JOINED UP FOR JAZZ PART 10, conclusion of inaugural S & D Joined Up Jazz Festival presented in association with Hot Biscuits

JOINED UP FOR JAZZ

PART 10, conclusion of  inaugural S & D Joined Up Jazz Festival presented in association with Hot Biscuits

Steve Bewick, Gary Heywood-Everett, Norman Warwick, & Susanna Forden

the joined up jazz journalists

STEVE BEWICK

´Jazz radio, on air, via the internet, three times a week to your device.´

Hello, my name is Steve Bewick and I am a freelance jazz broadcaster currently playing out as Hot Biscuits on www.fc-radio.co.uk three times a week.

You can catch me on Wednesdays and Thursday at 9pm and late Saturdays at 11pm (UK time). This is usually one show repeated twice in the week. I can be found at www.facebook.com/stevebewick and a back catalogue of my shows are available at; https://www.mixcloud.com/stevebewick/

The history of Hot Biscuits is also a personal history and a glimpse into the politics of football. Sound strange? This is about as strange as my jazz preferences. I started with Hospital Radio way back and then enjoyed doing live radio when funding was available for an RSL (Radio short term Licence to broadcast). Going back to patient requests was never quite the same. I always wanted to undertake a regular specialist programme with Jazz and contemporary music in mind.

Chances came from within the protest movement at Manchester United Football Club against the sale of the club to the Glazier family. This yellow and green protest led to a break in support for the club out of frustration at being refused a voice. A group of 2,000 supporters at a public meeting voted to tear up their season tickets and establish a new FCUM (Football Club United of Manchester) in the North West League of the non-league structure.

The radio station came from a group of ex-media students who wanted to support the fledgling club through radio and TV and so was born FC Radio and TV.

Some twelve years later the club has an official, unofficial media platform. The radio station is rather like 5 Live with 6 Music. Only it’s a bit more chaotic.

My jazz broadcast has its emphasis on local jazz music in the Greater Manchester area and the North West generally; resident bands, touring bands, jazz clubs, festivals and so it goes on. I very much like to record and make available live jazz music in the area. This has become a staple part of the Hot Biscuits mix although over time and distance I have made contacts with friends, musicians and bands around the world. Oh, and the rest of the UK. All of whom offer me new influences and sounds.

I discovered jazz through jazz/rock fusion in the shape of Miles Davis and Bitches Brew. From there I took the contributing artists list and explored jazz sideways, back ways and forwards more recently with improvised music through various live outlets. Early be-bop and hard bop are high on my likes list. I have the opportunity to explore big band swing through a local Jazz Society where participants take it in turn to present a talk about different aspects of the big band sound and jazz generally from that 50’s period of jazz history.

My colleague in this venture, recently joining the team, is Gary Heywood-Everett. I´ll allow him to introduce himself to you.

GARY HEYWOOD-EVERETT

´who remembers the Light Programme, or the Jack Jackson Show?´

´Hi, I´m Gary Heywood-Everett. I wonder if any listeners to Hot Biscuits or readers of Sidetracks & Detours remember a programme on the then Light Programme, the precursor to Radio One, called the Jack Jackson Show. It was on a Saturday I think and used to begin with his signature tune which was Organ Grinder Swing. It was a while before I found that the musician playing it was Jimmy Smith but I knew that I liked it and wanted to find more of his music. Soon I discovered ‘Walk on the Wild-side’ and through that I was hooked on modern jazz. I was a mod at the time and the music with its disdain for the past fitted right in with everything else. I wanted to know more and soon – with a few friends looking for obscure (but cool) artists, buying Jazz Journal to read about these people and getting the records they reviewed. Soon we were widening our jazz tastes by listening to Dave Brubeck, Jacques Lousier, Art Tatum, Earl Hines and Duke Ellington. It was a random but enjoyable selection.

With one foot still in the Blues and R n B we began to see the connections in the music and when concerts were advertised at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester we bought tickets. There we saw B B King, Duke Ellington (twice), Woody Herman, Ella Fitzgerald, Jazz at the Philharmonic tour (Dizzy Gillespie etc.) as well as our favourites at the time, the Modern Jazz Quartet. To our knowledge Manchester had two jazz clubs in the late 1960’s, the Manchester Sports Guild (MSG) which we were thrown out from trying to get in for free, and Club 43 on Amber Street. As soon as we were 18 years of age we became members of Club 43 and felt incredibly grown-up going to a real night spot! There we saw – close up – Ben Webster, Zoot Simms and Al Cohn, and Archie Shepp, sitting alongside Georgie Fame in the audience who, like us, was lapping up the music of his idols.

I’ve never lost that initial interest or the sense of excitement in improvised music from around the world in all its forms. Although some may argue that there are no musical connections, my interests range from Free Jazz to New Orleans, from UK music (what a loss Keith Tippett is to music recently) to West Coast cool.

For more information or to contribute to Hot Biscuits you can contact us at hotbiscuits@fcumradio.co.uk

NORMAN WARWICK

´Come follow your art through music, jazz, literature and visual arts from pottery to poetry, ballet to blues and drama to dance.´

Hi, if I can just get a word in here as well, please, I´ll introduce myself as Norman Warwick, owner and editor of the daily Sidetracks & Detours blog.  This site invites you to follow your art through music of all genres including jazz, as well literary and visual arts from pottery to poetry, ballet to blues and drama to dance. Gary contributes to this Joined Up Jazz Festival whilst Steve has regularly contributed jazz essays over the years.

Steve and I used to co-present a weekly programme on Crescent Community Radio from Rochdale, a programme that combined Steve´s love of jazz, my passion for the arts in general and lots of news on the arts and culture of the town. It was on that programme that we both met Gary, when he was a guest talking about his latest book.

More decades ago than I can count, unless I use my thumb, I presented what would now be called Americana music on Cavell Radio Sherwood, a community station, playing music by John Stewart, Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt, to name the three greatest singer writers ever ! I was also simultaneously producing music magazines. Lendanear was effectively a newsletter for my own folk group, Lendanear, and that gradually grew into Sidetracks, which grew into Detour and that eventually morphed from print to electronic media called Sidetracks & Detours, which maintains the promise to deliver news, interviews, previews and reviews made by the small UK organisation I formed and that continues to serve The Manchester Evening News Media Group with a dedicated page in a number of newspapers.

In England I regularly broadcast on BBC radio outlets such as Radio 2, Radio Merseyside, Radio Manchester and Radio Lancashire as well as on commercial outlets such as Quality Country Music Europe (CME) and Monster Radio FM and very occasionally guested on tv. It has all been very exciting but nothing has ever quite matched the sheer ´locked away from the world´ pleasure of sitting in that Crescent Radio studio with Steve as we chatted to guests and each other, learning about new musical sounds from all around the world as we did so.

I have lived on Lanzarote now for five years and contribute a weekly column at Lanzarote Information on-line about the jazz, classical and folk-lore music and practitioners on the island.

SUSANA FONDON

´showcasing both new and established musicians and singers´.

Hello, as a regular contributor of live music reviews and interview to Lanzarote Information I was chuffed to be asked to become a ´joined up jazz journalist´, although I love most music forms as well as jazz. Once I knew it was ok with Miguel, my editor at Lanzarote Information. I was happy to help this festival along, and Tommy Cummins, the artist I featured in my interview was also happy to be included.

Live music is an integral part of Lanzarote and I enjoy regularly going to see my favourite artists and also I enjoy ´discovering new ones. Interviewing them for Lanzarote Information gives me the opportunity to showcase both new and more established artists to a wider audience. Although I studied piano as a child and sang in church choirs, my taste in music is quite wide: from classical to heavy metal and (almost) anything in between. 

I took it as a compliment when asked to contribute to Sidetracks & Detours Joined Up Jazz Festival presented in association with Hot Biscuits weekly Jazz radio show and it meant a lot to me, but  wow, I didn’t realise it was going to be part of something THIS big. It felt great when Norm told me about the coverage from radio stations, jazz magazines and listings outlets.

I often agonise over making interview sound fresh (although it’s a quite fixed set of questions) and I want to do justice to the musician!!!! Funnily enough I’m very shy but starting to interview the people I knew made me build a certain amount of confidence and now I even enjoy interviewing people I never met before!!!

Norm´s note:

Susana has since posted another interview on Lanzarote Information with a guy who is the regular country music player at Rancho Texas here on the island of Lanzarote. The venue is a kind of honky tonk offering all you can eat to cowboys and their families who reached the end of their cattle drive and have all the steers roped and branded and corralled ready for market.

This particular ´cowboy´ made himself available for interview to Susana and as always her gentle questioning  put him at ease so that he talked about Lindsey Buckingham as a favourite artists. With Susana´s permission we might be able to wrap that interview in to an article about Liddy Buck, one of my own favourite singer-writers and guitarists who was influenced by, and was in turn an influence on the late great John Stewart who wrote Daydream Believer.

Meanwhile, Steve and Gary will continue to develop their own new radio initiative and Susana and I will continue to write independently  for Lanzarote Information.

No doubt the four of us, the newly dubbed Joined Up Jazz Journalists, will find new music, emerging artists and yet unidentified audiences, even as we protect the legacy of music we have each loved throughout our lives. And we will share it all with you.

To place a written article or to seek an interview, or to submit news contact me at normanwarwick55@gmail.com and I will look to carry your information and share it with my colleagues at Hot Biscuits and Lanzarote information

Meanwhile, we reach the conclusion of our ten part inaugural Sidetracks & Detours Joined Up Jazz Festival. We have brought you profiles of  John Coltrane, Bessie Smith, Gil Evans, Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, looked at jazz during ´swing time in Europe at the time of Hitler´s assault on the world in the springtime of Lanzarote over the last five years. We have travelled from Britain to American and back over to Russia, France, Italy, Sweden, Holland and Germany, and followed jazz tracks from the nineteen twenties to the present day. We also looked at venues, labels, radio and print media support, for the industry and we´ve heard a lot of music along the way. Look out for the announcement of a new mic-cloud broadcast called The Blue Plaque Playlist*, of tracks specially selected and by our Joined Up Jazz Journalists. Norman Warwick, Steve Bewick, Gary Heywood-Everett and Susana Fondon have compiled another of our Sidetracks & Detours special playlists for you to enjoy. Meanwhile, please continue to follow your art down the sidetracks and detours of our daily blog as continue to deliver jazz news until we return with our second annual Joined Up Jazz Festival next year.

We already have thirty exciting jazz features lined up to publish before next year´s event. Look out for….

Jazz Jumps Up                                 a look at jazz festivals to come

Blue Plaques In Jazzland               a show of appreciation

Billie´s Blues Echoing Still           another look at Billie Holiday

Straight No Chaser                         jazz on the radio

Deep Fog Of Misunderstanding    the jazz of Cat Toren

Remembering                                  Annie Ross

Okayness Of Taking Chances        Susanna Alexsanfra, jazz piano

On Being Human                            Israeli Jazz Man

The Democracy ! Suite                   Winton Marselis

Andra & Billie & The Blues Billie Holiday film

Nubiyan Twist in the tale               Leeds based jazz nonet

Jazz Musicians Playing Violin      Jazz In Education USA

Lost To Jazz                                    ghosts in the music

Jazz Structures                                jazz support systems

Festivals Bouncing Back               Berks Jazz Festival USA

Joined Up Jazz Journalists             in conversation

Talking Beat Poetry                        The Beat Generation

The Migration Of Silence              William Parker Jazz Box Set

The One And The Other                Lara Solniki Jazz

Listening To A Beat Poet               Allen Ginsberg

East African Jazz Journey              Omar Sosa, Cuban Pianist

Role model and utter inspiration   Maxine Gordon

Where Will The River Flow Matt Carmichael Jazz Saxophonist

In Search Of Billie Holiday           BBC tv Documentary

The Blue Plaque Playlist*              music from our virtual festival

Jazz In Reading                               combined listings service

Jazz Silhouettes                               journalism joining up jazz dots

Rebecca Jade is excellent               Java Jive on jazz radio

Taking His Own Sweet Time         Tommy Flanagan enja records

Impressive New Players                 Gui Duvignau

This article was written our by four Joined Up Jazz Journalists; Norman Warwick, owner and editor of Sidetracks & Detours daily blog, Steve Bewick and Gary Heywood-Everett, presenters of the Hot Biscuits radio programme and Susana Fondon, music correspondent for Lanzarote Information. Today´s post concludes our inaugural Joined Up Jazz Festival

Don´t forget you can hear Steve and Gary presenting Hot Biscuits each week on www.fc-radio.co.uk

You can also read an archive of Susanna´s work on Lanzarote Information.

Sidetracks & Detours will continue as a daily arts blog on these pages.

Meanwhile we are also grateful to Jazz In Reading, Jazz North, Ribble Jazz And Blues, Monster fm Radio, and Lanzarote Information for their kind support by including details of our festival in their listings, We look forward to bringing you further details in the weeks to come of the excellent work they do for the jazz community.

Thanks for visiting our Joined Up Jazz Festival. Please leave the arena quietly and carefully and be safe and stay well.