Christmas Show Confirmed

I’m pleased to (finally) confirm that I will be playing Lead Trumpet for “Christmas with the Rat Pack” at Birmingham’s Alexandra Theatre this Christmas.
The show runs from Monday 12th December for 4 weeks. Please come and check it out, should be a lot of fun!!

Happy Birthday to Me!!

Happy Birthday to me!!! Thirty-one years old today and all set for much more fun than last year.

Today I’m jetting off to Dublin for a week there with the Rat Pack tour. It brings the tour full circle for me; my first week depping on the show was in Dublin during May last year. Anyway, should be a lot of fun…

Here’s to a sore head in the morning…

New Sound Clips

The astute return visitor to this site will notice that I’ve revamped the Sound Clips page with a new Flash-based MP3 Player! I decided that it was probably the easiest way to make my sound clips as widely available as possible. Anyway, to celebrate, I dug around through some recordings and came up with a couple of new clips. Go and visit the “Jukebox“!!!

The first is from the AlmeidaGirl and Descarga CD “Llanita” which I had the great pleasure of recording on last year. I’ve since had a chance to do some live gigs with the band and it’s always good fun. The album has been doing really well. Check out the sound clip here and then if you want to hear more, you can download the album from the iTunes Music Store. Click this link and away you go!

The second clip is from a Quintet gig we did early in 2004 at HullJazz. It’s my solo on Cherokee changes from a tune we like to do called “Clinicology” by Phil Woods. The recording quality is a little rough since it was done on a single mic at the back of the room. It took a little soul-searching to post it at all, so please go easy on me!!! The rest of the folks in the band are: Jim Corry – Alto, Naadia Sheriff – Piano, Adrian Knowles – Bass and John Perry – Drums.

I should have some more clips to post shortly! The new CD from The Cat Pack is due for imminent release and features my Lead Trumpet on a few tracks (I’m still bearing the scars!!). We are also about to record a new AlmeidaGirl and Descarga CD with some great new songs by Kirsty Almeida and on top of that, I’m planning to take my Quintet into the studio sometime before Christmas. We recently played a couple of gigs including the Cleethorpes Jazz Festival and it was a good blow – time for me to dust off the old Jazz chops again and learn some new ones!! I’ll keep you posted…

Addendum: It occurs that given the modern look of the afore-mentioned MP3 Player, perhaps I should call it a “Bry-Pod”???

The Return of the Website.

At last, I’m pleased to be able to put the site back up and make it available once again. What I expected to be a few days has turned into 9 weeks – time flies when you’re working flat out!!! Apologies to any regular readers who’ve wasted time checking the domain every few days. Believe it or not, my traffic stats show that plenty of folk have been looking in from time to time.

Of course, in typical fashion, the site isn’t quite finished (but then it never is). I’ll be tweaking things over the next few weeks. If you spot any problems with anything please use the Contact page and let me know. The site should display properly in all modern web browsers (IE5.5+, Netscape 6.2+, Opera 6.6+, Safari 1.1+, Mozilla Firefox etc). Any older versions than those and I make no promises. I’ll be testing everything more thoroughly in the next few weeks.

Repeat visitors will notice a few changes – the major one being that my weblog (formerly “Life of Bryan”) has been removed. It’s still on the web though; visit TrumpetBoy.co.uk. All the old posts are there. This News page will simply impart information of what I’m up to at the moment and other Music-related stuff. There’ll be a good dose of that at the other site, along with all kinds of other nonsense, technical and otherwise.

Please have a look around and let me know if there are any problems.

Bye for now…

Bryan