A Little Late Blogging

In order to remind you that tomorrow night, (May 30^th) at The Hedsor Social Club we have an almost complete collection of The Clive Burton Quintet. OK, due to Ken Rankine’s argument with the floor we will have a dep bass player, but do come along, you may be in for a big surprise, which will require a round of applause!

Its been a few week since we heard Mike Wills with the reed section, but this week he will be at Hedsor Jazz!!

Next week (June 6^th ) is a very special night for Hedsor when we welcome in for the first time lady saxophonist Karen Sharp. Karen was at one time a member of the Humphrey Lyttleton Band, and is a wonderful full bodied tenor player. OK wise guys, I mean that in a musical sense, but she wont hurt your eyes either!! 

She has played with various members of our wonderful regular quintet before, but this will be her first outing with the entire ensemble!! Do come along, bring your dependants and tell your friends, we must stop Hedsor Jazz being the best-kept secret in The Thames Valley!!

Did any of you watch the Trad Britannia and Smoky Dives programmes? I must say they brought a great deal of nostalgia to my eyes, as I remember many of the interiors shown. I was interested in the comment one old bouncer from the Cy Laurie Club made that it was a far safer place (Soho) in those far off days than it is now!!

With the tears of nostalgia still in my eyes I sought out to play one or two CD’s of music from the period.

BUT I bet you will find it hard to believe there is one with Acker Bilk AND Stan Tracey!! Well it has some other wonderful British players on it as well, including Tony Coe, Kenny Wheeler, and Keith Christie too! 

“Blue Acker” came out on LP in 1968, I have the original LP, but also the reissue on CD, which includes 6 extra tracks that were originally issued on an LP entitled “We Love You Madly”, (which if you can find an LP of it will cost you around £50)!

Artwork for said Lake reissue is above. It’s very well recorded, and all the arrangements are by Stan Tracey, so it is definitely the best of British Modern Jazz of its era. LACD218 is the number.

Another CD that I have managed to pick up this week in a charity shop is even older, (but of course, not as old as me!). A German reissue of the 1944 Esquire New York Concert. It was broadcast and recorded (V Disk) for the American Forces. You can see from the artwork the line up is stellar. The recording is very reasonable, and the music is just wonderful. Billy Holiday’s “Billies Blues” is just perfection. OK so I only paid £1.60 for it, but you can still get it from Amazon etc from around £10.

OK, enough of me tempting you to spend money for an at home event. That New York concert had a lot of people listening to it. To keep jazz live, you need a collection of people called an audience! See you at Hedsor Social Club on Thursday, ANY THURSDAY!