Review of 2019 part 2. 2020 so far (Strange days indeed!)

It's been a long time since my first blog post, mainly for personal reasons, so this review of the second half of 2019 is going to be pretty short. Suffice to say that I was fairly busy on the gig front with a number of excellent performances at Marsden Jazz Festival, my favourite being Dutch trombonist Wolter Wierbos whom I had managed to sign for his first ever UK solo performance.

Of the rest, notable mentions go to Tony Kofi (October) and Theo Travis (December) for their gigs at The Keys in Huddersfield with Ben Crosland's Trio, and to Alison Rayner's ARQ who put in a great performance at Wakefield Jazz in November.

My gig of the year though, was the electrifying performance by Louis Moholo-Moholo's 5 Blokes at Cafe OTO on 29 August, which was arguably one of the best gigs I have ever attended.

 

2020 got off to a very brisk start for me, with gigs by Alina Bzhezhinska's HipHarp Collective, Pigfoot and Anthony Braxton's Standards Quartet all in January and then.....

...everything shut down! How strange the last 7 months or so has been. No live gigs, but a great deal of online activity with artists finding new ways of getting their material out to audiences until finally a few socially distanced gigs were allowed. Sadly however, as I am typing this it appears that this is likely to be stopped by order of the UK dictatorship.

As a result of this inactivity, I have decided to start a jazz podcast, the first edition of which is due to launch any second now, hence this hasty blog post. Imaginatively titled The emuliJazz podcast it features a variety of material, the majority of which is British and European jazz from the 1960s to the present and all of which comes from my own record collection. Please give it a listen either on the Podcast page of my website www.emuli.uk or via Spotify, Amazon music or the Podbean app.

 #emuliJazz

Originally posted 11 October 2020.

NB. The emuliJazz podcast is no longer ‘live’ but all the episodes are still obtainable on request (See the emuliJazz Podcast playlist blogpost)