Billy Jenkins Trio Blues Suburbia
released on CD and download
VOTP Records
July 5th 2011
~
Vacuum to it. Iron to it. Eat to it. Love to it.
Jazz gives me the blues.
Incense. I ching. We give. We bring. Be Bop.
Flip Flop.
Breathe in.
We sing.
Jazz gives me the blues.
Toe Rag Blues. Dirty shoes. Jazzed up rust.
In jazz we’d trust.
Turned to rust.
Lust gone bust.
Nothing’s new.
Jazz gives me the blues.
Billy Jenkins – electric guitar, voice, harmonica
Finn Peters - alto saxophone &
flute
Jim Watson –
NORD organ
Mike Pickering –
drum kit
- Jazz Give Me
The Blues
- I’m Just A
Lucky So And So
- For All We
Know
- Black Coffee
- Do Nothing
Till You Hear From Me
- God Bless
The Child
- Travellin’
All Alone
- I Ain’t Got Nothing But The Blues
~
Recorded and
produced by Charlie Hart in one take instant time and space
on 26th July 2010 at Equator Studios, London SE4
BLUES IS THE
NEW JAZZ
JAZZ GIVES
ME THE BLUES
official
press release by Mike Gavin:
July 5 2011. Billy Jenkins turned 55.
What could be more appropriate than a retro 'Fifties
late night jazz album -
a celebration
of that thing called jazz - another cliché in the land
we call jazz.
NO!! STOP!!!
We don't want no more of that groovy dinner jazzy
lounge piano soft-focus wide screen smooth talking
tasteful jazz thang.
Man, jazz gives me the blues! Jazz is the blues.
Blues is the new jazz.
After
years of following the jazz rainbow Billy saw the light
way back in the nineties and formed a blues band
(the marvellous Blues Collective and then the recession
proof Trio Blues Suburbia).
Adding a vocal element to his music allowed Billy to
confront those perennial blues issues: dogs (he don't
like 'em),
parents (ditto), tea (very much in favour), Cliff
Richard (no position at all really but he did meet him
once)
and the Duke (just can't get enough).
So maybe moving away from jazz brought him back to a
renewed appreciation of those hoary
old numbers we all love to hate and an understanding
that the blues underpins jazz.
Whatever, here we have a Billy Jenkins album of
standards (OK, so that's like a Lady Gaga guide to comfy
cardigans
but there we go). Just to contextualise, the album kicks off
with a homage to the ultimate in 50s
hipness - the Hammond organ trio - yes, in the Jimmy Smith
corner Mr Jimmy Watson (not playing Hammond) and in
the Grant Green corner the heavy weight guitar string
champion of the world, let's hear it for Mr B Jenkins Esq.!
Mike Pickering's in the drum seat (he makes up the last
third of the Trio Blues Suburbia) and guest soloist and
Jenkins novice, lauded and award winning altoist and
flautist Finn Peters rocks in with a bluesy
chorus or two and some kissing noises.
[Maybe this is a good time to list the wonderful
saxophonists who have passed through Jenkins' groups and
gone on to great things (must be something in the water).
Step forward if you please Ian Trimmer, Iain Ballamy, Mark Lockheart, Mark
Ramsden, Andy Shepherd, Frank Mead,
Dai Pritchard, Martin Speake, Volker Schlott, Jason Yarde,
Nathaniel Facey etc etc. OK, step back again.]
Billy takes these old jazz standards and does
unmentionable things to them, lyrically and musically
metamorphosing
them into something new and strange - reinterpreting the
hackneyed old images,
injecting anger where anger never was, blueing the
jazz.
The guitar, that guitar, still strikes like lightning,
illuminating as it incinerates,
but the emphasis here is on mood - a fifties late night mood
for a fifty-somethin' guitarist.
