On the records, tapes, and CDs front; the most important releases for me in 1994 were by my established favourites; Bireli Lagrene, Gary Potter, and the Rosenberg Trio. And also the Romane Quintet; a new discovery to me, who played at the Samois festival in France that year.
One of the highlights of the year was going to the Samois festival with the Swing 91 crew, and my new Nottingham friends and musicians; Matt Palmer and Barry Taylor. Samois was a great place for meeting new people to jam with like Nev Willis from ‘Django’s Mangos’, and Pete Dalby, who lived in Dorset at the time. Pete was someone who I would meet up and jam with on a regular basis, much like my friends from Liverpool who I was still continuing to visit and play with when I visited Liverpool, at least once a year.
Swing 91 continued to play at other music venues like the Portland Arms, where I would sometimes jam with Jim and Ted and Co in the ‘Grass’ band. Although I had sold my Les Paul guitar this year, to buy a handmade ‘Maccaferri’ style acoustic guitar, I still used to have jam nights on borrowed instruments with my old mates Jim Ward, Dave Manley and others; many of which would be late night drinking and after hours drunken jamming at the Portland Arms; where many rock classic favourites such as Hawkwind’s Master of the Universe and Brainstorm would be resurrected!
Swing 91 was going good for the first half of the year; but after a time, Pete Warwick’s love of Irish Folk started to come back to the fore. On the Swing stuff, his playing could sometimes be erratic, and whilst I was going through a relatively ‘straight’ phase, where I was focused solely on the music, the whole drinking culture of the Market Inn still seemed to be very much the thing for Pete, to the point where it effected his playing to some degree. Slowly but surely, I began to feel disenchanted with things, and felt it might be time for me to move on. This came to a head when Pete and the two John’s formed a band to play more folk and Irish oriented music, so it seemed the right time to break up Swing 91 as there was a conflict of interests developing around the respective energies being put into the two bands; although I would continue to work with John Coulson in new jazz projects that were just around the corner.
Meanwhile, one of the people I met via our gigs at the Elm Tree, was someone who was trying to learn the gypsy/jazz guitar, called Paul Nice. He had even been to the Samois festival, and it was ironic that I met Paul in Nottingham and not at Samois itself, as we had made mutual friends from Samois, like Pete Dalby.
Paul became a regular visitor to the Elm Tree, and started coming over to Mansfield occasionally for a jam *stroke* lesson. It transpired that he was looking to rent out rooms in his house in Nottingham, and so it was mutually beneficial for us both, as this would be my way to move to Nottingham and establish myself on the much wider music scene in the city. Moving to Nottingham opened up many more opportunities for music and gigging. I had already begun to do some trio gigs at craft fairs around the country with bass player Pete Tomlyn and Matt Palmer on clarinet and saxophones before leaving Mansfield; so it seemed that I almost had ready made quartet to expand the gypsy/jazz idiom to Django’s post Grappelli era with a clarinet. The addition of Barry Taylor on rhythm guitar completed the line-up, and so ‘Django’s Tigers’, was born; and replaced Swing 91’s residencies at both the Elm Tree and Cafe Metz.
Matt Palmer had previously formed his own band called the ‘Knights of Jazz’, and when the opportunity to play at the Elm Tree in the Sunday lunch time jazz spot came along later that year; he resurrected the band with a new line-up comprising of myself on guitar, and John Coulson on bass, along with Keith Chaplin on drums. Whilst Django’s Tigers focused on Gypsy/Jazz, ‘Knights of Jazz’ was more mainstream jazz, and was an opportunity for me to focus on my electric guitar playing.
As 1994 moved into 1995, I was living in Nottingham, and playing in two regular bands, and doing a variety of gigs in and around the city. Things were going well.
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