Meeting	We meet monthly on the 3rd Thursday each month from 10:00 to 12:00 from September to April
Current Venue	Methodist Church
Members
Contact	Leader Jazz Group

The Methodist’s Church in Bye Street offers a perfect venue for jazz with plentiful seating and superb audio/visual facilities

If you have a liking for jazz, in any of its many forms, why not come along and see if you enjoy listening and watching first-class jazz in a friendly environment? Each month is different and full of interest.

Jazz Group 2024-25 review

As usual our meetings have been characterised by the variety of music we’ve shared. At our first meeting we took the whole meeting to listen to a collection of “Classic” jazz from the early 50s to mid 60’s, a period in which many people consider that  jazz peaked. We’ve dipped into the treasure trove for early jazz fans that is Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot 7 recordings (largely avoiding any tracks with Louis singing!).

We have also had the opportunity to sample tracks from a large collection of “Piano Blues and Boogie”  from the 20s to the early 50s. A number of the artists that featured did not achieve great fame in their careers, despite having slightly esoteric names, and in some cases only recorded once, but their music was well worth listening to. On video we had a collection of performances by some of the giants of the Swing era of the 30s and  40s, including Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, Count Basie and many more.

We’ve had two sessions of more recent music devoted to specific connecting themes; guitarists from the 70s to the 90s, and concerts by prominent bands who happened to perform in Paris from the 60s to the 80s. Another presentation theme was variety in an individual player’s performances; this was explored in a session where slow and uptempo tracks were compared for a selection of musicians. From a visiting speaker we have had a very informative interesting and musically illustrated talk about the multi-instrumentalist, composer and arranger Benny Carter.

For the meeting after that we took the opportunity to have a session devoted entirely to vinyl recordings. The scope ranged from 50s/60s British traditional jazz to John Coltrane with much variety in between, including Errol Garner and Gerry Mulligan. We’ve also had a session of 30’s style jazz played by present day British groups, including two local ones. In April we had a session of performances by a selection of female Jazz pianists, many of whom are not as well known as their skill and musicianship deserve. The first half of our finale in May was filled with the sound of 5 of the all-time best saxophonists. We finished off the year with a mixture of tracks with no unifying theme, except the oxymoronic one that they were from different epochs and in different styles.