The hit list of new tunes is currently being drawn up. So far it looks like we will be looking at ‘I’ve Found a New Baby’, ‘Americano’, ‘Donna Lee’, ‘Place de Brouckere’ and Monk’s ‘round Midnight’. At some point we are going to have to make difficult decisions of what songs to drop from the set-list!

Dates for the diary…..

February is a month of entirely private engagements (weddings and private parties) for us, but you can catch us in March on the following dates:
2nd March: The Golden Cross Inn, Cirencester
10th March: The Exmouth Arms, Cheltenham
14th March: Theoc House, Tewkesbury
23rd March: The Royal Oak, Woodchester

Thanks to all of those that made it out to see us at any gigs in January. If you’ve not heard us before then to keep in touch you can join our mailing list. We tend to send out an email once a month to let people know when and where we’re playing.

If you’re a Facebook user then pop onto our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/swingfromparis

At the Star Anise Café we were grateful to be performing in a concert setting, fitting for the work we’ve put into new material over the last couple of months. It was certainly refreshing for us to play in a room with great acoustics and this meant that amplification was barely needed. The gig saw the first proper outings for ‘Spain’, ‘In a Sentimental Mood’ and ‘Festival 48’. There was also a return of ‘Softly as in a Morning Sunrise’ and rejigged versions of ‘Swing 48’ and ‘What is this thing called love?’ (with added bebop).

Although the first outing for some of the full on stuff is rather nerve-wracking, it is great to finally be playing these tunes to an audience. Thanks for coming out to this gig, we really relish these types of gigs and it was a pleasure playing to an appreciative crowd. We had a great evening and even sampled Stroud’s nightlife afterwards! It helped that the café stocks beer from Stroud Brewery, although my senses were a little confused to be drinking their Xmas ale ‘Ding Dong’ in January.

If you were wondering what we played that night here is the set-list:

Set 1

Honeysuckle Rose
Swing 48
Brazil
In a Sentimental Mood
Swing 39
What is this thing called love?/Hot House
When I was a boy
Jealousy
Nuages
Indifference
Cavalerie/Limehouse Blues
Concierto de Aranjuez/ Spain

Set 2

Softly as in a morning sunrise
Lulu Swing
Under Paris Skies
Festival 48
A night in Tunisia
Ménilmontant
BBD
Groovin’ High
T.Bolero
Tears
Minor Swing
Tiger Rag
La Foule
Encore : Belleville

The Bayshill

Live music has made a strong return to The Bayshill following its change of ownership. Although we’ve played there quite a few times, it felt like ages since we’d played there. A lively post-races crowd made for quite an atmosphere!

In the second set we were joined by local vocalist, Jo Silver. Singing ‘Bei mir bist Du schön’ and ‘Undecided’, the tunes were well received and not too shabby considering we hadn’t rehearsed them. Jo is playing at The Bayshill in April with her outfit Café Bohemia. Hopefully there will be more collaborations in the future.

While we there we recorded a little jam over ‘Limehouse Blues’ mixed with a bit of Django’s ‘Cavalerie’. Have a listen!

Oxford: 20th Jan, 7.30pm
(The Chequers Inn)

This will be our first performance at The Chequers Inn in Whitney, near Oxford. A sister pub to the Seven Tuns in Chedworth, this too promises to have a cosy and friendly atmosphere.

Stroud: 27th Jan, 7.30pm
(The Star Anise Café)

If you fancy watching us in a concert setting, then you can catch us at the Star Anise Café in Stroud on Friday 27th. The new year brings new material and this gig will be our first chance to debut tunes that we’ve been working on since Andy Wood joined the band. Tickets are £5 in advance or £6 on the door, to purchase please contact the Star Anise Café’s box office on 01453 840 021. Doors open at 7.30 and the show starts at 8pm.

Cheltenham: 28th Jan, 8.30pm
(The Bayshill Inn)

Saturday 28th sees us return to The Bayshill Inn, Cheltenham. This is the Cheltenham debut of the new line-up and we’re looking forward to returning to a venue we’ve always enjoyed performing at. The pub changed hands last year, and you can expect a warm welcome from the new management of Dale and Lisa. By all accounts they have a excellent selection of real ale! Music starts at 8.30pm.

Happy New Year: CD offer

You can still get our CD with a massive 40% discount by downloading it from here. To get the discount enter the following code: 2012.

Lastly, we wish all of you a happy New Year.

Andy, Fenner, Steve & Andy.

The result of a productive night's practice

Last night saw our final rehearsal of 2011, with us all together. Some brilliant tunes underway! Spain, Festival 48, and In a Sentimental Mood – all sounding great. 2 more gigs to go for us until 2012 – catch you soon…

Progress since the line-up change has been very exciting and after one practice we are ready for live action! Andy Wood has picked up our arrangements so quickly, it won’t be long before we get bored and arrange a whole load of new tunes. We don’t often announce every tune at our gigs so we’ve decided to share our current set-list with you. This is the tunes that we will be playing at the Royal Oak on Friday 28th and also at the Golden Cross Inn on 11/11/11 !

Set 1

Ménilmontant
Night and Day
For Sephora
Under Paris Skies
What is this thing called love?
Lulu Swing
Tears
Cherokee
T.Bolero
Belleville
Blues Clair
Limehouse Blues
Minor Swing
Jealousy

Set 2

Brazil
Swing 39
Indifference
Honeysuckle Rose
Swing 48
Bossa Dorado
JAT
A night in Tunisia
Nuages
Boulevard of Broken Dreams
Tiger Rag
La Foule

Where to see us in the coming weeks….

Friday 28th October -The Royal Oak ,Woodchester
This is an 8.30pm start, food is recommended.

Friday 4th November – The Snooty Fox, Tetbury
7.30 start, to book a table phone: 01666 502436

*Friday 11th November – The Golden Cross Inn (Cirencester)
9pm start, please call 01285 652 137 to book a table.

*Friday 11th will be the full debut of the new quartet with Andy Wood on guitar.

We have two gigs for you this month. On Friday the 21st October we are performing for the first time at the Seven Tuns, in Chedworth. Friday the 28th sees us return to the Royal Oak in Woodchester. We hope you can make it out to either or both of these gigs. As you may already know, we’ve had a line-up change and we are very excited about what we’ve been working on since this.

Wisky, soda and rock n’roll!

The set-list is developing nicley and with a tad more practice we will be adding some interesting additions to the set. One tune we hope to look at is ‘Tu Vuo’ Fa l’Americano’, a tune that was famously used in ‘The Talented Mr Ripley’. There’s already a Gypsy Jazz version that was recorded by the vivacious guitar player, Moreno. For some reason, his version misses out a fair amount of the orginal, so we might go for a mixture of the two (please note Swing from Paris do not support the practice of altering the chord structures of other people’s songs). Anway, we hope this is a tune you will like – here’s a video of Jude Law and Matt Damon ‘performing’ the tune!

Follow, like & subscribe!

If you’re a user of Twitter or Facebook then please feel free to follow us on Twitter @swingfromparis or find us on Facebook via www.facebook.com/swingfromparis

You can also keep informed about gigs by subscribing to our mailing list – you can do that by completing the email address box on the right hand side of this post. Once you’ve signed up you will be able to download a track for free from our latest album. Hope to see you at our next gig!

Swing from Paris- Andy, Fenner, Steve & Andy.

If you’ve ever been to our gigs you will know that we are not that great with words. So here is some important band news for you:

From JV to AW

Thank you John, we wish you all the best for the future. There have been many fun times, with playing Samois main stage a particular highlight! We are very excited that Andy Wood is joining the band, he is an imaginative improviser and like us is obsessed with Django and Stephane’s music. Our first gig with Andy will be at the Golden Cross Inn,Cirencester (11/11/11). More info on Andy will be added to the ‘About the band’ section in the coming weeks.

The summer has flown by this year and we’ve been enjoying gigging ‘round the Shire and beyond! A first for us in June was Eastnor Castle. We played at a steam rally, where there was a working collection of steam rollers. Playing outside on a sweltering day with hot steam everywhere was not our average gig, but we had great fun and even managed to get a look around the castle. Thanks to Dave Roach for filling in for Steve on this occasion.

Eastnor Castle - Steam Rally June 2011

Festivals

We’ve played quite a few festivals this year (Winchcombe, Cheltenham Jazz Festival & Lechlade) and August saw us make debut performances at both Bude and Pershore. Thanks for those that came to see us, there was such a wealth of live music on offer at both events. Below is a video of us performing ‘Tiger Rag’ at Pershore. We’ve also added quite a few videos from our gig with Robin Nolan to our Youtube channel. You can check them out here.

Stroud Brewery Launch

One gig in July was your average musician’s dream, as we performed at the launch of Stroud Brewery’s new building. We performed in the garden outside of the brewery and there was a really good turnout. The brewery now has increased brewing capacity and we did learn quite a bit about how they make their beers on a very informative tour. Big thanks to Gregg for the Budding that we took back to IGGF, it went down very well. You can find out more about their beers here.

Download our CD

The front cover of our CD 'Ménilmontant'.

Our CD ‘Ménilmontant’ is now available to download via Bandcamp. Priced at £6.99 you can download the full 13 track album here. Now we’ve run out of physical copies of the CD this will be the only way to get hold of our music until we record again. Although we had planned to record this summer, we’ve been too busy to find the time and didn’t want to rush a recording. It’s more likely that we will have a follow up CD in 2012, so in the meantime feel free to download our CD!

September Gigs

The gig-list has been steadily growing and we’ve added a couple of dates. We have two public performances this month. We are at Bistrot Coco in Cheltenham on Monday 26th September and the Golden Cross in Cirencester on Friday 30th. More details can be found on the gig-list.

If you haven’t been to see us for a while there will lots new tunes being added to the set over the coming months. Next up for the SFP treatment is Chick Corea’s ‘Spain’ and an old jazz standard called ‘Cherokee’.

On the last Saturday in May we played at the inaugural Lechlade Fest and at Westons Cider Winchcombe Festival of Music and Arts. Gypsy jazz is not new to Lechlade, our rhythm guitarist used to run a jamming weekend there and live jazz can be seen regularly at the Trout Inn. If you’ve not been there it is quite an idyllic spot and is where the Thames meets the Thames and Severn Canal.

Riverside Stage at Lechlade Fest. Picture by David Tickle.

The festival featured a range of bands from folk to indie and had two stages. Sadly for us, we played amidst driving rain that gave our instruments a long overdue bath! Despite this we enjoyed ourselves and it still didn’t top an Xmas market we played in the snow. Thanks to those of you that braved the elements, particularly when there was a dry beer tent with foot long hotdogs a short distance away.

After drying off we headed to Toddington, where we shared the bill with the Buick Six. The night was part of the Winchcombe Festival of Music & Arts and we were at the Toddington village hall. We had a slight adjustment to the line-up with Dave Roach filling in for Steve Laming. Warming up for the blues band, we played a 45 minute set – far too short for our liking. The audience was incredible and it was a real shame that we weren’t playing for longer. The feedback was fantastic and we hope that we can play the festival again in the future.

June – Public Gigs

June has been very busy for us already and it is only the 12th! We have two more public performances and these are at the Royal Oak, Woodchester (Friday 24th) and at Eastnor Castle (Sunday 26th). All the info is on the gig list.