‘Trad’ jazz and Exmen cometh to boat festival

PAUL Clerehugh will once again be serving up some specials in the Crooked Billet’s pop-up tent at the Thames Traditional Boat Festival next weekend.

Henley tenor saxophonist Art Themen has confirmed the line-up for his blues and jazz quartet on the Friday night.

He will be joined by guitarist Denny Ilett, double bass player Mark Hodgson and drummer Charlie Stratford.

Art, who was given a lifetime achievement award by the Worshipful Company of Musicians in 2021, says: “Paul rang me up and said, ‘Can you do this slot?’ so I cast around.

“Now a local resident, Denny Ilett is unusual in that he’s a kind of virtuoso British guitarist vocalist. His father was a famous trad jazz trumpet player, so he’s from a musical family.

“He actually arranges and writes music and he sings not unlike Frank Sinatra and I’m told that the girls quite like him.

“This man has everything — he’s handsome, very talented, he plays guitar in all idioms and he sings like Sinatra singing the blues, so he’s the star of the show really. I’m just the fixer.”

Both Mark and Charlie are from Oxford. Art says: “Mark is a professor of double bass at the Royal College of Music, the Guildhall College of Music and the Birmingham Conservatoire.

“He’s a kind of academic player but he’s also an international touring artist who has played all over the world.

“Charlie is a kind of, I wouldn’t say a child prodigy as he’d probably squirm with embarrassment, but he was obviously very gifted as he won a scholarship to study at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, which is probably the most prestigious place to learn jazz. So he’s a very good drummer.

“It’s a quartet that covers all the bases and we’ll be playing accessible, bluesy-type music, with one or two vocals from Denny.”

During the coronavirus pandemic, Art often entertained his neighbours, playing along to an iPod. He recalls: “I think it was for six months. I did six nights a week for four months and twice a week for another two months.

“It kept me sane. It probably drove the neighbours mad but I think it turned one or two of them on to jazz a bit.”

On the Saturday night, Essex pianist and Hammond organ player Mickey Gallagher will round up some musician friends under the umbrella of the Exmen.

He played with the Animals in the Sixties and with Ian Dury and the Blockheads in the Seventies and has had plenty of other work.

One of his most recent projects was brought about by the coronavirus pandemic, when he worked with the actress Jane
Horrocks.

They created Love Pants, a Radio 4 drama telling the story of her brief relationship with Dury. Mickey says: “While I was working with Ian, he had a little tempestuous affair with Jane for a year. I think it was 1987 or 1988.

“It was very interesting because his career was sort of on the wane and her career was on the up so they were sort of ships passing, as it were, and the dynamic was quite interesting.

“Anyway, lockdown happened and I was at a loose end when Jane just happened to ring me out of the blue.

“She said, ‘Oh, I’ve got these letters from Ian from the time we were together, and I’ve got some diary entries too and I was thinking, they’re so beautiful and would you be interested in trying to put them to music?’

“I went, ‘Oh, that sounds like a good idea, I’ve got all the time in the world at the minute’ and Ian was a wordsmith, a beautiful writer. So she sent me some stuff — there were about three or four letters.

“I started doing little bits of music for it and it was a very strange experience — I felt as if Ian was on my shoulder a lot.

“It was just a dalliance, there was no time limit and no pressure. Then, I think it was last October, Jane called and said she’d got a Radio 4 producer interested in the stuff that I’d done.

“It was all higgledy-piggledy, all over the place so we had to sort of pick out her diary entries and his letters and find a timeline.

“We got a storyline and then I put it in an audio-form demo, just very roughly.

“Jane played that to the producer who went, ‘Oh, I want this’ and he got on to me and said he wanted to do it.

“I said, ‘Great’ and he said, ‘Yes, next month’ and I went, ‘What? It’s not finished!’ He said the demos were fine and he’d use some bits from the hits.

“At Christmas, they put it out as a 40-minute play with the music. That was really good as it felt that I’d achieved something in the down years.

“It shows a side of Ian that you’d never seen before, you know, his persona.

“When I was with him, Ian never apologised for anything but in these letters, he’s full of
apologies.”

• The Thames Traditional Boat Festival is at Fawley Meadow, Henley, from Friday to Sunday, July 14 to 16 with events taking place from 10am daily. The Crooked Billet party takes place each evening from 6pm. For more information, visit tradboatfestival.com