Just went up the road and back in the car for a bit of shopping, listening to a CD of Oscar Peterson - a collection of tracks by big and small bands, all featuring Peterson on piano. Like other great jazz musicians he could play chamber music and run his own small combos, but also played with big ballroom bands more to the 'white taste', because a man's gotta live.
What a sublime ivory tinkler the man was, in the total jazz mode: complete, confident mastery of the instrument, a playful and humorous nature and that inborn (as it often seems) black joyous sense of rhythm, dignified, precise, ever-ingenious, never pompous or solemn. Just goddam sublime.
I couldn't help wondering yet again why some people claim not to be keen on jazz (although some of them profess a taste for rock music both good and bad). You couldn't listen to Peterson's Georgia on my Mind and say that. You just couldn't.
I inherited the CD along with others a couple of weeks ago. Went to see my late carnival friend Larry's missus and she gave them to me. I think it makes her sad to play them now and she really prefers salsa anyway. Makes me sad too to remember their erstwhile owner, but in quite a good way.
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Favourite of mine too, AC. I learned from a radio profile (by Ken Clarke, as it happens) that his band went on stage not knowing what key he'd require them to play each number (jazz term) in; he'd just start and expect them to follow. I can imagine being that fish-in-water competent in music just enough to be envious.
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>> I couldn't help wondering yet again why some people claim not to be keen on
>> jazz (although some of them profess a taste for rock music both good and bad).
>> You couldn't listen to Peterson's Georgia on my Mind and say that. You just couldn't.
>>
>>
Just Youtubed Georgia on My Mind and it reminds me of why I hate jazz. In fact I hate pianos too, my definition of Perfect Pitch is a piano dropping in a skip and landing on a trombone.
Each to their own, I suppose.
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Heh heh, indeed RR. Sorry though. You don't know what you're missing.
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The version I got just now from youtube was different from the one on my CD, much later I would say, longer and more decorated, more of a tired virtuoso performance. I will try to find out. But I would say the CD version is better, more imbued with the real spirit. Showbiz tires people out and sucks them dry.
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>> But I would say the CD version is better, more imbued with the real spirit. Showbiz tires people out and sucks them dry.
CD version 1962. The youtube one a decade later I would think.
Draiber has quoted Philip Larkin at some length. Larkin was a good poet, very good, but a somewhat bigoted and curmudgeonly jazz critic like his friend Kingsley Amis. Their letters to each other often talk about jazz, which they both loved, but are filled with distasteful 'humorous' racist blather as well. Like draiber, they were devoted to early jazz and were (arrogantly and ignorantly in my opinion) dismissive of later efforts which they didn't understand.
I like it all, or most of it. One of my greatest heroes is Louis Armstrong who was also from that era but coped with everything until his death. He too was sucked dry and knackered by colossal showbiz success, but remained genial to the last. Smoked large amounts of cannabis every day of his life pretty well. Man after my own heart.
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I spent a few weekends working in a posh tailor's shop as a Saturday boy while I was in sixth form. One of the old boys who worked there as a full time shop assistant was a really enigmatic character. Very pleasant fellow of indeterminate age but this was the late 1970's and I'd hazard he was past his 60th birthday by then.
He was almost Edwardian in his demeanour in the sort of way Stephen Fry portrayed Jeeves. Similarly immaculately dressed and impeccably spoken he struck me as someone who had not always been a shop assistant if that makes sense? If someone had told me he was a retired or perhaps disgraced army officer I'd have believed them.
Anyway, he did his job well and was obviously a key member of staff well liked by the others and always polite to me despite the huge age and experience gap.
His oddities included when on his tea, coffee or lunch breaks he would retire to the staff room and chain smoke Russian Sobranie cigarettes while listening to Oscar Peterson, Dizzie Gillespie and Charlie Parker albums on his own little Dansette record player and completing the Telegraph crossword in relatively short order.
I often wondered who he really was. Almost certainly no longer with us I guess.
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>>
>> He was almost Edwardian in his demeanour in the sort of way Stephen Fry portrayed
>> Jeeves. Similarly immaculately dressed and impeccably spoken he struck me as someone who had not
>> always been a shop assistant if that makes sense? If someone had told me he
>> was a retired or perhaps disgraced army officer I'd have believed them.
>>
Yes, I can recall one or two characters just like that, you have described the phenomenom well. Were they bred like that, or did they cunningly or subconsciously develop the character because they found that creating a fictitious persona shielded them from the slights inflicted by the real world?
Always men, always with this kind of vague ex-officer feel to them. I've sometimes suspected that they were probably ex non-com officers, who had picked up and copied the mannerisms of the real officers they would have liked to be.
I had a sort of in-law once I christened "The bogus wing-commander" because although sporting the blazer, tie, etc he didn't ring true. I invented the story that he was actually an ex pay-sergeant discharged for pilfering mess funds. It turned out to be almost true.
Anyway, that's deviation. Oscar Peterson - YES
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For those who have never heard the man:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tY_RE7tWzM
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>> For those who have never heard the man:
>>
>> www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tY_RE7tWzM
>>
>>
>>
That's the one I listened to.
Not a patch on the Dave Clark Five.
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>> Not a patch on the Dave Clark Five.
Oooh, ah, see what you mean RR, thumping metronomic beat no risk of confusion, eh?
Dave Clark was a byword for awful drumming when I were a youngish person. But as you say, chacun à son goût...
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It was indeed awful, but you could bop to it -
www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MOH7vUKIjE
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Not many people could bop in those days, even to a brass colliery band or the Dave Clark Five. I see no one bopping in that clip. But Glad All Over annoyingly sounds a bit better than I remember it.
Georgie Fame in the Flamingo was another matter. But the punters were a bit older and more, er, louche. The music was ultra-danceable and the punters, or most of them, could dance. Some people - not many - even danced at Ronnie Scott's.
They would have bopped to that Oscar Peterson too, and so would I. Jazz music has slowly acquired an artsy-fartsy intellectual image that puts people off it. It isn't properly understood that it has its real origins in black lowlife honkytonk feelgood bopping music played in brothels and bars.
Tastes differ though, and more importantly fashions change.
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"Proper" jazz: the ODJB, Ken Colyer, early Chris Barber, The Crane River Jazz Band, the Dutch Swing College Band, etc. etc.
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>>Jazz music has slowly acquired an artsy-fartsy intellectual image that puts people off it.
This was certainly true at the time of the BBC TV's black and white jazz series, compered by Steve Race and re-run not long ago on BBC4. Among others, it featured Oscar and Dizzy. From their sober dress, serious, thoughtful mien and polite, restrained applause the audience could as well have been a group of postgraduate students attending an abstruse lecture by some internationally-respected professor on The Influence of James Joyce on Samuel Beckett.
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>> For those who have never heard the man:
>>
>> www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tY_RE7tWzM
>>
>>
Sounds like Eric Morecambe.
Playing all the RIGHT notes, but not necessarily in the right order.
Undoubtedly talented but I just can't get into it. Still at least it's not rap. ;-)
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>> Sounds like Eric Morecambe.
>> Playing all the RIGHT notes, but not necessarily in the right order.
Keep it up Londoner, you're half way there. I really mean it.
It may be a bit soon, but if you are worried about what order the notes are played in, or when exactly, or indeed what notes they turn out to be in the event, let me recommend a proper baaptism of fire: anything played or composed by the jazz piano genius Thelonious Monk, say Brilliant Corners or Round Midnight, but any jazz standard.
Don't blame me if it sounds odd. It's terrific really. You can get the message!
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>>listening to a CD of Oscar Peterson
>>Dave Clark
>> the jazz piano genius Thelonious Monk
I keep meaning to venture into my attic to look through the LPs that have been up there for donkeys years. I don't have any Oscar Peterson but there are one or two by Thelonious monk and, I think, one Dave Clark Five.
Might even check out the old record player, to see if that's still working.
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>> >> For those who have never heard the man:
>> >>
>> >> www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tY_RE7tWzM
>> >>
>> >>
>> Sounds like Eric Morecambe.
>> Playing all the RIGHT notes, but not necessarily in the right order.
>>
>> Undoubtedly talented but I just can't get into it. Still at least it's not rap.
>> ;-)
perhaps you need to get into one of the branches of jazz. Like Jazz funk perhaps
Incognito
www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXmrVfB19XY
Mat Bianco
www.youtube.com/watch?v=evuJbFw0LKs
Me? I am off to see Shakatak in June.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzTElDr46UY
The good thing about Jazz is that there is nearly always some form or branch that almost anyone can enjoy
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"Me? I am off to see Shakatak in June."
It's a bit 'out in the sticks', but we occasionally go down to Roger Odell's (Shakatak's drummer) Jazznights @ The Cherry Tree in Belchamp St Paul where he plays in the house band - nice bloke.
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Shame he threw away such a promising career by shooting his girlfriend through a bathroom door.
Oh, wait...
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I saw Peterson live at the Fairfield Halls in Croydon, must have been some time in the 80's ......absolutely brilliant .....
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Not sure if I saw him once live too, at the Palladium. Went to see Ella Fitzgerald, in the eighties I would think - it's possible that Oscar was there too although I don't really recall.
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I can date my interest in jazz exactly to the Saturday evening in 1965 when I was sitting on a tube train in London with friends (a big adventure for a country boy) and took a fancy to the girl sitting opposite me. She was carrying a Sketchley's Dry Cleaners bag and an LP 'Oscar Peterson Swings the Great Standards'. I never did go for pop music and I thought 'I wonder what that's like?' So when I had saved the 32s 6d (I think it was) I went to the electrical shop in our little town, where the ancient proprietor would order records for you. The rest is history.
For a man with hands like shovels, he really could play...
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>> The rest is history.
>>
You married her, and she still likes Oscar Peterson?
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>>some people claim not to be keen on jazz
Who can say what it is, for a start? I can’t now find chapter and verse but somewhere in his collection of reviews, All That Jazz, Philip Larkin describes the best of it as a certain kind of dance band music of 1925-45. It was, he says, the music of “…the great coloured pioneers and their eager white disciples, and the increasingly remote world that surrounded their music, dance halls, derby hats, monogrammed music stands, the shabby recording studios where they assembled, and the hanging honeycomb microphones that saved it all for us.” (1984).
I think the dance hall connection may have been fatal to it. In fact, as Larkin points out, only about one piece in six played was “hot”. I feel that the reason that kind of music was done to death by big band Swing is that the latter is easier to dance to and has a soothing, drug-like effect. Like him, I favour the “brilliant cameos of the 78 age”. I don’t find much of the BBC Jazz Record Requests to be jazz, as opposed to easy listening, and am rather surprised to find that the CDs to go with the book (the two together make an excellent introduction to jazz) include a Brubeck track, “How High the Moon”.
He dislikes dreary later practitioners and has a splendid riff on modernists such as Parker “...couldn’t play four bars without resorting a particularly irritating five-note cliché from…’The Woody Woodpecker’s Song’’’), Gillespie (rudimentary sense of humour), Monk (limited repertoire), Davis (“… the dead muffled slow stuff, the sour yelping fast stuff…”), Coltrane (“…metallic and passionless nullity…”) and Rollins (“…the listener feels he is being pelted with slivers of granite”).
He relates these observations to “the two principal themes of modernism, mystification and outrage. [The creator] has painted portraits with both eyes on the same side of the nose, or smothered a model with paint and rolled her over a blank canvas. He has designed a dwelling-house to be built underground. He has written poems resembling the kind of pictures typists make with their machines during the coffee break, or a novel in gibberish, or a play in which the characters sit in dustbins. He has made a six-hour film of someone asleep. He has carved human figures with large holes in them.”
What I want is a return to the likes of 78-era Sydney Bechet performing his “Okey-Doke”. It begins as the most laid-back music – how do some musicians produce sounds that none other can produce? - but then he breaks away fast with his characteristic yowl. Real cheer-up material and what I, at least, mean by jazz.
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I like all jazz- and regularly visit jazz clubs and pubs in and around South London and the south east.... it is my relaxation....
I love stride and boogy woogy piano so I have attached a link to a great performance of Limehouse Blues .... fantastic performances by all three players....
www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7fDVlhFZ6E
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>> fantastic performances by all three players....
Agreed helicopter, instrumental virtuosos all three. Big drum kit eh?
But... the piece is jaunty in a jokey English way and has no real elegance. It's characteristic of jazz to use instrumental virtuosity for purposes of light and irresponsible entertainment, but at its best it can rank with any modernist art writ large.
Of course striving for that sort of effect when it doesn't come naturally (so to speak) can sound, and end up being, pretentious. Jazz is a performance art, with each rendering different, sometimes very different, from the last. And of course many of the great musicians had short and troubled lives, bedevilled by violence, poverty, racism, exploitation, substances and in Thelonious Monk's case mental illness. Like wild flowers if that doesn't sound soppy, liable to be trampled and eaten unlike big cultivated things in flowerbeds. The published oeuvre of many of the greats is quite thin although they worked like, er, blacks night after night for decades on end.
Rabbit rabbit... sorry.
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I'm going to look a right pillock after my earlier comments, but...
>> Incognito
>> www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXmrVfB19XY
Very enjoyable! Great strong beat and smooth powerful vocals.
>> Mat Bianco
>> www.youtube.com/watch?v=evuJbFw0LKs
Totally surprised by this. Sounded very Latin - which I like.
>> Me? I am off to see Shakatak in June.
>> www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzTElDr46UY
Reminiscent to me of Motown and Atlantic Soul. Pleasant to listen to in the car, I reckon.
All very interesting. (When I can music "interesting" it's praise.)
Thanks for posting, Zero! :-)
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>> >> Mat Bianco
>> >> www.youtube.com/watch?v=evuJbFw0LKs
>> Totally surprised by this. Sounded very Latin - which I like.
>>
>> >> Me? I am off to see Shakatak in June.
>> >> www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzTElDr46UY
>> Reminiscent to me of Motown and Atlantic Soul. Pleasant to listen to in the car,
>> I reckon.
I guess you'll love this then Londoner, this is Jazz fusion - Jazz with latin, motown, philly soul and R&B overtones
www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJFgb_f5q4Y
Last edited by: Zero on Fri 19 Apr 13 at 12:18
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>> I guess you'll love this then Londoner, this is Jazz fusion - Jazz with latin,
>> motown, philly soul and R&B overtones
>>
>>
>> www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJFgb_f5q4Y
>>
Yes - excellent! Though I would never have applied the term "jazz" to it in a million years.
I'd have called it a cross between soul/R&B/Latin.
But if that is truly counted as jazz then so be it. Call me converted.
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Danny Coots , a snare and brushes ......
No real elegance pehaps true AC .......but technical virtuosity by the bucketload ..... and the three would never be able to repeat that performance exactly again , it just happened ..... I love it when there is that spontaneous coming together of musicians and it works.....
......and of course it is the competition between and enjoyment of the artists and the audience that I like as well.
Jazz is not all about suffering ......
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So lets compare and contrast.....
Try this for elegant playing AC.....
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExT_GoPqdX4
I used to be the only person in the audience watching Don Weller play in south London pubs in the sixties - no one liked that sort of music at the time....
Dave Newton piano solo is great .....
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>> Try this for elegant playing AC.....
I think we can be said to be of like mind on this subject helico. A son-in-law who is a jazz funk drummer does plenty of session work and has often played with Don Weller... in my younger day I suppose Tubby Hayes was Weller's sort of equivalent in this country, and of course Mr Scott himself who played a fine horn...
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>> Tubby Hayes was Weller's sort of equivalent in this country, and of course Mr Scott himself who played a fine horn...
Just to make you jealous helico, I met Sonny Rollins once, for long enough to shake his hand, on the pavement outside the original Ronnie Scott's which was in a basement in Gerrard St (now the middle of Chinatown and all different). Introduced by Charlie Short, a much-admired bass player whose career had been cut short by arthritic hands and who had turned to minicab driving and knowing where to get drugs, speed being his preferred brew but anything you wanted. He drove Rollins about during his tour here in a black-and-pink Dodge V8 with big tail fins, and supplied him with weed the while.
Rollins was one of my very top jazzmen, and tenor sax my favourite instrument. Even tried to learn to play one but absolutely zilch musical ability and bone idle to boot, so gave it best. A lot of it is about 'tone' which Rollins had in spades. Gave Dexter Gordon a cigarette once in that same original Ronnie Scott's... Can't believe I once used to go there often to listen to jazz, but I must have because I can remember doing it.
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>> Jazz is not all about suffering ......
No, on the contrary, it is about transcending the sufferings of daily life. I didn't mean to adopt a miserablist line. Just commenting on the ephemerality of most jazz which isn't recorded.
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The book is actually called All What Jazz. The CD tracks were perhaps a posthumous choice by friends.
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>> The rest is history.
>>
You married her, and she still likes Oscar Peterson?<<
Sadly no. Anyone who could afford dry cleaning was too upmarket for me. Or was Sketchley a shoe shop? It was a long time ago...
Only the music stayed with me.
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You sure it was Sketchley, and not Chas Lumley?
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I wonder what the age profile of modern jazz lovers is. I attended an enjoyable evening of Keith Nicholls at our arts centre not long ago and I would put the average age of the audience at 60.
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Funnily enough Draiber I went to see Keith on Tuesday this week as a special guest at Carshalton Jazz club with Andy Woon Hot Five from the south coast ........
I agree that the average age is high......
Keith is backing on this clip a guy called Spats Langham who I have seen on several occasions ...... this is for anybody who thinks they can play banjo......
www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=QjbaeFJM78g
also worth seeing and hearing is Enrico Tomasso on trumpet.......
www.youtube.com/watch?v=_04nTrGEUmQ
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Nice. I should have mentioned that my audience, though old, was far from restained in resonse.
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Or, for that matter, restrained in response.
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S'pose I never got where the line between Jazz and Blue's was, Wynton Marsalis is a fantastic musician and the only guy I know who can make Eric Clapton look uncomfortable:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7eeb1MTkUY
I can't say I enjoy Jazz but Blues I get.
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Wynton in his younger days, caused many a cornet player to throw their instrument out the window from 2:40 onwards sounds like two instruments; one man playing:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7eeb1MTkUY
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The Marsalis family is extremely talented....
I saw younger brother Jason Marsalis playing vibraphone brilliantly in a little club called Donnas on North Rampart St in New Orleans .......
As for the blues......this is one of my favourite clips and I have posted it before ... Billy Branch and the Sons of Blues - saw him in the Rum Boogy Cafe on Beale St.....
www.youtube.com/watch?v=jL5JE2ntREc
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The All Purpose Blues band are pretty damn good too.....the 544 club on Bourbon St is where they play.....
www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlA7tyl0ALY
Billy Gregory is great on lead guitar....
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Bulls Head in Barnes, Sun May 12 from 8.30, a sort of amateur jazz night featuring singers including an American friend of mine, widow of an old English friend from before 1960. I haven't heard of the trumpeter but he's played with some people it is claimed. The friend is mid-western, lived here a long time and went native to an extent, great deep smoky voice, not hugely talented but that's no reason not to go for it.
Can't promise a full-scale West End evening but I may well be there, supporters' club as African gamblers call it when they bung you just because you were there when they made the crazed bet.
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Doubt well get any jazz, but just entering Maidstone studios to see later with jools holland
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He can play some piano that Jools Holland when so minded.
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Ben Waters is the man that Jools asked to play piano for him at his wedding...... currently the best exponent of the art of boogy woogy in the world IMO .
www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5P0HxGJc-g
He plays also in tandem with Axel Zwingenberger, together with Dave Green on Bass and Charlie Watts ( of the Stones) on drums . Together they are known as the ABC of boogy woogy..... Charlies first love is jazz..... it is surreal to watch him playing jazz using brushes rather than belting out the beat with the Stones.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8c52MfpqPs
If you get the opportunity to see any of them in action together or individually grasp with both hands..
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>> Bulls Head in Barnes, Sun May 12 from 8.30, a sort of amateur jazz night
>> Can't promise a full-scale West End evening but I may well be there,
The Bull's Head is one of my favourite venues. A good pint and usually an enthusiastic and respectful audience. I go every month or so and try and sit in the front row or two so I can see the musicians at work.
I'm unlikely to be there on May 12. I'm not sure I could take the disappointment if you turned up smartly dressed and properly shod. And I might have to adjust my mental images of others too. :-)
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I adored jazz when I was younger. Malcolm Webbs Jazz Band every Monday night in the Brown Cow, Bingley, from the age of 15.
Excellent Timmy Taylors beers, Golden Best, Best Bitter, Landlord, and Ramtam in winter.
Once I reached the age of 18 I never listened to it again....
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Where did you go legacy? Rock? Bubblegum? Grand Opera? Symphonies? Mere curiosity on my part.
I don't have any hi-fi equipment and seldom listen to music except in the car. Some of us aren't very musical really. It's always a pleasure to visit someone who is though, 'hey listen to this man...'
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In my late teens and 20s I listened primarily to a very, very strange mix of Rock, Soul & Reggae.
I have never liked folk music, despite having friends who love it, and enduring it in my local pub several Fridays. It just makes me go home!
Likewise classical music. I appreciate the genius of these composers, but apart from Puccinis violin concertos it really does very liittle for me. A classical music appreciation course, with a knowledgeable tutor, say 2 hours a week, is something I would jump at.
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>> The Bull's Head is one of my favourite venues. A good pint and usually an enthusiastic and respectful audience. I go every month or so and try and sit in the front row or two so I can see the musicians at work.
I didn't see you Crocks. I always sit at the back and did last night, between herself and an Iraqi friend. But I couldn't see anyone at the front who looked like a car freak...
The trumpet player wasn't bad at all. The bass player didn't turn up but the substitute as it were off the street did very well. Apparently the drummer was a last-minute recruit too... didn't always seem happy with the rest of the combo, but then drummers tend to look sour. Those cats are often better than the ones they stand in for. My American friend did all right as usual and smiled charmingly in a silly hat, if you are old enough to like booming midwestern blondes. I could only have a pint and a half because I'd already had a couple and I'm cautious these days. We had to cruise back here later.
The Bull's Head is going to stop the jazz nights in a month or so, perhaps indefinitely. So go soon to catch perhaps the last for a while, or the last ever.
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Sorry to disappoint AC. I wasn't there. I should have been watching a friend perform in a pub in Wimbledon.... but I forgot that as well.
Your last paragraph worries me as I know The Bull's Head has had problems with their neighbours. Was it just those jazz nights that were stopping or all music?
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I hope jazz enthusiasts caught the 4 1/2 hour feast on BBC4 last Friday. There was a Peterson track and a whole film devoted to Sonny Rollins. Three hours were devoted to women jazz singers.
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Caught a programme called Jazz Horns or some such on Saturday night with some quite interesting black and white footage....unfortunately I was lulled to sleep with half a bottle of a very pleasant Chateau La Negley which SWMBO and I had consumed between us .... we picked up a few cases on a trip to France a couple of weeks ago.
.... I remember seeing Dizzy Gillespie and woke up to Arne Dahl an hour or so later and didn't remember a thing.......
I have also decided to go back to my old moniker....
Last edited by: helicopter on Tue 14 May 13 at 15:58
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>>I have also decided to go back to my old moniker....
You mean helicopter? How did you change it? I can see how to change my password but not my name "draiber", as I want to.
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Go to 'my settings' and click on the 'forum options ' tab......change it .... save .....
As meerkat say.....seemples....
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Welcome to the forum rambo. Please don't cause any trouble.
:o}
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From the Greek for platform, pulpit, lectern. It is in memory of the days when I enjoyed haranguing students. How I miss their little faces now!
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There is a village in Essex called Wendens Ambo.
Always wondered where the name came from.
Edit.
Should have looked at wiki first!
"Wendens Ambo is a small village of approximately four hundred people in Essex, England. Its unusual name originates from the joining of two villages, Great and Little Wenden, to form Wendens Ambo, meaning "both Wendens"."
Last edited by: Crocks on Thu 16 May 13 at 15:54
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>> Welcome to the forum rambo. Please don't cause any trouble.
He's been here three years!
Or have I missed something?
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>> have I missed something?
Yes.
:o}
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Glad to see you managed OK ambo......
I changed my forum name around when I came over from the backroom and never got round to changing it back until the other day.
I am still not sure how we got from Oscar Peterson to Greek pulpits.......
Last edited by: helicopter on Thu 16 May 13 at 15:38
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>> The Bull's Head is going to stop the jazz nights in a month or so, perhaps indefinitely.
I have got an update for you AC.
As you know the pub closed for a refit and there was concern that the music may never re-start. I have been waiting for the re-opening but information on the internet was a bit thin. So today I took a trip there to see exactly what was happening on the ground.
Plenty of white vans outside but signs of staff through the window so I went in. It re-opened today! I was only their eighth customer - but unfortunately no free drinks!
The old music room has been converted into a restaurant area but they have a new music room out the back in the old stables. I was given a tour of it by one of the staff. It appears much smaller, with a smaller stage and only an upright piano. (The old grand piano is still in the new restaurant area.)
The first night of music is on Monday 16 December with a blues night. Ben Waters is on (for helicopter) on the 23rd.
So maybe your friends will be back there sometime.
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Yes Crocks, I was aware of Ben Waters appearing there , I get regular updates by email direct from him of his gigs and all his news as a member of his 'fan club'.......
Bulls Head is difficult to get to for me and SWMBO , we have however seen Ben at venues in Crawley , Sutton and most recently Farnham Maltings where he gave a stonking performance and even played one of my requests....I also recorded the first half for my enjoyment before the batteries ran out on my Flip video..
He and his mum even run trips abroad where you can accompany him and his band on tour and go to all his gigs ....... something SWMBO I plan to do when I retire.
He is a genuine nice guy and absolutely great boogy woogy piano man.....
I have posted this link before but for anyone who has not seen it - be amazed....
www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5P0HxGJc-g
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Oscar Peterson - WillDeBeest
