Ain’t Life Grand! And Kay Young

Festival Time: So, February already, everyone off to Halls Gap or Inverloch. or even St Kilda Festival. One of the great pleasures of maintaining a deplorably low standard of competence for the jam sessions is

that if half the jammers go to Halls Gap, the other half doesn’t get any worse. We don’t get any better either, but you can’t, as Hortense once observed rather ruefully, or not as the case may be, have everything.

Ain’t Life Grand!  Much music making this week gone by, with Julie Stewart setting up a groove at the Grand Hotel on Friday, sang beautifully, and quite a contrast to Kay’s smooth tones later on, the Captain, meself  and Is Don keeping up manfully but well out of the comfort zone. Kay and Noriyo had the Saturday night, and if you haven’t been down to the Grand yet (a fair few have), give it a whirl – it is a pleasant place indeed… This week sees Jo Loth rippling through the standards songbook on Friday, and Kay doing her Saturday thing, on Saturday..

Noisy Sunday: And then there was Sunday – an afternoon of contrasts it would seem, held together by Captain Chaos in fine form despite having  spent 22 hours a day in rehearsal for HGJF. After a somewhat loose opening stanza,  La Smiff brought a touch of class to the proceedings, although that could be a typo, and newcomer Christine belted through Bye Bye Blackbird, Fever and some latin number which I have already forgotten in a moment of Freudian cleansing…props to Tom for a two hour stint on drums, although he was helped out by Fred the bongos, and to Agus for holding Ceora together.. As the afternoon wore on, one by one, the musos, and we use that term loosely, packed up and left,. After they had all gone, the afternoon ended with some fine ballads from the divine Miss Smiff and a quiet little closing Tenderly from Kay.

 Noice!

The bit about drumming: It has been mentioned in despatches that there has been no mention of Al Papa Jazz these last few weeks. Drum wise, he has been so quiet, that we considered putting a stuffed replica in the corner instead. Two problems: we couldn’t find a stuffed replica that drummed that badly, and in fact we couldn’t find a replica as stuffed as . . . well, you get the picture.