The blog is dedicated to Irish Jazz and to the fans, musicians and venues that support it. if you have any content you would like to add to the blog please get in touch.
Jazz to suit all moods as we enter into the final Jazz Mine of 2017. Plus a bonus track at the end which was not included in the broadcast due to time constraints. Happy New Year to you all.
This album shows how much Edel Meade’s vocal style has matured since she first appeared on the Dublin scene about six years ago. She opts for an understated approach, ethereal and with a touch of mystery. Combined with perfect diction and the sheer beauty of her voice, this puts Blue Fantasia in a class of its own.
On episode 137 of Jazz Mine you can hear from John Coltrane, Hugh Buckley, Lee Konitz, Magnus Lindgren, Ray Charles and many more ..........A wide range of jazz covering many ages & genres. Saturdays 5PM on dublincityfm.ie.
Some great news. The Hot Box is now available on iTunes. If you are an iTunes user which I`m sure many of you are, you can subscribe and listen to the show while driving to work, on a bus journey or even relaxing on your sofa.
For those that don’t use iTunes don’t worry we got you covered. New episodes will always be available on the site and we will still upload to Mixcloud.
Here is a list of all the ways you can listen:
On this edition you can hear the "Happy Horns" of Clark Terry, one of the most important Jazz trumpeters, fluegelhornists and composers with a brilliant technique and full of rich emotions. And I look back at his extraordinary career, with Terry rising out of the Count Basie Big Band into the Duke Ellington Orchestra and releasing some stunning work as a leader of his own groups and as a sideman with Oscar Peterson and Bob Brookmeier to name only two.
Read more: Tales from the far Side 14.12.17 The Happy Horns of Clark Terry
In the epic series of alphabetical pianists started early in 2017 we reached the letter H, in Hot Box 21, only to find such a plethora of riches that they spilled over the confines of a single Box. As luck would have it, the letter I has very few incumbents so we are able, in Hot Box 23 to play the missing H’s - or at least most of them - and both the I’s. And speaking of the letter I, we couldn’t resist the temptation to play a very early “Capetown jazz” piece from the South African star Abdullah Ibrahim that runs a little over 15 minutes!
Read more: The Hot Box #023 – A to Z of Jazz Piano Part 9 – The Letters H & I
Venues for jazz music come and go, generally because the owner of the venue gets tired of scrambling for enough audience to make money, or the old owner moves on and the new owner would rather build a block of flats on the site. The Fox Inn, at Ballymadun just outside Ashbourne, County Meath was one such venue, and I am put in minded to recount this particular Unreliable Memory by the death, in New York on November 22, of the singer and lyric writer extraordinaire, Jon Hendricks, at the fine old age of 96.
Jon had two week-long residencies at The Fox Inn in the late 1960’s, at a time when he was living, for about 5 years, in Britain. He was a veritable fount of jazz wisdom, extremely funny on and off stage, and he exuded an enthusiasm for life that was very infectious. That’s another way of saying that The Fox Inn was riotous when Jon was in town. Read on for a while and I will get around to further eulogising Mr Hendricks but first…..