A New Jazz Festival
Now, just when the summer season is dying down, a big jazz day beckons, organised by Mike Willis, a musician and, it turns out, one of St Leonards’ prime movers.
Jazz Samba at Ronnie Scott’s
During his five years living in this area, Mike has collected an appreciable following for his own band, but also by numerous other musicians, who are grateful for a regular platform and a meeting place. At 74 Norman Road he offers a weekly open mic club for poetry, music, and a few beers. The participants are all talented, with some nationally, as well as locally, appreciated.
Willis has ambitious plans, and this is a big venture even for him. He now also regularly promotes or organises excellent concerts at Henry Ward Hall, filling the auditorium. But the upcoming Jazz Festival is of a different order, and he has managed to collect sponsors, supporters, and musicians in a very short time. Via Jazz Hastings comes the band Hexagonal, led by saxophonist (and photographer) Gregory Heath. Heath also joins forces with Barnaby Davies, in Barnaby’s Big Band, as part of the day-long festival.
Trombone player and entrepreneur Davies (of Barnaby’s Jazz Lounge in Robertson Street) has also provided a venue. It’s more the traditional type of jazz venue – candles and chat and subdued lighting, but above all friendly. Musicians play for maybe an hour on the window stage (a great position – visible to all who pass), audiences can move in and out freely, food and drinks are served from the small kitchen. There’s a little art gallery on the next floor up which shows changing exhibitions, making for a very attractive environment for our diverse local audiences. On the jazz festival day, smaller bands will perform at Barnaby’s most of the day.
SMALL BAND VARIETY
Versatile saxophonist Josephine Davies, the sister of Barnaby, is making waves across Europe with various different musical projects that largely incorporate her own arrangements and/or compositions. We featured her in this newspaper a couple of years ago, and since then she has released no less than four albums with her different projects, with another two due in October and January. At Barnaby’s she will front three bands, one with a harpist, one dance band and one organ trio. Also on the bill are Jazz Samba and Terrarium.
QOW is a multi-talented, multi-generational modern jazz outfit featuring the legendary Spike Wells on drums, inventive sax player Riley Stone Lonergan, and multi-genre bass player Eddie Myer. This excellent outfit is named after Dewey Redman’s tune QOW, and their style recalls Redman’s radical, driving 1960s, straight-ahead jazz vibe. Their gig will primarily be, though, a tribute to multi-instrumentalist and composer Bheki Mseleku, whose genius was lost to us when he died, too young, in 2008. Like Josephine Davies (and the now legendary Mark Kavuma and Dave O’Higgins, and lesser-known but brilliant Harben Kay and Corrie Dick), QOW has been snapped up by Ubuntu Records, so expect to hear a lot more from them.
BIG BAND HEADLINES
It’s significant that the majority of the talent at this festival comes from the local area, and the festival’s very existence signifies a great deal of goodwill among musicians and organisers.
Headliners Osibisa and Dele Sosimi are of course not local, but both are legends in their own field – remember the pink flying elephants on the Osibisa album cover? We were able to catch a brief interview with founder member Wendell Richardson, a much-reduced version of which appears separately on the facing page.
Dele Sosimi is an Afrobeat musician, born in Hackney, raised in Lagos. He has worked with Nigerian legend Fela Kuti and also with Fela’s son Femi. With his own band, he has performed at the Montreux Festival, at Joe Zawinul’s Birdland in Vienna, in Canada, Norway, France, and Portugal, and of course in Hackney. His core group is a six-piece.
If you’re a bit of a purist you’ll say, but Osibisa and Sosimi aren’t really jazz, are they? The answer to that is, surely jazz originated with African musicians? And if you’ve ever been to a Womad festival you’ll know that there’s a massive crossover. Duke Ellington once said there was no such thing as jazz, only music, and it was good music or bad music. This jazz festival promises to be very, very good music.
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