Isomatic UK Weblog

This evening we went to the Berrylands Hotel in Surbiton, for Brian White's Magna jazz band, with the standard line-up. The picture shows Brian enjoying his vocal 'Dinah'. Other numbers that we particularly enjoyed were:
'Pleading For The Blues', origin unknown to me;
'Coquette', composed by Carmen Lombardo, Gus Kahn and Johnny Green, made famous in 1930 by Bix BeiderBecke;
'Weeping Willow Blues', written by Blind Boy Fuller almost 100 years ago and made famous by Bessie Smith;
'Blue Turning Grey', written by Fats Waller and Andy Razaff, then played by everybody;
'The Old Stack o'Lee Blues', commemorating the killing of Billy Lyons by Lee Shelton in 1895 ("Stack o'Lee he shot Billy........"), the 1928 version recorded by Mississippi John Hurt being generally considered definitive;
and Alan Dandy's great keyboard solo, Harold Arlen's 'Blues In The Night'.
Once again we suffered from talking during the last of these. Why can't they keep their mouths shut for just 5 minutes ?
The audience was surprisingly small, increasing our chances of winning the raffle. Sure enough, Selina (in the lucky seat) won second and third prizes, although she asked Brian to draw prize 3 again as she had already won.

Labels: Jazz