Pianist and composer Alex Webb’s show Café Society Swing – A True Story, a celebration of music and story saluting New York’s first integrated jazz venue, Café Society in Greenwich Village that opened in 1938, will play The Leicester Square Theatre on 21 and 22 December.
Pizza Express Jazz Club in Soho is to host a new monthly series of gigs to celebrate Blue Note’s 75th anniversary in 2014 with the first four events running from January to May featuring leading UK jazz ensembles presenting music from some of label’s classic albums.
The atmosphere of exuberant celebration heightened as Anglo-American tenor man, Craig Crofton (pictured left), launched into a breezy reading of ‘Bessie’s Blues’ at the last of the autumn season’s fortnightly sessions in the ‘could have been designed to be a jazz club’ cellar of St.James Wine Vaults in Bath.
Jazzwise apologises for passing on widespread reports on jazz websites, social media and jazz radio and initial checks earlier today, that Horace Silver had died.
Staging a six-day jazz festival ‘off season’, a couple of weeks before Christmas when gift shopping and office parties are in full swing, might seem like a risky undertaking.
Polar Bear, the iconoclastic British post-jazz five-piece, are to return with their fifth album, entitled In Each And Every One (cover pictured left), on 24 March 2014, which will be released on the Leaf label on CD and double-vinyl LP.
The jazz world today mourns the passing of one of its greatest artists; the guitarist Jim Hall who died in his sleep yesterday, 10 December, he was 83.
A homage to the life and legacy of Fela Anikulapo Kuti, and a celebration of the recent release of the AIDS charity compilation Red Hot + Fela is set to take place on 14 December at the 229 Venue, London, and is part of international celebrations to mark what would have been Afrobeat-icon’s 75th birthday.
Saxophonist Phil Meadows has been announced as the winner of this year’s Peter Whittingham Award, having performed in front of a high-calibre judging panel that included Soweto Kinch, Norma Winstone MBE, Gwilym Simcock and the 606 Club’s Steve Rubie who unanimously agreed on him as the winner.
When I went to St Albans to chat to Stan about his 70 years in the music business for Jazzwise back in the summer, he was on top form.
