Peter Bacon has brought up an issue on his blog that I’ve been wondering about for a while – the ‘free jazz’ culture in Birmingham. It seems rare that people actually pay for gigs (at least over about £10) in the city centre, so is the amount of live music available to people for free jeapordising audience sizes at the bigger gigs? You can read his blog post and the comments here:
http://thejazzbreakfast.wordpress.com/2009/11/02/the-problem-of-free-jazz
Tomorrow is the first of the University of Birmingham Jazz & Blues Society’s fortnightly jam sessions at the Guild of Students. Particularly looking forward to this one as we seem to have had a huge number of talented first year students join the University this year. Starts at 8PM – come along!
So after settling back into life in Birmingham, I’ve managed to sort through some of the massive amount of shots I took on my A230 whilst on holiday in New Zealand. I’m hoping my limited photography skills can show what an amazing country it is – I’m really hoping I can be back there in the not too distant future!
When I was in New Zealand a very cool album was released on Tru Thoughts records. After seeing Lizzy Parks at the Rainbow a few weeks back (one of my favourite gigs of the year actually), I thought I’d post this tune!
Just got to the end of my first (of two) weeks round New Zealand. Such an amazing place – definitely on the ‘go back there’ list!
Went to see the Sub Ensemble at the Rainbow on Wednesday night – what a great gig. One of their latest creations is Chris Mapp’s interpretation of 4hero’s ‘Humans’, which sounded great – really inspired me to start writing for a band again this year at Uni, we’ll see how that turns out in a few months time!