I am very conscious that this blog has taken a back seat over the last many weeks in favour of our Salon Music and my own blog. So, since the party did take place in the garden at Hampstead Lane I am reproducing the post I have just added to the Salon’s blog for the benefit of our garden blog readers. (Please ignore if you get both!)
The party was held last Sunday and invitees included local Highgate friends and neighbours, Salon Music supporters, FreeFrom Food Awards friends and neighbours from Lawn Road and the Isokon. An extremely random colletion of people who none the less seemed to get on very well. We had Gypsy Jazz from Sol Grimshaw and his group, LOTS of delicious bread, cheese, crudités and dips – and the sun shone upon us! Read on – and more to come on the garden and my rampant Geranium Rozanne very soon.
Alison and her sketch pad were indeed guests at our Sunday jazz-in-the-garden party – and as you can see, were as active as ever.
Happily, despite out worst fears, the weather gods smiled upon us, the rain held off, the sun appeared often enough to cheer us all without baking us and that sharp wind from last week took a break. The result was the perfect temperature for a garden party.
The focus of the party was the playing of Sol Grimshaw and his Gypsy jazz group – Sol himself (on the left), Harry Diplock on the other guitar and their lovely bass player, Murray Dare. Some of you will already have heard Sol (who I ‘discovered’ at the Guildhall School of Music Jazz Festival 18 months ago) at the Highgate Society lunchtime concerts and in pubs around the village.
But what actually is ‘gypsy jazz’? It is the style of jazz pioneered by the legendary ‘Django’ Reinhardt in the mid 20th century. Django was a member of the French Romani Manouche clan (hence the ‘gypsy’) who had learnt his trade playing with dance bands. Influenced first by ragtime and Dixieland music, and then by Duke Ellington, Joe Venuti, Eddie Lang and especially Louis Armstrong, with the jazz violinist, Stephane Grappelli, he developed what came to be known as ‘gypsy jazz’.
After Reinhardt’s death in 1953 the generationof Romani players who followed him moved to amplified instruments and played in a more ‘electric’ style but over the last 20 years Romani musicans have returned to the accoustic style favoured by Reinhardt. Today the term ‘gypsy jazz’ refers to this style of playing rather than the players themselves as many of today’s ‘gypsy jazz’ exponents (such as our trio) are non-gypsies.
To give you a feel of what it sounds like here (with thanks to Martin Reidl) are a couple of clips.
And here are the group looking down through our rampant maclaeya from the patio.
My lovely photographers (thank you Ruth, Olive, Martin, Pete and Khulood!) were so busy snapping the guests and the players that they didn’t manage to get any pics of the food but we did get through serious quantities of Gail’s best French sticks, an array of cheeses, and not just chick pea hummus but anchovy hummus, harissa hummus and horseradish hummus, plus lots of salsa and an extremely colourful collection of crudités.
However, they did capture the garden (check out that cardoon flower that came out on Sunday just for us), guests of all ages (my next door neighbour Jean with her house guest Claire and I, Aubrey, our youngest guest playing with Boris and her dad, and Sudhir from Lawn Road looking particularly amazing – get that bangle….) and our bass player, Murray, in full flow.
And while they were hard at work snapping, Alison was recording the lovely summer fashion on display…
Meanwhile don’t forget…..
Saturday 9th September –
The Voice Trio – Patterns of Love
On 9th September we are back in the Highgate School Chapel. The lovely Voice Trio, Victoria, Clemmie and Emily, will be singing love songs through the ages – from their favourite Hildebrand of Bingen in the 12th century to contemporary songs written for them by Helen Chadwick, Marcus Davidson and Ayanna Witter-Johnson – and taking in some Walter Scott and traditional folk songs along the way. For more see this post and this one.
About gardens
I’ve long loved Django’ Reinhardt…and these guys are good, too! Looks like such a cool garden party…wish I’d a been there!
Wish you had been here too Tom!!