When I think of a vibrant cultural hub in South East London, Woolwich is not the first destination that comes to my mind. Once an important naval, military and industrial area, it has been for some years undergoing extensive urban regeneration supported by Greenwich Council and other property developers. Some of those investments are already […]
A musician’s reflections on the effects of the Coronavirus crisis What a thing it is to be a musician: to write and arrange music, to practise and rehearse, to play and perform. In so many ways, I am perfectly suited to this enforced self-isolation. I spend so much time alone as it is, and always […]
If the following doesn’t quite hang together in a completely cogent manner please forgive me. I’m suffering from too little sleep and rather more specifically from the kind of all over sense of relief that comes when something you’ve sweated over, obsessed about, and previously only considered the stuff of bucket lists and dreams finally […]
Now it’s February, and everyone’s “Best Of 2019” lists are in, which means that culture journalists now have to cast around for some new content after an easy January. Of course this year they had to choose between a ‘Best Of 2019’ and a ‘Best Of The Decade’ – the latter now an implausible confection, […]
Buster Mantis was alive yesterday celebrating 1 year of Champion Sounds – a weekly improvised groove-jazz session that happens every Wednesday. The energy felt in the packed room was massive and the brilliant line-up gifted us with a set of unforgettable real-time music-creation completely off the charts. The names are well known in the scene […]
Now here’s a market stall purchase I’m delighted to have made quite by chance earlier today. ‘The Observer’s Book of Jazz’, published in 1978 by Frederick Warne Ltd., was one of the first books I ever read on the music – perhaps even THE first, it’s hard to recall at this distance. Yet I remember […]
So…where to begin? I was honoured to be among the sixty saxophonists chosen to close the Ronnie Scott’s 60th Anniversary concert at the Royal Albert Hall, a logistical feat that required – as Ronnie himself might have put it – ‘the cunning of a sewer rat and the timing of a Swiss watch.’ The bulk […]
In his biography of Debussy, Eric Frederick Jensen records a conversation between the great pianist and composer and his friend and mentor Ernest Giraud. Debussy plays a series of intervals on the piano – notated in the book as impossible-to-parse mix of apparently random clusters and wider leaps – and Giraud asks him what they […]
There’s Always Someone Looking At You: The Peculiar World of the Jazz ‘Recordist’ I was on a gig the other night when a man noisily elbowed his way through the door of the venue, pushing what looked for all the world like some sort of portable defibrillator unit, mounted on a wire frame and […]
This June saw the sad passing of the universally respected British music executive, columnist, record producer and radio DJ Tony Hall. Hall’s achievements span across the whole spectrum of post-war popular music: anyone whose name can be positively linked to figures as diverse as Ronnie Scott and Black Sabbath deserves a special place in the […]