All That Jazz, Hastings
VICTORIA KINGHAM
You’ve heard it here before: Hastings is a constantly surprising town. You’d think after some years one would know everything there is to know about its cultural vibrancy. But I still come across jazz-lovers who don’t know that there has been a top-quality, thriving jazz club here for the last 18 years. Given that a new, one day Jazz Festival is also taking place next week, I spoke to the founder of Jazz Hastings, pianist John Donaldson.
He and Reg Hendrickse founded the club with a number of other musicians and aficionados, originally in the Angling Club building on the seafront. There were a few people here who were on the British bebop circuit – Donaldson himself, Simon Thorpe, and the late Pete Burden. Among other noted contemporaneous modern jazz and bebop musicians were Bobby Wellins and Peter King. Both are now gone. Wellins was a fluent and inventive tenor player who like a number of British jazz musicians of that generation (including local free music tenorist, Trevor Watts, still very much alive and making music here) honed their skills during the War in the Royal Air Force band. The self-taught Peter King, on the other hand, was at first renowned for playing alto ‘more like Charlie Parker than Charlie Parker’, but later developed a Bartok-influenced style of his own.
ON AND UP
These people were legends of the British jazz scene, which thrived in London but was a little less active in the South East. Donaldson and his associates had to acquire a piano from somewhere, and had no PA system (“just a box with a mike stuck into it”) and they ran the club expecting it to fold within a few months. Other jazz musicians came down to play here and loved it, however, and it was established for quite a few years in the old place. “There were a few issues,” muses Donaldson. “it got a bit bonkers. One day we turned up to play a gig while they were having a funeral wake at the back of the room. So we thought we might need to try another place.” Roger Carey, bass player (and partner of sterling singer Liane Carrol), was by then regularly acting as sound engineer – the sound balance in that club has always been fantastic – and the club moved to the other angling club, the EHSAA building behind Hastings Contemporary, where it continues, on the first Tuesday of every month.
“So it’s just kind of gone on, and up” continues John. “We’ve got Bill Bruford coming in November, Jeff Ballard (who I’ve just been working with) in December, so we’ve upped the ante. It’s taken a while!”
Indeed. A solid eighteen years of dedication. The club’s founding musicians and administrators work for nothing. The way the bands are paid sometimes depends on how well-known they are. Some demand a fixed fee, some who know and love the club will work for a split of the door takings. But people who promote gigs know how random this can be – sometimes a band gets four times the amount they expect, but “all it takes is a football match, or, you know, a plague of locusts” says Donaldson, “and the audience don’t come.”
The definition of “jazz” has widened enormously from its early twentieth-century roots being regarded as risqué music for American dance halls. There is now a jazz course at most respected music conservatoires and the musicians that come up through these college outlets are skilled, confident, brilliant. There is a definite young British Jazz Scene, inhabited by exceptional musicians and leaders: guitarist Rob Luft, saxophone player Xhosa Cole, trumpet player Laura Jurd, drummer Corrie Dick, to name but a very very few. All these have appeared at Jazz Hastings in the past four years since it re-opened after the pandemic.
POST-COVID REJUVENATION
This first post-covid gig was an occasion which cemented me in my decision to move to this area. It was hard to fault such good humour and joy. One performer was local poet Pete Brown, who died a couple of years ago. His musical career began many years ago as a Beat poet combining poetry with music, essentially an offshoot of the folk music scene. He toured with Davy Graham, formed a band which had at that time a young John McLaughlin on guitar, and eventually came to the notice of Eric Clapton and Jack Bruce. He and Bruce co-wrote a number of classic Cream hits, including Sunshine of Your Love which, Brown joked on the evening, was the reason he lived in a house and not a bedsit. In his eighties he was still in good voice. That gig was unique: all the players were local. The other band was Hexagonal – local musicians Greg Heath (tenor), Donaldson himself at the piano, Jason Yarde, bassist Simon Thorpe, Graeme Flowers and Tristan Banks all have international reputations. Other locals – Hastings’ own Liane Carroll, with Roger Carey on bass, made up the third part of the celebration. Hexagonal will appear in the line-up of next week’s Jazz Festival.
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