BRECON JAZZ FESTIVAL 2023

‘Jazz & Film Weekend’ The Films, Saturday 19th and Sunday 20th August 2023

THE FILMS, COLISEUM CINEMA BRECON

The final weekend of the 2023 Brecon Jazz Festival was billed as a ‘Jazz & Film’ event and featured a mix of film screenings at the town’s Coliseum Cinema and live music events staged at other venues around Brecon.

The four musical performances that took place over the course of the weekend have already been reviewed here;
Brecon Jazz Festival 2023, ‘Jazz & Film Weekend’ - The Music - Saturday 19th and Sunday 20th August 2023. | Feature | The Jazz Mann

For reasons that should subsequently become apparent I have decided to review the film   screenings separately.

Saturday commenced with the screening of the 1959 film “Jazz on a Summer’s Day”, filmed around the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival at Newport, Rhode Island.

Sunday’s film was the premiere of the British independent production “Indigo”, film maker Tom Parsons’ appreciation of the work of the British trumpeter, multi-instrumentalist and composer Byron Wallen and his long running quartet Indigo, a band also featuring saxophonist Tony Kofi, bassist Larry Bartley and drummer Tom Skinner.

Saturday’s events also included ‘Talking About Film’, an informal discussion with Tom Parsons held at St. Mary’s Church which reflected on “Jazz on a Summer’s Day” and also addressed Parsons’ own film which was to be screened the following day.

JAZZ ON A SUMMER’S DAY

The cinematic aspect of the final weekend of BJF 2023 commenced with the screening of “Jazz on a Summer’s Day”, a record of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. In 1999 the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” and the film was re-mastered and re-issued in 2021.

The still ongoing Newport Jazz Festival was founded in 1954 and the film documents its fifth edition. In addition to the music the film also shows something of Newport itself, a particularly affluent area of the US populated by socialites such as Festival backer Elaine Lorillard, who appears briefly in the film.

The opening credits refer to “a film by Bert Stern”, the fashion photographer who was the film’s original director. The opening sequence, features sunlight rippling on the water of Newport Marina and the film also includes extensive coverage of yachts taking part in the trials for the America’s Cup races.

The opening sequence also features a ‘cast list’ of the musicians appearing in the film, this reading like a veritable ‘who’s who’ of jazz.

Shot entirely in colour the film has no narration or commentary, with Stern content to let the combination of his cinematography and the music itself do the talking. Festival MC Willis Connover is heard announcing the artists and the film also features snippets of overheard conversation documented in various scenarios.

“Jazz on a Summer’s Day” is a very candid portrayal of the Festival with Stern adopting a ‘fly on the wall’ approach with unedited audience shots, footage of musicians behind the scenes at soundchecks and hotel room rehearsals (the Chico Hamilton group) and scenes shot in the streets of Newport and its environs. Like Brecon Jazz Festival in its heyday the Festival appears to take over the whole town, sometimes to the annoyance of some of the locals. A band of student musicians from Yale University are shown driving around playing New Orleans style jazz from a vintage car. Apparently the group included trombonist Roswell Rudd, a musician later to find fame in rather more avant garde jazz circles.

Stewards are shown setting up the chairs in Freebody Park ready for the open air musical performances. The first concert footage we see is of a trio featuring saxophonist Jimmy Giuffre, valve trombonist Bob Brookmeyer and guitarist Jim Hall playing “The Train and The River” behind the opening credits.

Thelonious Monk also appears early on in the film, playing with a trio featuring Roy Haynes on drums and a startlingly youthful looking Henry Grimes on bass. Unfortunately we don’t see enough of the musicians as Stern keeps cutting away to footage of those America’s Cup yachts.

Sonny Stitt is then featured on tenor sax (he’s more commonly associated with the alto), leading a group that also features guitarist Sal Salvador.

Given his background as a fashion photographer it’s perhaps not so surprising that Stern lingers longer over a performance by the glamorously attired singer Anita O’Day, focussing on her coat and hat as much as the music. That said O’Day’s performance is terrific and includes an audacious slowed down arrangement of “Sweet Georgia Brown”. Although overshadowed by the ‘holy trinity’ of Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Billie Holiday O’Day was an accomplished and adventurous vocalist with a superb technique and she was also a great entertainer. Here she bounces ideas off her small group in thrilling fashion and I’m sure she remains an influence for contemporary jazz vocalists such as Zoe Gilby.

The O’Day footage includes more candid footage of the Festival audience, some listening intently others eating ice creams, and we also cut away to the Yale student jazz band as they play from a child’s train ride.

The next musical performance comes from British born pianist George Shearing leading a Latin styled quintet featuring vibraphone and congas.

The vibes also feature on vocalist Dinah Washington’s soulful rendition of the jazz standard “All of Me”. The performance also includes Washington playing vibraphone alongside vibes specialist Terry Gibbs. The whole show was documented on the album “Newport ‘58”, one of many “Live at Newport” recordings to be issued by a wide variety of artists over the years.

Given that “Jazz on a Summer’s Day” was filmed sixty five years ago in the year that I was born it comes as no surprise to learn that most of its participants are no longer with us. A happy exception is Terry Gibbs, still going strong at ninety eight and who released his latest album as recently as 2017. Also still with us at ninety eight is drummer Roy Haynes, seen at Newport with Thelonious Monk.

I recall seeing the late Henry Grimes (1935-2020) at the 2009 Cheltenham Jazz Festival, more than fifty years after Newport ’58.  By now Grimes has become an elder statesman of the music, grey of hair and beard, but still a phenomenal musician.

Audience members could be seen up and dancing at that Washington gig and it was notable that audiences at Newport were racially integrated, a welcome sign of the changing times and a far cry from the American South and the repressive ‘Jim Crow’ laws, basically apartheid by another name.

This spirit of integration was also represented on the bandstand, notably in baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan’s ‘pianoless quartet’, with trumpeter Art Farmer also featuring in the front line. Mulligan (1927-96) later appeared on the concert programme at the 1991 Brecon Jazz Festival, playing with his quartet in the Market Hall. The 1958 Newport performance was later released as the album “News from Newport”.

Even at this early stage in the Festival’s history there were signs that Newport was already on its way to becoming what is now known as a ‘hybrid’ jazz festival, with other genres of music featuring on the bill. Blues belter Big Maybelle was featured singing ““All Night Long/I Ain’t Mad at You”, accompanied by a group of well known jazz musicians billed as the Newport Blues Band.

Rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Chuck Berry, a controversial addition to the line up, played electric guitar and sang “Sweet Little Sixteen” in the company of the same musicians that had backed Big Maybelle. Berry’s vocals and guitar were followed by a searing clarinet solo but the footage depicts Berry from the waist up, so modern day viewers wanting to see Berry’s famous ‘duck walk’ were left disappointed.

For me one of the most remarkable performances featured in the film was that of an ensemble led by drummer Chico Hamilton. An unusually configured line up featured Eric Dolphy on flute and Nate Gershman on cello and the music sounded startlingly modern, sounding as if it could have been made in 2023. I had to keep reminding myself that this was 1958! Hamilton’s own playing was effortlessly fluid and his mallet solo, featuring subtly evolving polyrhythms was utterly compelling. The cameras cut away to an audience open mouthed in astonishment and admiration. They were totally transfixed, as was I some sixty five years later. The film also includes extended footage of a shirtless Gershman playing solo cello in his hotel room.

Part way through the film the role of director transfers from Stern to Aram Avakian, with the latter placing a greater emphasis on the musical performances. There’s an extended section featuring Louis Armstrong which includes footage from an interview followed by performances of “Up The Lazy River” and “Tiger Rag”, with Armstrong’s singing and trumpet playing supported by a band featuring drummer Danny Barcelona. Trombonist and vocalist Jack Teagarden joins Armstrong for a good humoured duet on “Old Rocking Chair” and the performance concludes, almost inevitably, with “When The Saints”. The mutual respect that Armstrong and Teagarden had for each other shines through and at this early stage of its existence it must have represented quite a coup for Newport’s organisers to have had a global star like Armstrong on the bill.

I have to admit that I’ve never really ‘got’ Armstrong despite his undisputed importance in the history of jazz. His status as an ‘all round entertainer’ has never sat well with me and I’d far rather hear him playing trumpet than singing and generally hamming things up. He’s not the only hugely popular act whose appeal largely passes me by, I don’t really ‘get’ Elvis Presley or Coldplay either.

The film closes with a remarkable performance from gospel singer Mahalia Jackson who sings with great power and authority, hardly needing the onstage mic. A powerful rendition of “Didn’t It Rain” sees the audience snapping their fingers in time with the beat but they fall into open mouthed silence for Jackson’s stunning singing of “The Lord’s Prayer”, a totally mesmerising performance, even to the unconverted. Jackson was last on the bill on Saturday night and her performance extended into the early hours of Sunday morning, welcoming in the Sabbath with “The Lord’s Prayer”.

The song also concludes a film that features some brilliant musical performances but which is also an encapsulation of the optimism of late 1950s America, in affluent areas such as Newport at least. In addition to the racial integration remarked upon previously it’s also notable that jazz is still a music appreciated by young people with many hip young things among the audience, digging the sounds of jazz before rock music began to dominate the music scene of the 1960s and beyond. Artists such as Shearing and Mulligan were still particularly fashionable at this time.

The varying directorial styles of Stern and Avakian result in a film that is both a concert movie and a social commentary, capturing a particular moment in American musical and cultural history. In its re-mastered form it’s still essential viewing and listening for music fans and represented a perfect choice for Brecon Jazz Festival, an event that has come to mirror Newport through its longevity and musical diversity.

TALKING ABOUT FILM with TOM PARSONS, ST. MARY’S CHURCH

Following the “Jazz on a Summer’s Day” screening audience members were invited to St. Mary’s Church to discuss what they had just seen in the company of film maker Tom Parsons, whose own film “Indigo” was to be screened at the Coliseum the following day.

This wasn’t a case of Parsons talking TO the audience but instead a fully interactive conversation featuring Parsons, Festival organisers Lynne Gornall and Roger Cannon and the small group of audience members that had come across from the Coliseum.

The audience members expressed their delight at the musical performances with Mahalia Jackson receiving particular praise. Some were pleasantly surprised to see racially mixed audiences in 1950s America, something also epitomised by the obvious bonhomie between Louis Armstrong and Jack Teagarden, a friendship that also flourished away from the stage.

Everybody found Stern’s cinematography to be very evocative and said that they had become absorbed by the footage and wished that they could actually have been there on that July day in 1958.

Some of my personal observations and opinions about the film, which I expressed in the discussion, are incorporated into the above review.

Parsons talked about some of the technical issues and challenges with regard to the filming and sound recording that Stern and Avakian had had to overcome in the making of the film.

The affable Parsons then told us something about his own film. He works as a dubbing mixer in the television and film industry, specialising in synchronising sound and vision.

“Indigo” is a project that has been more than a decade in the making. Parsons is a huge jazz fan and a friend of London based trumpeter Byron Wallen. In the days when Youtube was in its infancy Parsons regularly filmed Wallen’s gigs and placed the footage on Youtube.

Despite the publicity for his music that this facilitated Wallen was wary of giving his material away for nothing and the idea of a full length documentary style film was born.

Parson’s “Indigo” project began in 2009 and has thus been more than a decade in the making, the hiatus between initiation and completion having been occasioned by Parsons taking time out to concentrate on his young family, this voluntary break then followed by the pandemic.

The “Indigo” film combines live footage of the band from both 2010 and 2020 together with interview footage captured in each of these years.

BYRON WALLEN, INDIGO, REVELATIONS IN SMALL STEPS
COLISEUM CINEMA, BRECON, 20/08/2023.

Parsons’ words about his own film certainly whetted the appetite for seeing the film itself and it was with a keen sense of anticipation that I took my seat in the Coliseum Cinema with around thirty other inquisitive jazz fans.

I’ve been a long time admirer of Byron Wallen’s trumpet playing, having heard him first in bassist Gary Crosby’s Nu Troop ensemble in the 1990s. In 2020 I reviewed his album “Portrait; Reflections On Belonging”, which was released pretty much on the eve of the pandemic, this resulting in most of the accompanying tour dates being cancelled. Album review here;
Byron Wallen - Portrait: Reflections On Belonging | Review | The Jazz Mann

Brecon Jazz regulars will recall Wallen visiting the town for the 2018 Brecon Jazz Festival, when he performed as part of a sextet led by jazz harmonica player and pianist Adam Glasser paying tribute to the South African trumpeter and composer Hugh Masekela.

Wallen has appeared frequently on the Jazzmann web pages as a sideman in the bands of others, but as a solo artist he’s very much been under-recorded. His previous albums include “Sound Advice” (1995), “Earth Roots” (1997) and the well received Meeting Ground” (2007).

His Indigo quartet, featuring saxophonist Tony Kofi, bassist Larry Bartley and drummer Tom Skinner has been running since 1999 and the band released its self titled album, still its only official recording, as far back as 2002.

Parsons’ film was initially intended as a celebration of the quartet’s tenth anniversary, but a whole lot more water has flowed under the bridge since then.

Today’s screening was introduced by Parsons himself, who explained that this was a world premiere of a film that sought to both educate and entertain as it explored and explained Indigo’s music, whilst also introducing the individual band members as both musicians and as people, exploring the human stories behind the music.

Subtitled “Revelations in Small Steps” the film commences with footage of the leader, who explains that as a musician he is dedicated to the principles of improvisation and spontaneity, a commitment strengthened through his involvement with the late free jazz drummer John Stevens (1940-94). Wallen appeared on Stevens’ 1992 live recording “New Cool” and credits the drummer with liberating him from the bebop tradition. Wallen regards much contemporary music as being too sterile and polished and is more concerned with creating music “on the spot”.

Wallen has travelled widely and is also an acclaimed educator. His travels have taken him to all corners of the African continent and also to Indonesia and to his parents’ homeland of Belize. The sounds of these various locations are reflected in his own music, including that of the Indigo quartet.

He recounts that he has worked with ensembles led by his sister, the acclaimed contemporary classical composer Errolyn Wallen, as well as playing on numerous rock and pop sessions. He toured globally with the bands Incognito and Us3 before forming his own group Sound Advice, an ensemble that embraced the influences of Brazilian, African and electronic music.

Wallen is something of a musical polymath and his travels have found him exploring all kinds of traditional musics, from all parts of Africa to Indonesian gamelan. Hearing the Thelonious Monk tune “Green Chimneys” played on a kalimba, or African thumb piano, in South Africa represented something of a turning point for him as he determined to incorporate traditional elements into his own jazz derived music.

Another seminal experience was seeing a performance by a band of Gnawa musicians from Morocco in West London.  Fascinated by the rhythms and instruments of this Sufi trance music Wallen visited Rabat in 1995 to work with two master Gnawan musicians, exponents of the peul flute and the guimbri, a kind of bass lute.

The film includes archive footage of Wallen’s time in Morocco and the trumpeter recall that it was difficult to integrate the trumpet into this non-Western music and also remembers that it was difficult to bridge the language barrier, both orally and musically.

He speaks with awe of the Gnawan musical tradition, something passed down through the generations with no formal ‘western style’ musical education

Wallen’s North African experiences fed into the music of his 1997 album “Automatic Original”, credited to the group Bambaraka and featuring Wallen alongside Oumarou Namazarou, Peul Flautist from Niger, and Si Mohamed Chaouqi (Tbel Drum and Guimbri)  from Morocco.

The film also includes coverage of Wallen playing the trumpet in the woods near his home, a regular practise and rehearsal space for him. He was also filmed playing a variety of ethnic flutes and percussion instruments. Indeed Wallen’s house resembles a ‘musical museum’ filled with the many and varied instruments that he has brought back from his global travels.

The Indigo band were seen assembling and sound checking at the Jazz in The Crypt venue at St. Giles Church in Camberwell, London. The rapport between the group members is apparent even before a note has been played and the quartet describe themselves as being “like family” with the same kind of gang mentality that The Beatles had in their early days. The shared love and mutual respect is obvious.

Indigo is one of those bands whose individual members are always busy with other projects and get together only rarely, making such occasions even more precious. Kofi is extremely busy as a solo artist while Skinner is currently a member of the Smile, a group featuring Radiohead members Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood.

During the Saturday “Talking About Film” discussion Parsons emphasised the special chemistry between the members of Indigo, explaining that when the band play with a ‘dep’, usually for Kofi and Skinner, the results are good, but never quite as magical as they are with the first choice quartet.

Indigo’s music experiments with rhythm, melody and harmony as it seeks to incorporate different time signatures and ideas sourced from different musical cultures, including Tanzanian music which makes extensive use of fives and West African music which tends to favour sixes.  It’s all part of Wallen’s fascination with numerology.  Wallen speaks of the music beginning with “simple melodies that then become very complex”, while Skinner is disparaging of the West’s obsession with 4/4 time.

Extensive footage filmed at The Crypt at St. Giles in 2010 and at a deserted Ronnie Scott’s during the 2020 lockdown offers several examples of this on tunes sourced from the “Indigo” album, such as “Dark and Beautiful” in eleven and “Harmony of The Spheres” in nine.

The nature of the band’s music has resulted in the unusual front line of trumpet and baritone sax, with Kofi occasionally doubling on soprano. Kofi plays all members of the saxophone family but considers the baritone, an instrument that he first took up in 1996, to be the most suitable vehicle for Indigo’s music. When the band first began playing together it was felt that Wallen’s trumpet and Kofi’s usual alto sax were too close together in terms of tone and timbre and that the baritone, with its five octave range, would be more suitable for the demands of Indigo’s music.

In the context of the ‘Jazz & Film’ weekend overall it’s interesting to note that the same trumpet / baritone combination occurs in “Jazz on a Summer’s Day” with the Gerry Mulligan / Art Farmer quartet. Meanwhile the Indigo musicians make reference to Mulligan’s work with trumpeter Chet Baker.

Despite the complexities of the music it isn’t the idea that it should be obtuse. Some of the music harks back to early New Orleans jazz, while dancer and chorographer Dr. S. Ama Wray, the film’s only female participant, explains that dance is in the DNA of jazz and that tap dancing has always been closely associated with jazz thus providing a neat link to the main BJF weekend when tap dancer Annette Walker and bassist Gary Crosby co-led a quartet at St. Mary’s Church. Wray also explained that other cultures dance and move to a variety of different, sometimes complex rhythms, it’s only in the West that dance music is habitually associated with 4/4.

It has always been Wallen’s intention that Indigo’s music should groove, regardless of the time signature and he expresses the opinion that the group’s album is “all about rhythm”.

During their conversation Wallen and Ray recall that it was Crosby who first brought them together around the time that Wallen was playing with Nu Troop. Wray then recalls the occasion when she and Wallen collaborated on the jazz dance work “Red”, which was supported by a grant from the Jerwood Foundation and performed at the Royal Opera House.

The film features a series of informal conversations between Wallen and the other band members, these filmed in outdoor locations by Lisa Wood, with Parsons taking the conscious decision to get away from the cliches of musicians being interviewed in the recording studio, and particularly at the mixing desk.

Wallen and Bartley recall co-founding a quintet in 1993 and playing regular gigs at the Jazz Cafe in Camden. It was Bartley who introduced Wallen to Skinner, by far the youngest member of the group. Meanwhile Skinner recalls being a fan of his bandmates when he was a teenager just getting into jazz and reading about them in the long defunct Straight No Chaser magazine.

Wallen and Kofi first met in 1991 and hit it off immediately, practising together in a manner inspired by Val Wilmer’s accounts of Ornette Coleman and Ed Blackwell in her classic book “Serious As Your Life”. The film includes archive footage of Kofi practising at around this time.

Blackwell’s New York apartment was always being visited by other musicians. Similarly, in Indigo’s early days the band’s musicians were always popping in and out of each other’s houses, as both Bartley and Kofi recall. It’s a fertile environment for creating new music and Wallen became particularly prolific as a writer, always bringing new material for the other band members to improvise around and develop, each putting their own stamp on the music.  Wallen speaks about room being left for collective interplay and improvisation within the written frameworks.

This intense period of ‘woodshedding’ was partly the result of the reluctance of promoters to book a ‘chordless’ quartet. Wallen remembers being asked “who’s the piano player” or “where’s the guitarist” on a regular basis.

But this period of constant rehearsal sharpened the band’s collective ‘chops’ and strengthened their rapport. Bartley speaks of the quartet developing their own “Indigo language” and when the band did eventually start gigging they quickly earned themselves a reputation as an exciting live act who succeeded in communicating with audiences despite the complexities of their music.

Bartley claims to have had the idea for the infectious double horn salvo that introduces “Harmony Of The Spheres”, the opening tune at all Indigo gigs. Skinner speaks of the quartet’s music as being “funky, but not in the obvious way” and explains just how much he has learned about rhythm from playing Indigo’s music.

The human stories behind the music are also featured. The film includes footage shot some ten years apart and one can see how the musicians have changed physically – “we were just kids when we started observes” Wallen.

Life events are also alluded are to, with one example being that Skinner has married and become a father during the period between the two live performances documented in the film. Indeed there are times when Parsons’ film reminds me of the more widely distributed “King Crimson at Fifty” , which documents Robert Fripp’s outfit on their 2019 tour, examining the sometimes tortuous history of the group and looking more deeply at internal band relationships plus the personal lives of the then current members. As with “Indigo” there’s a lot of human interest, it’s not just a film about music, and neither “Indigo” or “King Crimson at Fifty” are anything like the average ‘concert movie’.

Parsons’ film got me thinking about Indigo’s influence on the wider UK jazz scene and I think it’s probably fair to say that it can be heard in Sons of Kemet, Shabaka Hutchings’  distinctive reeds /  tuba /  twin drum kits quartet, with one of the two drummers being Tom Skinner. Kemet’s highly rhythmic music attracted the attention of a younger, non jazz-specific audience and earned the band a Mercury Music Prize nomination for the album “Your Queen is a Reptile”. The Jazzmann was a supporter of Sons of Kemet from the outset and the group has been featured on this site on numerous occasions, both in live performance and on disc.

Skinner’s success with Kemet attracted the attention of Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead and these three currently constitute The Smile, releasing the album “A Light For Attracting Attention” in 2022 to considerable acclaim. I’d like to think that Radiohead / Smile fans would be interested in seeing the “Indigo” film and learning more about Skinner’s life as jazz musician.

Indigo’s influence can also be heard in Larry Bartley’s own chordless quartet Just Us!. Featuring Kofi on alto sax, Ed Jones on tenor and Rod Youngs at the drums the bassist’s group released the excellent “Beauty in the Hideous” in 2014, an album that is reviewed here;
Larry Bartley & Just Us! - Beauty in the Hideous | Review | The Jazz Mann

The “Indigo” movie signs off with the wise words of Art Blakey and his famous remark about music coming “from the Creator, to the artist, to the audience”. It’s a good quote to conclude with, a near summation of Indigo’s approach to music making, and one that also places them within the context of a wider jazz heritage.

Parsons has made an impressive and highly enjoyable film and it is to be hoped that it can be seen widely. Yes, it’s about a relatively little known figure within a strain of so called ‘minority’ music, but I’d still like to think that a more ‘casual’ observer could still enjoy it and gain something from it.

For any jazz fan this film is a ‘must’ and as alluded to above I’d like to think that adventurous listeners of any persuasion could be attracted to it too, especially those Smile and Radiohead fans.

Parsons has the product, it’s just getting it ‘out there’ so that it can be appreciated. The so called ‘marginal’ status of the film means that it doesn’t have a BBFC certificate (the censors haven’t even watched it) and thus it can’t be shown to under eighteens, which is ridiculous as there’s not even a single swear word in there, and nothing else that could even remotely offend.

One would hope that adventurous film festivals, such as the annual Borderlines Film Festival in the Welsh Marches, might provide a suitable outlet, while for jazz clubs and festivals a double bill of Parsons’ film followed by an Indigo live performance represents a mouth watering prospect. It’s certainly prompted to me to check out the “Indigo” CD, (credited to Wallen), even though it was released as long ago as 2002. It’s still available via Wallen’s Bandcamp page.

Parsons and his team, including co-producer Wallen, have invested a lot of time and effort into this film and it’s one that deserves to be widely distributed and widely seen.

Brecon Jazz Festival’s new ‘Jazz & Film’ strand represents an interesting new addition to the programme and it would be good to see it continue. There must be a lot more jazz footage out there that isn’t likely to be seen in the multiplexes. I’d love to see the “And They Called Him Morgan” film about the late trumpeter Lee Morgan to mention just one example.

COMMENTS;

From Tom Parsons via email;

Thanks for the very comprehensive review!
I hadn’t been filming any of Byron’s gigs before we decided to try to make a documentary apart from the Crypt gig. The only other time I filmed Byron was when he was part of the horn section at the first Mulatu gig at Cargo, London. Other gigs we did were Chris Dave Trio (ft. Foley), The Invisible, Tom Skinner & Shabaka Hutchings (as Def Langoustine). Most of the gigs are up on the YouTube channel for Takminister. Tom Skinner suggested we filmed Indigo at the Crypt and after we did that and I proposed putting that on YouTube Byron said, no, let’s try and make a documentary. I guess it was Byron’s impetus that got the ball rolling.
Thanks again for the support! We’re hoping to have a London premiere in December as part of Byron’s mini-festival at The Coronet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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