Friday night I took out Gina ( my gorgeous and talented wife), and Dave & Sam (our gorgeous and talented staff from ABC Creative Music – the education company I run with my twin brother phil) for drinks to celebrate Dave booking in 45 support visits to primary schools in May. Unfortunately Phil couldn’t make it. For an hour Dave wasn’t there either and Sam and Gina discussed hairstyles.

Eventually we went to Bill Kyle’s cool jazz club on Chamber st and saw the Alyn Cosker power trio. Wow. Alyn was playing amazing drums – he went right past the “you bastard you’re good  I could do that if I had more time to practice zone” to “ I am a total Alyn Cosker fan!” zone – an experience I also had with the drummer Lee Pearson playing with the World Saxophone Quartet playing in Cheltenham.

I will enter the practice room with even more vigour after Friday night. Alyn was playing with  great young guitarist from Ayr – David Dunsmore, and bass player Ross Hamilton – who had a hairstyle like the bass player from Duran Duran and 4 young korean girls sitting adoringly at his feet who apparently have laminated photos of him…….nuts. David & Ross were great real great playing technically very good, but Alyn had that bit extra ie something really came through in what he played and did more than impressed you by it’s technical brilliance – it was fab. Mind you  I was pissed…

We got taken home in Martin Green’s car by a guy called Tom who then rode home on a wee moped he had on the boot all for £35. Amazing……It was called Scoot or something.

The photo could have been taken in my kitchen when we got home and ate steamed dim sum but I wasn’t – it was from the same location on a different day….

I have yet another theory about being a jazz musician. It goes in stages – for me it has been pretty much in decades. The first decade you are totally focussed on getting better at playing the music. Then in the 2nd decade you realise that no matter how good the music is if you don’t get your promotion skills sorted you will never really get anywhere. In your third decade you realise that no matter how good your promotional skills are, the jazz economy is basically buggered and very few people ever really get anywhere (and they are usually singers) and you have to just enjoy it for what it is and the love of the music and anything else is a bonus. So you go back to kind of where you started – the music!