Jazz notes

Classic blues recordings by Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith continued to be sold as “race records” directed at black audiences, but the blues flavour in such tunes as Birth of The Blues, True Blue Lou and Shaking the Blues Away soon spread to popular the white audience.

The centenary of the Americanisation of the stage musical also falls this year, since Irving Berlin’s Ragtime revue, Watch Your Step, opened in 1914, free from European theatricality.

With his family fleeing Siberia from the Russian pogroms against Jews, Israel Baline arrived in the USA in 1892, the youngest son of a cantor. His father died four years later and eight-year-old Israel left school to sell newspapers. Hearing hits of the day drifting into the street from the bars and restaurants, he found that if he sang the songs himself while selling papers, people tossed coins to him.

So he became a song plugger, a singing waiter and a song-writer in writing words and music. A type-setting error on one of his sheet music songs listed him as I. Berlin, which he thought classier, so added the Irving.

Alexander’s Ragtime Band, written in 1911, brought international fame and sparked a dance craze led by Irene and Vernon Castle, for whom Berlin wrote Watch Your Step, his first complete stage score. By the 1930s he was also writing for Fred Astaire, Judy Garland, Bing Crosby, etc. He died 1989, aged 101, and it is estimated he had written more than 1,500 songs.

Many Berlin songs have become jazz favourites and you will hear them in the coming week, starting tonight at 8.30pm with Bejazzled at Middleton`s Hotel, Skeldergate (01904 611570). This tasty combination of Tim New (saxophones, flute) and Don Lodge (guitar) plus rhythm section is noted for its impeccable taste in music.

Sunday jazz is similarly tasty, with jazz standards and more from John Marley (bass), Paul Smith (drums) and guests at Kennedy’s Café Bar, Little Stonegate from 1pm (01904 620222). Pianist Chris Moore’s The Central Scrutinizers is his virtuoso quartet, playing music by Monk, Mingus, Wayne Shorter and others at the Phoenix Inn, George Street, at 8pm on Sunday. The pub is also the place to be on Wednesday night, when Chris and trumpeter James Lancaster lead the regular jazz jam.

A stronghold of traditional jazz is Jazz in the Spa every Saturday night and this week’s guests will be the Millennium Eagle Jazz Band, with some notable multi-instrumentalists in the line-up (01937 844898). The venue is Boston Spa village hall, with the invitation to bring your own tipple. Scarborough Jazz runs every Wednesday at the Cask Inn, Cambridge Terrace, and next week, Martin “Mad Dog” Jones will be guest on trumpet and vocals.

The Ryedale Jazz Festival (July 20 to 26 ) features traditional jazz from eight bands (01751 473791), while the Hull Jazz Festival (July 24 to 26 ) will present mainly modern jazz (01482 323638). The programme for the Scarborough Jazz Festival has Nigel Kennedy on its cover. He will be playing the Grappeli role to John Etheridge’s Reinhardt in a Hot Club of France tribute (01723 821888).