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…and then came Phil and Lew

6th December 2019

The musical revue, ‘A to Z’, opened on 11th October, 1921, at the Prince of Wales’ Theatre in London’s West End. It would run for 428 performances. Ivor Novello is credited as being the composer of ‘A to Z’, though other songwriters contributed pieces of their own, including the revue’s most durable song. Composed by Philip Braham with words by Douglas Furber, ‘Limehouse Blues’ would become something of a jazz standard or, if you have grown tired of musicians battling over its accommodating changes at breakneck speeds, maybe you would prefer the description ‘jazz warhorse’. Recorded by Paul Whiteman in the early 1920s and, several decades later, by the Sun Ra Arkestra, ‘Limehouse Blues’ certainly has staying power. It has also proved quite enticing to post-bop saxophonists wanting to give their awesome techniques a workout while providing their rhythm sections with a wake-up call. But more of them later.

Phil Woods (Alto Sax)
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‘Ronnie Peters’, ‘Buckshot La Funke’, Julian ‘Cannonball’…

8th September 2017

Join jazz aficionado Peter Gardner with his look back at the one and only Julian ‘Cannonball’ Adderley…

Some accounts of his arrival on the New York jazz scene read like an exaggerated piece of jazz folklore.  Aged twenty-six, already a successful high school music teacher, he was in New York with a view to starting graduate studies to add to his already impressive educational CV. On Saturday 19th June, 1955, he had his alto with him and rather than leave it in a car, which could be fraught with danger in New York, he took it with him into Café Bohemia to hear a group led by bassist Oscar Pettiford. Pettiford’s tenor player, Jerome Richardson, hadn’t shown up and neither had his dep.

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