A quiet night with Art Themen.

We made it back to our Jazz Club at The Red Lion, Isleworth - it's been a long time.

It was a treat for me; one of Art Themen's occasional visits to the club.

I love his unrestrained bebob.....unfortunately it was just a bit restrained. The line up was Trevor Tomkins on drums, Robin Aspland on keyboards, Dave Green on bass and Henry Lowther on trumpet and flugelhorn.

We got a lot of Henry's thoughtful and quiet compositions, some standards but not so much of the bop I love, although we did get a few Thelonious Monk pieces.

Ah well, can't win them all!

Neil Harris
(a don't stop till you drop production)
Home: helpmesortoutstpeters.blogspot.com
Contact me: neilwithpromisestokeep@gmail.com

'Standard Miles' with Simon Spillett and Henry Lowther at the Red Lion, Isleworth.

I got very excited on Monday for a special night at The Red Lion, Isleworth.

Trevor Tomkins (drums), Simon Spillett (sax), Henry Lowther (trumpet), John Critchinson (keys) and Dave Green (bass) appear occasionally as "Standard Miles"; 

Putting together a collection of Jazz Standards that were very much a part of Miles Davis's programme and play them in that style.

It's very much not a tribute act, just jazz played in the style of another era and played very well.

there was a lot of mute trumpet, which I really like and Simon Spillett was something special on sax;

I must admit I wasn't particularly well and the bad news just keeps on coming but it was a very nice evening of special music.

Neil Harris
(a don't stop till you drop production)
Home: helpmesortoutstpeters.blogspot.com
Contact me: neilwithpromisestokeep@gmail.com

Art Themen at The Red Lion..

Monday night saw me and Robyn at The Red Lion, Isleworth for the Jazz.

These days I find the stools unbearable - by about 1000pm I'm in agony.

All the same nothing would see me missing Art Themen (above left). When I was on three monthly hospital appointments (and everything was going wrong very quickly) it always coincided with Art's three monthly visits and I used it to cheer myself up.

He doesn't come so often these days, which is a shame.

Art is a leading exponent of Bebop and has been doing that for quite a while - since I was young!

This time he was a bit more subdued, playing with Henry Lowther whose trumpet style is a lot more mellow;

 

 

And tonight you get a rare sighting of Trevor Tomkins who hides on the back row, normally. John Horler was on keyboards and Dave Green on bass.

 

Oh, was I glad to get up by the end of the evening!

 

Neil Harris

(a don't stop till you drop production)

 

Home;  helpmesortoutstpeters.blogspot.com

Contact me: neilwithpromisestokeep@gmail.com

 

 

The return of Ginge the cat?

I'd had a busy weekend and Monday saw me doing nothing much to get over it.

Until the evening - I did make it back to our Jazz Club at The Red Lion in Isleworth.

My photo is missing out the excellent John Donaldson on keyboards but you can see Trevor Tomkins on drums and Dave Green on bass.

I don't know Pete Hurt (sax) so well but he was good  and Henry Lowther is always welcome.

The started with Thelonious Monk's 'Monk's Dream' and went on toWayne Shorter's 'Blue Nile' (which I haven't heard before.

Henry Lowther composes; we heard 'Segment' and 'Quadrant' - both good.

But I was suffering; there are only a few chairs and by the time we get there they've all gone. An evening perched on a bar stool is not ideal.

The big debate now is whether 'Ginge' is back or not. With the change of ownership, 'Ginge the cat' disappeared for good.

Before he would lie luxuriantly on the fishtank but then leave as soon as the Jazz started (not a fan our Ginge)

The new ginger cat stayed for the music, so I'm still doubtful.

I couldn't take a photo because he was surrounded by admirers.

The jury is out on Ginge.

Neil Harris
(a don't stop till you drop production)

Home:  helpmesortoutstpeters.blogspot.com
Contact me:  neilwithpromisestokeep@gmail.com

Under fire.

Monday night was Jazz night....this is the great Stan Sulzman;

                  

His playing seems so effortless (of course, that's what's so hard to do).

While this is Henry Lowther on trumpet;

with Steve Watts on double bass just behind him.

It was a funny night, we took our lives in our hands; the worlds worst pool players were in town again.

Through the night we could hear them in the other room, the white ball crashing regularly to the floor.

At the interval we sat out in the garden, and suddenly there it was; the white ball flying off the table, bouncing along the floor, through the open door and out into the garden.

Normally the main danger is an over excited Jazzer.

Neil Harris
(a don't stop till you drop production)

Home: helpmesortoutstpeters.blogspot.com

Contact me: neilwithpromisestokeep@gmail.com

Made it, again!

b

That was nice – I had my appointment at Oncology today (Dr Feelgood has run away to a desert Island or Las Vegas or Machu Pichu or wherever it is that consultants go for their holidays).

I’m OK for another month. That’s nice, thanks Dr Feelgood.

I had a good send-off too; I had a late night last night, and that involved ice cream, beer, Jazz and more. Thanks for that too.

This is Henry Lowther on the left and Art Themen on the right, my favourite saxophonist;

                                  Nice shirts, boys.

Art was in really good form, his sax sqawking and shouting. It always means a lot to me to make it to his appearances at our club; modern jazz at its best.

Trevor Tomkins on drums, Dave Green on Bass and  Robin Aspland  on keyboards made up the set.

Neil Harris

(a don’t stop till you drop production)

Home: helpmesortoutstpeters.blogspot.com
Contact me: neilwithpromisestiokeep@gmail.com

Perfection, almost.

Monday and I’m back at The Red Lion, Isleworth for my Jazz Club, although distracted.

 

This is Henry Lowther on trumpet – using a ‘mute’ to stifle the sound and I do like a trumpet played that way.

Henry also played ‘T.L.’, a tribute to a musician which, with its strong and haunting melody, I love. I've got that– on one of his CDs I won in the club raffle once.

Two musicians I hadn’t heard before were Peter Hurt on sax and Robin Aspland on keys. I certainly know Dave Green on Bass and Trevor Tomkins on drums.

I must admit I was distracted – I was talking to Sue (one of my Monday jazzfriends) about Haiku – a very precise and ritualised form of Japanese poetry, which she happens to be rather good at.

The rules say a Haiku can only have 17 syllables and those have to be divided into lines consisting of 5, 7 and 5 syllables. That’s picky.

Perhaps the most famous (although it has one too many syllables) is Ian Fleming's;

 

You only live twice

Once in your dreams and once when

you look death in the face.

 

I’m not a fan of Fleming but I do like that.

We decided that in the martial art of Haiku she has probably got a blue or a brown belt; proficient but not yet at the Black belt stage where she can kill just by carelessly mishandling a stanza. I only have a white belt myself, with a couple of those yellow stripes. Ah well.

Of course we had a go – exchanging poems written on old envelopes.

Here is Sue’s;

 

Trevor wields those sticks

Like a thing possessed,

like a professor professed.

 

Which is rather good – Trevor Tomkins teaches music at the Guildhall School of Music.

Here’s my effort;

 

The Trumpet is mute

But the saxophone is loud

In my Jazz heaven.

 

It’s springtime and in parks all over Japan, people are assembling to watch the Cherry Blossoms, pure and white. The Japanese may seem to chase perfection….but they are searching for that blemish on the perfect face.

The beautiful blossom is not enough; they are waiting for that special, still moment when the first few bleached white petals fall, driven by the very slightest of breezes to ripple down on a diagonal from the branch.

Just like in Haiku, the poem is not enough.

Neil Harris

(a don’t stop till you drop production)

Home:  helpmesortoutstpeters.blogspot.com

Contact:  neilwithpromisestokeep@gmail.com

I was dreading April in New York.

There are some good Doctors, I thanked a good one on Monday morning.

Monday evening and I was watching another one – Art Themen, retired orthopaedic surgeon. There was nothing retired about his Saxophone work.

 

Monday night was always going to be quiet, we clashed with a tribute to Stan Tracey at The 100 club. All the greats of British modern jazz were there including Peter King and Cleo Laine. We also lost our bass player and were lucky to have Steve Watts take over.

This really was Thelonious Monk night with loads of his numbers starting with a bright and sparky ‘I mean you’.

A couple of tunes later and we had a treat from Henry Lowther on trumpet, playing his own composition ‘Mataya Sleeps’, dedicated to a neice who was asleep while he wrote it. More Monk closed off the first set – ‘4 in 1’.

The second set brought us a Henry Lowther solo on a beautifully played ballad; ‘It never entered my mind’, and then Art Themen took over but with a segué into ‘April in New York’. I’d caught sight of the music and was dreading this sad and sentimental song. I didn’t need that on Monday, not after hearing bad news, but I was lucky to hear it torn apart and then reassembled without any fake sentimentality.

There were a few familiar Art Themen setpieces; Dexter Gordon’s ‘For regulars only’ and a Clifford Brown blues to finish giving John Donaldson a chance to shine on piano. It was still a great night of modern jazz from the greats, played on a quiet Monday night.

I should add that Stan Tracey was for many years the house pianist at Ronnie Scott’s and in that role he accompanied the greats of the jazz world. I remember seeing him several times in the early 1980’s, entertaining another local club, with some fairly experimental jazz.

Neil Harris

(a don’t stop till you drop production)

12 gigs a week.

That’s Jazz Man !

 

Monday and I’m back in the world of jazz. Feeling fairly tired but still in the game. Hmmm.

I was having a sneaky look around The Red Lion – no more pterodactyls, although I did notice that the area I don’t go to has been kitted out to look like a typical lounge room of the 1950’s, which is just as puzzling. Or maybe it’s always been like that.

Photos to follow.

Monday turned out to be ‘Stan Sulzman’ day; he’s a larger than life saxophonist, in every way.

 

As the evening panned out it was obvious I really wasn’t match fit – if there was a theme it was a fairly mellow one, with a spiky tinge to it. Which probably described my state of mind too. I need to snap out of it.

Henry Lowther on trumpet and Flugel horn was as good as ever, Dave Green very expressive on Bass. Jeff Castle is new to me on keyboards, a last minute replacement for Ross Stanley, stuck in Southport.

A likely story. I was listening to Radio London a month or two back – Mel Tormé’s son was in the studio doing a session- he was accompanied by Ross Stanley who he described as the busiest jazz pianist in town. “12 gigs a week”. Trevor Tomkins was doing some  fine drumming but for me;

Stan’s the man

Meanwhile this Blog is approaching 7000 hits and my competition is going nowhere. I’ve had one suggestion – Gustav Metzger. Well, for a start the answer is a particular work of art as well as the artists name and in any event it isn’t Metzger.

He’s a very interesting artist though, in the 1950’s and 1960’s he was teaching in West London as well as doing his own art. He would destroy things – sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly. It became known as ‘auto-destruction’ and can be a fascinating mixture of performance art and sculpture, so the answer wasn’t so far out.

One person very much influenced by Metzger was a young Pete Townsend, later to be the leading member of The Who. That’s where the destruction of the guitars and amps in their early act came from.

The problem I have is that if I just gave you three words you could Google out the solution to my question, and I’m just not going to give them to you….yet!

sCLUE No 9

Here’s the question;

7000 what? By whom?

K

Clue Number 9;

He was enigmatic.

The story so far;

It’s a work of art by one of my favourite 20th century artists.

He was very European, a sculptor and an early pioneer of performance art. Some of his sculptures were very intimate – vitrines (small glass cases) filled with everyday objects while others were huge and brutal depictions of a brutal century.

When you’ve got the answer, e-mail it in to me at;

neilwithpromisestokeep@gmail.com

The first right answer wins a combat bracelet, made by me.

 

Neil Harris

(a don’t stop till you drop production)

 

The Usual Suspects

British modern Jazz has a tough time getting by, surviving. Really it’s one big collective. Someone gets a booking and it’s a ring round to find a group of musicians who are free. ‘Groups’, just can’t make it.

So, when Simon Spillett (coolish dude in a suit with a sax) formed ‘Standard Miles’, to play standards in the style of Miles Davis, that was quite something. Especially as this is the style of the 1960’s, the Herbie Hancock period.

 

 The five (round up the usual suspects) had certainly gone to extraordinary lengths to look like the Davies band of that era. Spillett introduced Henry Lowther (Trumpet and Flugelhorn) “I chose him for his uncanny resemblance to the great Miles Davies”. Lowther is short, a little plump, white haired and (how can I put this) very white.

You’ll get the idea that this wasn’t a tribute band or a band of looky-likey’s. They weren’t playing the Miles Davies Greatest Hits. It was just five great musicians playing a bunch of standards they know, in a style they love. A hand in an old glove.

So, Henry Lowther used a mute a heck of a lot and that short staccato stabbing sound, but the mask often slipped a little – did Davies ever play the flugel? He was in good form. There was John Critchinson delicate on piano and Dave Green on Bass. We had a rare treat of a trio – Piano, Drums and Bass on their own.

Trevor Tomkins was really something tonight. When the French government banned Absinthe, the distillers produced a new aniseed flavoured drink that carried a hint of what it replaced but was something new. It was called ‘Pastis’, because it was a pastiche of what went before. TT really took his drums to 1963 tonight and gave everything a certain flavour, a memory of something very familiar but irreplaceable, without pretending to copy what can’t be copied.

There was a taste of it all - urban sax, short and stabby sax and trumpet, fast and furious and very slow and thoughtful.

Even though these five play together a lot, know each other well, there’s nothing like being a group to take it up a gear. A thoughtful night and lots of cheers and whistles too.

Neil Harris

( a don’t stop till you drop production)