Ryan Quigley Quartet

Sep 18

It is hard to believe that you could hear a stronger line-up for a free afternoon of jazz. The Ryan Quigley Quartet (who had six musicians up on stage) brought a superb concert of diverse music to a polished end. Quigley’s a leading name in Scottish popular music, and a first call for the trumpet slot in all sorts of contexts. This time, though, he lead off a bravado set of performances around a series of standards and some originals.

This was classic concert jazz: strong musicians with a well-chosen set list and thoughtful arrangements. The two sax and trumpet frontline and a strong rhythm section were tight throughout. Each musician was given lots of solo space to show their chops, and each was received well by the audience. This is music that is often termed mainstream jazz, and has a wide appeal amongst long-term jazz fans. The solos are rewarding, the main themes recognisable, and the band played with real care and attention to each other and the people listening in the hall.

What better way to spend an afternoon than sitting in the Victorian splendour of the Scarborough Spa and enjoy some really top-notch British jazz.

Tim Wall

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About 'Just Like Jazz'

'Just Like Jazz' is a collaborative project between Interactive Cultures, a research unit at Birmingham City University, and the Scarborough Jazz Festival. We're media academics who happen to be jazz fans and we're working with the Scarborough Jazz Festival to explore the ways in which jazz festivals can be portrayed online.

Rather than creating a brochure website around the festival, or simply filming the festival and putting that online, our goal is to capture the spirit of the festival using a range of techniques such as photography, text and handheld, personal digital video. We have given small, cheap, portable video cameras to select audience members, musicians, backstage staff and the festival organisers and asked them to capture whatever they think is interesting: the buzz of the audience, the surrounding environment, snippets of the music performed, and any discussions that take place around jazz.

The Just Like Jazz team
Left to right: Prof Tim Wall, Andrew Dubber, Dr Simon Barber, Jez Collins.

We're gathering together all of this video, photography and text from our contributors and publishing it live on this website as the festival happens. We're also tagging the content in order to experiment with the ways in which the characters and stories that are captured can be navigated by you, the visitor. This process gives audiences the opportunity to experience the festival in their own way and makes the event accessible to those who may wish to attend the festival in future years, or who may never have considered visiting a jazz festival at all.

Although we've worked on projects like this before, with Aftershock in Italy and with the Copenhagen Jazz Festival, we don't have a fixed idea of what we're going to end up with. We're working with a loose structure and quite a lot of improvisation - in a way, it's just like jazz.

Do come and say hello if you see us around. We hope you enjoy exploring the festival online with us,

Tim, Andrew, Simon and Jez.
http://interactivecultures.org