Last year the director of the Cheltenham Jazz Festival started noticing me at lots of Free Improvisation gigs, and when I became an e-list TV comedian, he wondered if I might be able to help program and promote a new strand of experimental jazz during the festivities. I agreed, and suddenly the promotional duties are…
Over the May bank holiday weekend, the Cheltenham Jazz Festival bends its boundaries a little, making space for a music that’s entering its fifth decade of sustainable cult status, despite minimal airplay, minimal subsidy, and dismissal from mainstream critics. I’ve been pulled in to help promote three nights of so-called Free Improvisation, under the banner…
Islington’s Union Chapel is a foreboding venue for rock musicians. Its vaulted Victorian interior amplifies and supports the unplugged guitar or the naked human voice, but electrify the proceedings and indecipherable white noise bounces round the buttresses. Sometimes the holy formality of the space adds a magical, crispy frosting to an event, but sometimes it…
I bought my jukebox, a 1974 Wurlitzer Americana 3800, in the Spring of 1999. She holds 200 7” singles, gives off the purple glow of a fading radioactive sunset, hums like a fifties refrigerator, and reminds you what records were supposed to sound like, – not thin and compressed into machine computer code, but vast,…
The booker at Dalston’s doughty Vortex club introduces the opening night of London Jazz Festival sponsored events defensively; “ It’s business as usual here at the Vortex”. The club crowns the bend in an underground river of London jazz venues, that once surfaced in the back room of the Red Rose in Finsbury park, but…