Scrapbook.

Welcome to my scrapbook.

I'm trying to learn to play jazz on a lovely Besson cornet which was given to me by my parents for my 40th birthday.

It's rather a long-term plan but it's a lovely to play. It's so light, and portable. I can even play it in the bath. Ar first I thought it might mess up my horn-playing chops but so far it has only helped - because at least I'm practising more. Perhaps the novelty will wear off eventually, but I'm quite serious about learning to play jazz. I've got some of the Aebersold books with play-along CDs, which are great fun, well laid out, easy to use.

Here is the horn section during rehearsals for Peter Erskine's band, "The Creative Jazz Orchestra". Playing Peter's great pieces, with Peter, in this great band was a fabulous experience which I'll never forget. The horn parts were great to play.

That's Richard Berry, in the white tee-shirt and Martin Owen in the grey.

The BBC Radio 3 website has some stuff about this project. Click here to take a look at the relevant pages - and listen to a few bits, if you want.

Peter Erskine's eyebrows are much better than mine.

The above photo was taken just before the concert in Bath.
Musicians from left to right: Colin Currie (percussion), Mike Formanek (Bass), John Taylor (piano)
Peter Erskine (drums), Pip Eastop (Strawberries and cream & pint of Guinness).

Look what I found! This is a wonderful pair of Quad valve amplifiers. I'm going to recondition them and use them. I hope they sound as good as my WAD KEL80 monobloc valve amplifiers. This particular pair used to belong to John Cullshaw, top man at Decca - most famous for his production of the ring.

Here is Zak (aged 4 - photo 6th November 2001) playing hose-horn at his nursery school. It has loads of notes and it's not very loud. Ideal! I must try to get a photo of his embouchure which, amazingly, looks exactly like mine did when I started playing the horn agen 9 in 1967.

Here is my Yamaha "Frunting" Horn.

And here it is again. In America it's called a Marching French horn.
Why French? Why Marching? This picture is conclusive proof that
it can be played without marching.

How does it sound? Filthy! But it's great fun.

Strangely it has no defined high notes. When you get to a top C
(as written for horn in F) there are no slots for the notes, you can
slide around anywhere, so it feels like an amplified mouthpiece.

The picture below is of the unfortunate kids in my school - "Forest Grammar School", Winnersh. This was a really awful school, about which I can find nothing good to say. I only incude the picture here because I have recently got in touch with a couple of old friends from there, Mark Fricker and Simon Sherwood, after not seeing them for 27 years. We owe our very enjoyable reunion to the excellent website: www.friendsreunited.co.uk
Looking at this picture I realise how much darker my hair has got as I have aged. If you want you can find me with your mouse. Hint: I was very blond in those days.

This is Zak on his way to nursery with his horn
March 8th 2001.

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