Videos

A couple of clips from YouTube

Girl Talk—the back story

Back in 2004 a dozen or so jazz pianists gathered at Tina and Jean-Claude Vartanian’s house just outside Paris to celebrate the life of the Aaron Bridgers, who had died a couple of months before on 3rd November 2003.

Today if you google Aaron you’ll quickly discover he was Billy Strayhorn’s boyfriend. But musicians remember him best as a formidable pianist. It was a very convivial evening and the jazz pianists who had gethered to honour Aaron did what they do best, drinking and talking and then drinking some more. Just occasionally one of them would sit down and play a bit, while Jean-Claude left the video camera running…

Back in the 1960s Paris was the nearest place to go if you wanted to hear top-class American musicians—because a long-running dispute between Britain and the United States meant that only a handful of American musicians were ever granted work permits.

Aaron, who moved to Paris from the United States in 1948, was an influential and well respected figure on the Paris jazz scene. “When you’re in Paris,” Duke Ellington used to tell American musicians who were bound for Europe, “make sure you look up Aaron Bridgers.”

So it was a well trodden trail that Mick was following when one evening in July 1965 he pushed open the door of the Living Room, a jazz rendezvous just off the Champs Elysées. Aaron was the solo pianist. One of the tunes that he played back then was Girl Talk, a number that Neal Hefti had just composed for the Basie band.

I thought about you This is second video from that evening in 2004. I thought about you was written by Jimmy van Heusen, with lyrics by Johnny Mercer. The story that Mercer told is that van Heusen gave the music to him in New York shortly before he was going to catch a train to Chicago. Not long after leaving New York, Mercer started to draft the lyrics, which accounts for the opening words of the song: “I took a trip on a train”. The song became a jazz standard in the 1950s and was recorded by artists like Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra and Miles Davis

Here’s that rainy day Another tune from the pen of the great American songwriter Jimmy van Heusen. This version is played by the Mick Hamer trio, with Andy Woon on cornet and Gerry Higgins on double bass. The trio were recorded live at one of the weekly jazz sessions at the Clocktower cafe in Croydon on 18 August 2016. Thanks to Paul Smart for the video.

Jimmy van Heusen was born Edward Chester Babcock, but understandably he thought his surname would hinder his musical career so he took the name van Heusen from a brand of shirts.