Zoot Money at the Bull’s Head
This being Christmas week, Zoot Money needed to call up some deps for last night’s gig at the Bull’s Head in Barnes. A whole band of deps, in fact. But what deps they were. The great Jim Mullen on guitar. John Altman and Bob Sydor on soprano and tenor saxophones respectively. Kenny Wilson on bass guitar and Mark Fletcher on drums. All they were getting, as one of them said, was a key and a count-in. And away they went.
It was rough around the edges, gorgeous in spots, and suffused throughout by the spirit of the music they share. “The Promised Land”. “One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer”. “My Babe”. “Let the Good Times Roll”. Eight-bar blues, 12-bar blues, 16-bar blues. Zoot toggled between B3, Rhodes and acoustic piano sounds on his electronic keyboards.
The highlights included two duets at the start of the second set: Mullen with Zoot on a lovely “Please Stay” and Sydor doing the Fathead Newman thing on Ray Charles’s “Hard Times”. The pianist Kenny Clayton and his daughter, the singer Alex Clayton-Black, were invited up for a guest spot which included a delightful “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home to”, with a sinuous obligato from Altman’s curved soprano.
Cues were hit, cues were missed, but a good time rolled for the musicians and their audience in the little back room. That’s what the common language can do.
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