Am I embarassing you?

Not a bad weekend, I managed to spend some time with good comrades I hadn’t seen for a while. Had to drive up to London for the afternoon to see them – I’d turned into a real field mouse over the past year. It was nice to smell the smoke again. Good to be with courageous people. Staunch.

I’ve started saying thank you to all the people I know who helped. It’s important and I’ll be trying get that done over the next couple of weeks.

Also, I’m surprised to see that some of the old posters (faded now) have come down and the new one has gone up. Don’t know who could have done that. But it’s good, that’s a kind of thank you too.

Funny thing is, many of the people I thought had been reading this Blog, hadn’t. Or were too embarrassed to admit it. Ashamed – perhaps. I’m not.  Not many people get a chance to make a difference.

Maybe it was all strangers who made this possible. There’s something wonderful about that.

Anyway, I got home and enjoyed some more of BBC Four’s Jazz Weekend. I’d recommend ‘Jazz Horns Gold’ – it’s on again and is also on the BBC i-player – free of charge for 7 days (no broadband, grrrrh).

There were three highlights for me – Stan Getz Desafinado (what else?), Ben Webster with the late, great and much loved Ronnie Scott duetting close and very tight on saxes, and Dizzy Gillespie. Wow, he was good. There was some pretty good bass playing back then and a lot of Black and White too.

Friday night was a ‘Jazz 625’ featuring the Dave Brubeck Quartet from 1964. Late period. They were starting to lose a bit of the discipline, bored a bit with ‘Take Five’, perhaps. More Black and White.

One day I’ll tell you a couple of my Ronnie Scott stories, if you’re very, very lucky.

Now he was a stand up guy.

Neil Harris

(a don’t stop till you drop production)

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