Recent Posts
New CD out!!
My new CD ‘Swinging the Changes’ (Arbors Jazz ARCD 19358) is finally out! It features myself with Bob Wilber and my London quartet. At the moment it is available from Arbors Jazz but will probably be on iTunes and other online stores soon. I’m going to be putting up some tracks on the ‘Recordings’ page […]
Continue reading...The literary reputation of saxophonists.
It seems the reputation of jazz saxophonists has reached the literary world at last. One of the books I am currently reading is ‘Brother Odd’ by Dean Koontz and I quote;
“Saxophone players tend to have an attitude”, I said. “I know a saxophonist who tore a guitar out of another musician’s hands and shot the […]
Warning:ofensiv, politikaly incorekt post
I flew over from Brazil on Thursday and, as usual, had raydio 4 on the raydio wen I was drivin out of Lundun. One of the subjeks on the program was wether Inglish shood becum fonetik as in sum uther youropian countries (sorry, had to spell that properly for any younger readers!!). Aparently, one in […]
Continue reading...Bob Florence dies at 75
I’ve just heard that Bob Florence died Thursday night, 5 days before his 76th birthday.
Continue reading...How well do you tell your story?
I’ve lived in Brazil now for 5 years. When I came here I spoke virtually no Portuguese whatsoever. Hello, please and thank you was about it. Obviously to make my self understood I had to learn, very quickly. After a year or so I could hold a conversation quite well and although my vocabulary wasn’t […]
Continue reading...Introducing the Judy Carmichael Septet
I’m taking a break from catching up on emails and I’d like to take this opportunity to tell you a bit about the band and the musicians therein because there are some names that you may not be familiar with. … That the band is going to be good, and put on a superb show goes with out saying - it is made up of THE best swing musicians in the world and led by the worlds leading stride pianist, Judy Carmichael .
Continue reading...Twitter not
Just a quickie. Back at home for day in the middle of the tour with Judy Carmichael. I was messing around with Twitter a while ago and finally signed up a few days before the tour started - the idea being to ‘Twitter’ away on the road and use them as small blogs. However, due […]
Continue reading...Web 2.0 - part 1
I’ve had a few emails from musicians who didn’t really know much about the tools and ideas I talked about in my last newsletter. I thought I was well behind in this new movement but it seems there are many musicians, especially in the jazz world, who aren’t sure what is going on. I’m going […]
Continue reading...The passing of another master
It is with great sadness that I report the passing of Jimmy Giuffre. He died on April 24th, 2 days before his 87th birthday.
Jimmy was one of the great individualists of the clarinet, always inventing and thinking outside the norm. His later, free playing unfortunately took him out of the mainstream jazz world but he […]
