WOW Medway!

Philip recently helped out Wow Medway, a new arts listings magazine for the part of Kent he now lives in, with a piece about the flourishing jazz scene in the area. Under the title ‘Blue Notes, Green Shoots’ he talked to Roan Kearsey-Lawson, a great jazz drummer and vibes player (and they are rarer than hen’s teeth) who runs the monthly 144Club and the annual Maritime Jazz Festival in Chatham. Also featured was James Taylor – not the former Mr Carly Simon of ‘Fire And Rain’ fame – but the James Taylor, Medway born and bred, who is by some distance the UK’s funkiest Hammond organ player. His band JTQ, the James Taylor Quartet, are celebrating their 25^th anniversary; their versions of the Starsky And Hutch and Mission Impossible themes were signature grooves of the acid jazz movement. The piece ended with a favourite quote from Frank Zappa: “Jazz isn’t dead. It just smells funny.”