line with these two maestros.

Among the many impressive things about the band was the way they combined the ability to sight-read ferociously demanding brand-new arrangements and solo creatively when asked to do so. I found myself wondering, “What is the equivalent situation for equally outstanding musicians working exclusively in western classical music?” I’m sure they must have equally enjoyable musical experiences – but I struggle to see how they can equate to the extraordinary range of abilities on show with an improvising band like this one. A great evening of marvellous music by wonderful musicians to an appreciative full house. Please keep doing it, we love it.

Personnel

Alan Barnes alto sax
Mark Nightingale trombone & all arrangements
James Davison trumpet & flugelhorn
Graham Harvey piano
Jeremy Brown double bass
Ian Thomas drums

The post Mark Nightingale – Alan Barnes Sextet first appeared on UK Jazz News.

The quality and diversity of her writing and arrangements were remarkable. Kenny Wheeler is clearly an influence, as would be expected of a recent graduate of the RAM, but Emma’s personal voice came through loud and clear, notably in some original and striking guitar voicings which David Preston handled sensitively and tastefully.  One of my party, a trombonist, was particularly impressed by a workout for bass trombone; we were all knocked out by Emma’s use of Immy Churchill’s lovely voice as an integral part of the orchestral textures. With one exception – Joni Mitchell’s Woodstock – all the pieces were Emma originals; this can be a risky strategy for a young musician, but here it paid off 100%,  every number fully deserving its place on the gig. Having said that, ‘Woodstock’ was a standout, partly because it gave Immy Churchill a chance to be a lead vocalist rather than an instrument. To my ears she was a little down in the mix, but it was still a great arrangement.  

Among a mostly young band made up mainly of Emma’s friends from RAM and NYJO, two senior players stood out – Mark Lockheart on tenor and Nick Smart on trumpet, both featured on gorgeous solos. It was good to hear Emma thanking both for their influence on her playing, and also Ant Law who was watching from a stool at the bar – uncomfortable but the best listening spot in the Club. Given my NYJO background, it’s no surprise that I enjoyed seeing an all-NYJO-alumni tenor trombone section, James Copus among the trumpets and Tom Smith in the baritone chair, including a bass clarinet part which made full use of that instrument’s unique texture, unusual in big band arrangements. Emma’s own playing had complete technical mastery but always with a very musical objective and a precise creation of the desired mood. The ease with which she switched from soloing to directing the band was remarkable, and the smile with which she did it lit up the room.

All credit to Ronnie’s for booking the Emma Rawicz Jazz Orchestra and giving them two separate houses; both were sold out, and (at the first house at least) to an attentive audience which clearly appreciated  the quality of what they were listening to.  Memo to the Club: please make this an annual feature.

First show

Particles of Change
A Portrait of Today
La Madrugada
Woodstock
Rangwali
Voodoo
Middle Ground
Vera

Second show

Anima Rising
A Portrait of Today
Woodstock
Waldeinsamkeit
Rangwali
Middle Ground
La Madrugada
Particles of Change

The post Emma Rawicz Jazz Orchestra first appeared on UK Jazz News.

Art Mead was one of the unsung heroes of British jazz, one of the many behind-the-scenes supporters of the art form who make the jazz scene as vibrant as it is in spite of the cultural establishment. It’s an honour to record his contribution to jazz, and in particular to headline the fact that in 2007 he invented and established what became the prestigious Dankworth Prizes for Jazz Composition.

Art was a successful businessman, with a BSc in Physics & Mathematics, who loved jazz from an early age. Once he had sold Protech, the electronics company he had built from scratch with two friends, he was able to devote his time, energy, knowledge of jazz and independent means to supporting the music that he loved. His main vehicle for this was JazzOrg, a community-focused resource-sharing set-up based on a website which Art developed and coded personally in the days before WordPress & Wix. He used this to make youth band arrangements freely available to anyone who wanted them, along with a personal blog offering his thoughts on the jazz scene, always with a humorous twist and often with a Ronnie Scott joke. The site had achieved over 3 million hits by Art’s 80^th birthday in 2015.

Art’s most enduring jazz achievement was to establish the JazzOrg prizes for Original Jazz Composition for young composers, which eventually became the Dankworth Prizes (of which more later). A competent MD and bass player with the Mid Herts Jazz Orchestra and several other bands, Art took lessons in jazz composition from Allan Ganley, John Dankworth’s drummer for many years and a noted composer in his own right. This led him to establishing an annual competition for original jazz compositions by young musicians, for big band and small-to-medium ensemble, with cash prizes that Art funded personally along with general expenses. At that time I chaired the jazz committee of the Worshipful Company of Musicians; Art approached me to suggest that the prizes would be more prestigious if they were promoted jointly by JazzOrg and the Company, and – after consulting colleagues Leslie East and Tim Garland – I was delighted to agree a partnership approach with Art.

Les, Tim & I were greatly taken with Art’s personality and style; he was warm, businesslike, generous and clearly in it for the good of the music and not for any personal glory. Together we refined the concept in a series of conference calls and emails and agreed that the judges of the first competition would be Frank Griffith (an old friend of Art’s) and Tim Garland himself. We announced the first competition in early 2008, there was an adequate number of entries, and the winners were James Hamilton (Leeds College of Music, big band) and Nicky Jacques (Birmingham Conservatoire, small band). We were up and running !

Art being the engineer that he was, his immediate reaction was to improve version one and trial version two. Between us we came up with the following ideas : get the winner’s pieces played live as part of their prize at a concert in a prestigious location, increase the prize money, and get a big name to endorse the whole thing. That’s exactly what we did ! Simon Purcell (then Head of Jazz at Trinity Laban) and a member of the Company’s Jazz Committee offered a live concert by the Trinity Big Band under Malcolm Earle Smith, and Art suggested to me that John Dankworth (also a member of the Jazz Committee) might allow his name to be attached to the award. I was deputed to request Sir John’s permission; the conversation should go on the record, so here it is as it happened:

Nigel : John, we would like to re-name Art Mead’s award as the John Dankworth Award for Jazz Composition.

John Dankworth : No Nigel, I won’t let you do that. Call it the Dankworth Award for Jazz Composition: that way you get four for the price of one.

We approached Ronnie Scott’s Club with the idea that the winning pieces would be played as part of a Trinity concert playing John Dankworth’s wonderful Zodiac Suite in its entirety. With the strong support of Ronnie’s MD James Pearson, the concert took place on Sunday 26 January 2009 with JD and Art and his family in the front row; the prize-winning pieces by James Beckwith and Matt Roberts climaxed the first half. A fitting culmination for Art of a life supporting jazz.

The prizes have of course grown in importance and prestige since 2009, exactly as Art foresaw. The panel of judges now regularly includes Nikki Iles, Jason Yarde, Callum Au and Josephine Davies as well as Tim Garland and Frank Griffith. Importantly, the Dankworth Prizes were joined in the Musicians’ Company portfolio by the Eddie Harvey Jazz Arranger Award in 2014, funded by the Harvey family, who were impressed by the success of the Dankworth Prizes and felt that an award commemorating Eddie would sit nicely alongside them. Art of course concurred and was delighted to see the synergy between the awards grow as musicians like Billy Marrows and Charlie Bates won both.

Art and I became good friends as we worked together on the Dankworth Prizes, so when I became Executive Chair of NYJO in 2009 I regularly turned to him for advice and the opportunity to discuss things with a wise and experienced colleague. He generously sponsored a Chair in the orchestra and came to concerts and open days to see how NYJO was progressing; if I had a tough problem to resolve I would call him. He was the ideal consigliere – never diverted the conversation to himself, always put himself in my shoes and then offered objective practical advice.

I’ll leave the last words to Nikki Iles, who called me as soon as she heard of Art’s death. The word she kept using was “warm” – “ he was such a warm man, so unselfish, always interested in me and how I was rather than wanting to talk about himself. And he loved the music for all the right reasons.”

Jazz will miss Art Mead, and so will I. RIP.

The post Art Mead (1935–2024) first appeared on UK Jazz News.

Nigel Tully writes: My friend and fellow-bandleader Anthony Colwyn died two weeks ago of Covid-related complications following a long illness.

Anthony’s love of jazz started as a schoolboy trumpeter, when he first heard the great Humphrey Lyttleton and realised that there was more to music than the then narrow version of western classical music taught at Cheltenham College. He and his pianist friend Jim Beach (later famous as manager of Queen) started a band called The Autocrats which basically played the kind of music which its members liked; in Anthony’s case this was traditional Dixieland jazz. This continued when Jim went to Cambridge University while Anthony went to London to read dentistry; the music they made together was so full of infectious fun that Anthony became an honorary member of the Cambridge Footlights, where his gigs included the annual Footlights visit to the Edinburgh Festival alongside fellow-members John Cleese and Eric Idle.

Although Anthony was fully committed to his professional career as a dentist, he ensured that he could always pursue his first love of playing live gigs as often as possible. In the ‘60s the Autocrats became famous on the “society dance-band” scene, gradually recruiting professional musicians to replace school and university friends and building the band up to its normal 9-piece version. (Full disclosure: its only rival was my own band The Dark Blues, a more rock- and pop-oriented outfit. Any society party worth the name in the 60s and 70s booked one or other of us, so of course we almost never met. In later years Anthony delighted in telling the story of how The Autocrats lost out to The Dark Blues as the band for Prince Charles’s (as he was) 21^st birthday party but turned the tables when he was booked to play for the Queen and Prince Philip’s ruby wedding party).

Anthony changed the name to “The 3B Band“ (for third Baron), and then to “The Lord Colwyn Band”. He knew that, as a dance band leader, his job was to fill the floor and keep people dancing, which he did with an eclectic mix of trad jazz, calypso, the occasional pop song and a selection from the movie “The Jungle Book”, featuring “I’m the King of the Swingers” and “Bear Necessities”. He particularly enjoyed singing in the manner of Louis Armstrong until an attack of whooping cough meant that he could no longer imitate the famous growl. But his love of jazz meant that his favourite gigs were jam sessions in a pub, at which his fellow musicians would play for almost no pay because they were such fun, or the day after a country wedding party when – having stayed somewhere local overnight – the band would re-join the party the following lunchtime and play the jazz they loved for no extra charge.

Anthony and I became friends in later life through our shared love of jazz (mine more of modern jazz than his was; he remained committed to the greats of Dixieland) and our desire to see the cultural establishment give jazz the respect that we both felt it does not get, though things are improving. He was a hard-working chair of APPJAG (the All-Party Parliamentary Jazz Appreciation Group), energetically promoting its events and awards. He was of course a member of the Musicians’ Union – perhaps the only hereditary Tory peer who was a union member. He spoke regularly in the House of Lords about the importance and value of jazz and was particularly energised by the “two in a bar” legislation which made it so difficult for jazz bands to play in pubs. He was also a founder director of Jazz FM alongside Dave Lee and Sir John Dankworth.

He became a vice president of NYJO while I was chair there; he was immensely supportive of the work of NYJO, and always gave a sympathetic ear to its challenges. On a personal note, one of the reasons we bonded was that we both knew that we were not the best players in our respective bands, but we were proud of being the best bandleaders. We both also had professions to which we were equally committed; there was no question that when there was a choice, music came first, but the day-jobs gave each of us a helpful additional perspective and also benefitted enormously from our lives as working musicians.

This is not the place to review Anthony-the-dentist except to say that many musicians were grateful to him for looking after them personally, with a very sympathetic attitude to fees. But the way to remember him is as a fun-loving joyous bandleader, delighting audiences and fellow band members with his trumpet-playing, witty announcements, and general air of bonhomie which somehow communicated itself to the entire dance floor or pub where he was playing.

My thoughts and very best wishes go to his widow Nicky Colwyn, who supported Anthony’s musical life so strongly and was always there for him.

Ian Anthony Hamilton-Smith, 3rd Baron Colwyn. Born 1 January 1942. Died 4 August 2024. In sadness.

The post Anthony Colwyn (1942–2024) first appeared on UK Jazz News.