Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Cygnus Flare at Ronnie Scott's and Armenia tour, Archer scholarship f
The last few weeks have been awesome. The Edinburgh Fringe Festival was really busy and really good fun - I played a record-breaking 50 gigs in 3 weeks, as part of 3 shows that were running daily throughout the festival. There was Pronto Jazz's Swing From the Movies in the mornings, Movin' Melvin Brown's Chuck Berry Lives! in the afternoons, and Roddy Bottum's Sasquatch rock opera in evenings. It was a pleasure to work with so many talented musicians over this period, and to finally play with bassist Lorna Thomas! Here's a pic of the magnificent Sasquatch cast
and on stage with Movin' Melvin Brown
and here's a video of the kind of antics we were getting up to each day with Movin' Melvin playing Johnny B. Goode.. stage invasions from dancers in the audience became part of the show!
Then Cygnus Flare played to a sold out Friday night audience at Ronnie Scott's opening for Tord Gustavsen, which was pretty amazing!!
Then we went off on tour - to Armenia!! We went to play for the 25 year anniversary of the British Embassy in Armenia, which was a great honour for us. We played other gigs at jazz clubs in Armenia to make a tour out of the trip. All gigs were well attended, even by a couple of people in Cygnus Flare t-shirts - which I didn't know existed. This was an amazing trip and it was really nice to meet people in Armenia that like our music.
Then finally I came back to London, and straight away started a new chapter - at Trinity Laban doing a postgrad in Jazz, where I'm happy to say that I've got a fully funded Archer scholarship. I'll look forward to working my socks off to make the most of this opportunity!
Let's end this blog entry with a drum solo from Yerevan that was video'ed by David Gabrielyan
