The one remaining jazz club event is on Saturday (20th), the Jazz at the Crown Christmas Party with the Yorkshire Post Jazz Band.

Please note that Jazz at the Crown has moved and the new venue will be the Trustees Hall on Boston Spa High Street. Organisers Tim and Les point out that there is no bar, so take your own drinks. For more details call 01937 842544 or 01937 842636.

York does not have a jazz club, but we are fortunate in having several pub and restaurant venues where top quality musicians play every week. The Pizza Express features solo piano on Thursday, Friday and Saturday with most of the top pianists in York.

On Sundays, Tim New and Friends play for Sunday lunch at the York Hilton and the Black Swan, Peasholme Green, continues with an ever-popular jam session on Sunday nights. This is a particularly promising session, since the players are generally younger than the average jazzer and they attract a correspondingly younger audience.

Nina and Karl play Fine and Mellow on Mondays at the Rook and Gaskill, Lawrence Street.

Many of the usual weekly jazz fixtures will be on hold over the festive season as the warm and sensitive musicians of York will be spending quality time with their families. However, a date for your diary is January 29, when there will be a celebration of ten years of jazz at the Old White Swan, Goodramgate. The Don Lodge band and the Mardi Gras Band, which alternate every Thursday, will join together on that night to celebrate the long residency and to give their thanks to hosts Di and Tom for their patronage.

There is a long history of top-class live music in York and arriving just in time as a stocking-filler is a must-have CD from the York Oral History Society. Rhythm And Romance is the logical companion piece to the two books by Van Wilson on live music in York from the 1920s to the 1970s. Rhythm And Romance was the title of Volume One, which covered the dance band era, and this amazing CD is a collection of music by York bands, with some touching verbal reminiscences to punctuate recordings made as far back as the 1930s.

The CD opens with three tracks made in 1934 by J Prendergast and the Rialtonians and although they are in the stilted, syncopated style of the day, an exhilarating spirit shines through. Jack Prendergast was the owner of the Rialto (now the Mecca bingo in Fishergate) and the father of York's famous musical son, John Barry.

The remastering throughout is excellent, although there is surface noise on some of the tracks, to be expected since they came from old tapes and shellac or vinyl originals. This is a valuable reminder of just how exciting these bands from the middle decades of the 20th century must have been in the flesh. Particularly fascinating are early performances by some of York's best-loved musicians, such as Bobby Hirst and George Roberts. Derek Dunning's version of Ol' Man Rebop with the Bert Keech Band in 1948 bows to the bebop revolution started by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie in the USA.

The Modernaires Dance Orchestra has survived to today, but the 1948 recording of the Modernaires playing Dickery Dock at the Rialto gives us a tantalizing glimpse of its beginnings, a top class band in the prime Glenn Miller mould.

As recording technology advanced, the recordings achieve greater fidelity and the 1982 Modernaires recordings of At Last and Pennsylvania 65000 are good. The topping on this rich collection is the final track, I'll Never Smile Again, recorded by the Modernaires in 2002.

Van Wilson and Mike Race are to be congratulated on a wonderful piece of musical archaeology. This is history brought to life in the voices and music of many of those who made it. Rhythm And Romance can be ordered from the York Oral History Society, c/o 15 Priory Street (by post only) at £5.99 and from Borders or the Barbican Bookshop.

Updated: 15:07 Thursday, December 18, 2003