Now You Got Jazz

[Originally posted here at my Twilight Universe blog...]
A few years ago I used to be the events manager at a local music venue. Despite parting ways rather acrimoniously (I thought the managment there couldn't manage a piss-up at a brewery) I was glad for my time there. Mostly because of the Jazz Club that was run on Tuesdays.

I've liked Jazz, Soul, and Blues music for as long as I can remember. Louis Armstrong won me over with "Its a Wonderful World" when I was just a kid and didn't even know what Jazz was. While I've never immersed myself in it the way other people do, I always come back to Jazz. More recently this has included the soulful sound of Jamie Cullum, who I met at the Jazz Club.

The nights formal title was Spikes Place, after the legend that used to run it before his death, Spike Robinson. I sadly never met Spike, he died in 2001 - a year before I started working there, but I regularly saw his wife Sue, and she was fiercely proud of him, and rightly so.

Spike, like many jazz artists, loved his craft passionately. A consumate proffessional he attracted artists to the club of a world class calibre. World famous drummers, piano players, and saxophonists like Derek Nash came to play. I felt incredibly lucky to be there. While the club was more the intrumental jazz variety -- which I find nice to listen too, less exciting to watch -- when vocalists came they were, again, world class. Not only were there the new stars of the scene like Jamie Cullum (whose first album Pointless Nostalgic I highly recomend, in fact more so than his latest multi-million seller TwentySomething) but there were established greats too.

Greats like Lillian Boutté.

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