Due to some kind of communication breakdown, Grimsby Jazz have found themselves without a band this evening! Although we’re not entirely sure who will be in the band at this time, Bryan Davis will be performing, with friends at 8.30pm at the Stamford Club (formerly Chartdale Club) on Clee Road in Grimsby.
If you’re at a loose end, please come out and hear Bryan play!
We are pleased to announce that Bryan Davis has been appointed as Lead Trumpet in the newly formed Lower Austria Concert Jazz Orchestra (no, not Los Angeles!) under the direction of Thomas Ramsl. They play their inaugural concert at the St. Pölten Jazz Festival, in Austria, on Saturday, 27th September 2008. They will be playing a programme entitled “Murdering The Classics” which, among other delights, features the Stan Kenton version of “West Side Story”!
There is a further tour planned for March 2009. More details about that will, of course, be passed on in due course.
This month sees the end of the Rat Pack Tour for the time being. The show is playing in Brighton, Norwich and Bournemouth before it wraps up for the summer.
Bryan will be playing most of these dates but will be taking time out from the weekend in Norwich to head out to the beautiful La Perelada castle in Spain to play a casino show with Chris Mann and Mark Adams who are presenting their “Frank and Dean” show.
The day after the end of the Rat Pack tour, Bryan will be playing at the Manchester Jazz Festival with sensational Latin-Jazz Big Band La Gran Descarga. He played a handful of gigs with them last summer and it’s really a great band. They are playing the first half of a double bill with Roberto Fonseca at the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester. For fans of Latin-American music, it’ll be a great night – come out and say hello!
For the remainder of the month of July, Bryan will be doing various other gigs including a Rat Pack event at the Liverpool Echo Arena and also playing with the fabulous Syd Lawrence Orchestra. Confirmed dates for August include gigs with The Real Macaws, 2 days in Glasgow playing “The Motown Show”, a weekend with the Glenn Miller Orchestra UK and an appearance at the “Jazz In The City” festival in Leeds with Steve Parry‘s “Big Band from Hell”. You can check the Schedule for further details.
In addition to these gigs, Bryan will be available to teach trumpet lessons in the Leeds area. He will available until sometime in early September at which point he will be making a big move away from Leeds – more details about that later, once the timetable has been confirmed. If you’d like to study with Bryan, please don’t delay – you may not have the chance for that long! To set up a lesson, please get in contact and we’ll organise it.
Bryan had a fantastic trip to Austria at the end of May, playing with Thomas Gansch and his band; Gansch & Roses. We’ll add more news about it shortly. The first concert they played, at the Schagerl Brass Festival, was broadcast live online by TheMusicPage.com – highlights will be available soon on the site. We’ll link to them once they become available. In the meantime, please enjoy this video of the band playing Thomas’ Bill Chase tribute – “Der Rock Des Trompeters” – from the gig at Porgy & Bess in Vienna.
Following all my good intentions at the end of 2007 about keeping up with News updates, I singularly failed to actually write anything! Here’s the next installment of my Rat Pack US Tour ’07-’08 adventure.
Los Angeles – Dec ’07
We had a great time playing at the Wilshire Theatre in Beverley Hills for the first 2 weeks of December. I previously mentioned that I had the legendary Rick Baptist and Dan Fornero joining me in the Trumpet section but that turned out to be just the beginning of the story!!
We had a great time playing the show and I count myself as extremely fortunate to have had the opportunity to listen to, play with and learn from these wonderful musicians first hand. Both are players I’ve admired on records for many years and it took me some time to get over the fact that I was playing with them at all! To put it in context; I was asked on the rehearsal break, by one of my friends and colleagues on the stage crew, how the band was in LA? My response: –
“I might as well be sitting between Santa Claus and Superman!”
More important even than the musical side of things was the friendship they both showed me. I was invited on various excursions with them throughout our stay in LA. Rick did me the honour of taking me to work with him one day! Sounds ordinary when you put it like that but, in fact, he took me to the recording stage at Fox Studios to watch a session for the TV show “American Dad”. That was a tremendous thrill! Not only because it’s the same production team that works on my favourite of the current US cartoons, “Family Guy” but also because of the living legends I met in the band! The other Trumpets flanking Rick on this occasion were none other than Warren Luening and Charley Davis! The trombones were no slouches either: Bob McChesney, Charlie Loper, Ira Nepus and Bill Reichenbach! It was a fantastic day out – thanks Rick!
Dan was kind enough to take me on an equally star-studded excursion the following day. We met up at the Musicians Union building in Hollywood where I had a chance to sit in on the rehearsal with Gordon Goodwin’s Big Phat Band! It was definitely an experience to sit back in the Trumpet section with Dan, Wayne Bergeron and a pair of stellar subs; Willie Murillo and Serafin Aguilar. Willie, who also subbed for Rick on the show for a couple of days, is best known as Lead Trumpet with Brian Setzer’s Orchestra, and Serafin was a member of the last Big Bop Nouveau band led by the late, great, Maynard Ferguson. Of course, the particular thrill was to hear Wayne Bergeron who is undoubtedly one of the greatest trumpet players out there, and a really nice guy! It was awesome to watch them all put through their paces by Mr Goodwin’s wonderfully complex music – I’m glad I didn’t have to play!! It was also great to meet the other guys in the band as well as seeing some familiar faces; the two Tenor saxophonists, Brian Scanlon and Jeff Driskill, were playing the show with us in LA, and Baritone saxophonist Jay Mason had been with us a couple of weeks before in San Diego. The rehearsal was for a gig the following week, on the day we were due to leave (!), but it was such an experience to see this band live that I changed my flight and stayed the extra day – well worth the expense!!
While we were in LA, I was delighted to be invited to head down to Fullerton College to coach their Jazz Band I. The Director of the Fullerton Jazz programme is Bruce Babad, a fine saxophonist who also played the show when we were in San Diego. More importantly, Bruce is better known for playing in the Big Band of legendary composer/arranger Bill Holman! Bruce has been doing a great job at Fullerton and the band was really good. We had a lot of fun and I particularly enjoyed having the chance to give my demonstration of “what not to do” as a member of the trumpet section. That can sometimes be as important and useful as demonstrating the right way to do things and has proven helpful in previous workshops I’ve participated in. I’m also pleased to say that Bruce has invited me to come back and be Guest Artist with the band in October ’08. There will be a proper announcement about that in due course.
That just about wraps up my highlights of the Rat Pack trip to Los Angeles. I’d like to thank all the guys who joined us in the band and I’m pleased to say that I can name them all for a change! They were:
…and not forgetting our regular travelling team of:
More Rat Pack Roundups shortly….