Tuesday, January 01, 2008

We're Back!! Jazz in Paris - the venues, the jazz cafes, the concerts, the cocktails...

Hey... a long time on tour and away from the blog and the listings... Just finished two months in Japan on the road with a big band... a great and strange experience... the Japanese audiences are fab, we were playing to houses of 2 and 3 thousand people and they are the best listeners in the world. The only odd thing is that they all wave goodbye at the end... very odd...

I finished the tour with a side trip to Hong Kong and and on one of the final nights we wandered around looking for some where to have a drink and stumbled into an Australian Bar (dedicated to the criminal Ned Kelly) and caught the last set of the South China Coast Jazzmen… actually looking mostly Indonesian, these guys were headed by the 80 year old trumpeter (and in this video dancer/percussionist/singer/rubber chicken player and all around party animal) Silverio Yaneza, who is dancing up a storm in the back row. They were pretty loose (but hey, it was the last set of the night and they’ve been playing there for 20 years) but still he rocked and gave us a great send off to an amazing trip... so here's a clip from that night in Hong Kong... see if you can catch the rubber chicken in the moment... I hope I have this much jive in me when I'm 80




I'll start updating this blog next week... there's a lot going on for the new year in Paris Jazz...

cheers
Brem