Cheltenham Festivals blog archives

1 week
2 days ago

From Tony Dudley-Evans
Jazz Festival Artistic Director

There are two concerts at this year’s Barclays Cheltenham Jazz Festival that I am particularly looking forward to hearing. One is the Cuong Vu Trio gig on Sunday 2nd May which I wrote about in my last post. The other one is Dave Holland and Pepe Habichuela, the collaboration between the bass player Dave Holland and the Spanish flamenco guitarist Pepe Habichuela and some of Pepe’s flamenco family.

We’ve tagged this post with jazz, Tony Dudley-Evans on Monday 1 March 2010.

3 weeks
1 day ago

From Tony Dudley-Evans
Jazz Festival Artistic Director

Cheltenham Jazz Festival has built its reputation to a large extent on its ability to spot young jazz talent from UK, USA and Europe. It has always presented the really hot new bands on the New York scene and the Jerwood Rising Stars and Jerwood Jazz Generation programmes have enabled us to choose the best young talent from around the UK. And it has been really pleasing to see the response from audiences; sessions with young unknown bands in the Pillar Room, a not obvious but nonetheless great jazz venue, have always drawn big crowds with many bands selling out.

The Pillar Room has reflected in the last few years a strong tendency in UK bands towards bringing together jazz and elements of rock and electronica. We had in the first years of the Jerwood programme bands such as Polar Bear and Acoustic Ladyland, both bands with drummer Seb Rochford and saxophonist Pete Wareham as their main men. Then another example is that we had Fraud led by saxophonist James Allsopp, who blew the Pillar Room away with a full on set at the very unjazz hour of 12 noon on a Saturday.

We’ve tagged this post with jazz, Tony Dudley-Evans on Tuesday 16 February 2010.

10 months
3 weeks ago

Tony Dudley-Evans
Artistic Director, Budvar Cheltenham Jazz Festival

A particularly unique part of the Jazz Festival programme this year is the creation of a special band led by Jack DeJohnette featuring young British players who have all had an association with the Jerwood Rising Stars and Jerwood Jazz Generation and Take 5 schemes.

The project was first discussed at the 2008 Cheltenham Jazz Festival when Jack DeJohnette performed a solo drum concert (actually it turned out to be a duo with Ravi Coltrane for much of the set) and gave a drum master class in which he talked at length about his career in music. Jack expressed an interest in working with young British players and a series of discussions with Jack, John Cumming of Serious and myself has led to this unique project.

We’ve tagged this post with jazz, Tony Dudley-Evans on Thursday 23 April 2009.