Our jazz music expert, Chris Howes, is an award-winning promoter who has worked with many leading musicians. He lets our readers know what's hot and what's not ...

It's a good week for pianists, three of them in particular. Nikki Iles and Pete Churchill are among the best young pianists in the country, and Churchill is a dab hand with vocals, too.

You will find them this Friday at the Peter de Wit Caf in Greenwich Church Street where they will perform some of their programme as a piano duo a real musical rarity these days. The place has a uniquely friendly intimacy and the cuisine is very fine I know, I have worked there myself. Jane de Witt sums up her approach to food as "simple, tasty, well prepared and unfussy" just like the music.

It is great to find that miraculous pianist Steve Melling back on our doorstep this weekend a rare local appearance. Last week I mentioned his work with Laura Zakian and now, this Sunday, he is with another good singer, Trudy Kerr, at the Plaza Suite at the Stag Theatre, Sevenoaks.

Melling's natural pianistic inclination is towards the driving power-play of McCoy Tyner. He has actually worked with drummer Elvin Jones, who was Tyner's percussion partner in the mould-breaking John Coltrane Quartet. However, Melling is a brilliantly sensitive accompanist, too, as his work on the current Trudy Kerr project proves.

Kerr has put together a band modelled on the wonderful cool West Coast music of Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker. For reasons not immediately apparent to me, Baker's trumpet work has lately taken a back seat on the airwaves to recordings of his thin and bloodless vocalising. Trudy Kerr's song interpretations promise a bit more spirit and she has also applied some vocalese words to Baker's old recorded trumpet solos. Vocalese had its hip heyday in the 1950s and 1960s through the bohemian outlook of singers like Eddie Jefferson and Jon Hendricks. It was re-popularised in the 1980s by the vocal group Manhattan Transfer, but, these days, it is an almost totally neglected jazz vocal form.

The instrumental flavour of the Mulligan/Baker partnership is recaptured very well in Kerr's band by baritone saxophonist Derek Nash and trumpeter Dick Pearce, with the rhythm section completed by Geoff Gascoyne on bass and Tristan Maillot on drums. But, this music is not "Pointless nostalgic", to use the title of a song by the suddenly high profile singer-pianist Jamie Cullum. Trudy Kerr's musicians are all characters in their own right, and you can expect the stamp of their own musical personalities on this wonderful music.

Congratulations to the four winners of our Dave Brubeck competition, as well as thanks and commiserations to all the entrants who weren't lucky. Yvonne Minchington of St Paul's Cray and David Powell of Bromley each have a pair of tickets for Brubeck at Fairfield Halls on May 4, while Wendy Cleave of Ashford and Ann Coppinger of Catford will have the same for May 6 at the Festival Hall, all thanks to the tour agents, Jeff Hanlon Promotions.

April 28, 2003 17:30