Keyboard Memories (Part 2)

In 1981 the band was gigging away and thus we continued to expand our mannish young egos. Commensurably, my keyboard set-up got bigger and bigger, and more and more out of hand. It was magnificent. The latest addition was a Hohner ‘Duo’, so called because it combined two instruments in one, a Pianet (cousin of the Fender Rhodes) and a Clavinet.

Beatifully crafted

Hohner’s celebrated Clavinet was the funkiest keyboard ever made: witness Stevie Wonder’s Higher Ground or Superstition, or John Paul Jones’ stomping backbone to Led Zeppelin’s Trampled Under Foot.

Being all metal and wood, the Duo was purely mechanical and electric as opposed to electronic. It was a portable electric clavichord and vibraphone in one instrument. I made cantilevered attachments for my keyboard stand to accommodate the beautifully engineered, but heavy, Duo, and with the Continental and the CS-15 up top it was a hell of a weight to have balancing on one stand. Not many young keyboard guys would have dreamt of carting around such an unreasonable amount of equipment. But then again, not many would have been at the beck and call of quite as unreasonable a young ego.

At one gig we played support to The Comsat Angels, an English band who would go on to have a long career without ever really making the big time. They had a keyboard guy and, among other things, he was using a Hohner Duo. The Comsats guy had an impressively percussive technique on the Duo. Basically he slapped it about, and sort of bunched it a bit. It was a good effect. I made a mental note.  

To amplify my three keyboards a got Yamaha powered mixer with two 75 watt amps built in. This was a heavy enough item in itself to have added to my equipment pile, however, being stereo, it required a second speaker cab too. I paired off with my old four-by-twelve with a makeshift two-by-twelve for the time being.

There was to end to me hunger for new gear. Once again I had succumbed to the lure of the Belfast Telegraph’s ‘Musical Instruments for Sale’ column. I bought a Yamaha SC-30, A synth that was essentially the same as the CS-15, but with a few extras. It had a three and a half octave keyboard instead of the more usual three octaves of most monophonic synths, and it sported a primitive eight-step sequencer, and a ring modulator.

A ring modulator is a simple device that combines any two input waveforms to produce a fairly enharmonic output. As applied to the outputs of the two Voltage Controlled Oscillators of the CS-30 the resultant output was often not unlike the sound of a detuned short-wave radio. It was not a sound than was ‘musical’, in any conventional sense. Karlhinze Stockhausen, a leading light in Modern (i.e. nineteen-sixties) serious (i.e. really hard to listen to) music was always big on ring modulation. 

D E V O

You would be hard pushed, however, to find too many enthusiasts within the less ‘serious’ worlds of rock and pop, although, two important exceptions would be Devo and Bill Nelson. Devo’s brilliant first album, Are We Not Men? … We Are Devo, is positively dripping with Ring Modulation. Brian Eno, the album’s producer, seems to have had one wired up to the mixing desk, employing it with gay abandon and a frequency of use usually reserved for more normal effects such as reverb or stereo chorus. Bill Nelson, also, on songs like Rooms with Brittle Views, Do You Dream in Colour? and many other equally wonderful examples, typically places a motif on a ring modulated synth right up front in the instrumentation, in the place usually reserved for a guitar riff in less adventurous pop arrangements.

Notwithstanding the enormous inspiration I derived from Devo and Bill Nelson, I did not ever get around to incorporating the ring modulator into my own sound. I was however very excited about the prospect of using the SC-30’s sequencer. A sequencer is a device designed to play and repeat automatically and in strict time, a predetermined row of pitches; usually no more than sixteen, and often just four or eight, notes in total. Their basic design hadn’t really changed since their invention. On the control panel of the SC-30 there was a row of eight knobs (or ‘pots’ as we electronics engineers like to say). The position of each pot defined the pitch of that note. This row of eight notes would then be repeated ad infinitum (this being the whole point of the exercise) at a rate determined by a ninth pot. There was also a very dramatic big red ‘start/stop’ button.

CS-30 Sequencer with big red buttons

Sequencers had been around since the early seventies. A VCS-3, the original rock ‘n’ roll sequencer, can be spotted in the instrument listings on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon; the track On the Run being formed around an eight note sequence. Sequencing had a genre defining role in the work Tangerine Dream. It was the steady repetition that was the novelty plus the possibility of really fast rates of play. Keith Emerson was too much of a musician to make use of sequencer generally, but there is a dramatic guest appearance at the very end of the Karn Evil 9 on the phenomenal Brain Salad Surgery album, were Emerson steadily increases the speed of a sixteen note row, taking unbridled, full advantage of this defining characteristic.

Of course, following the digital revolution and the computer revolution, old fashioned sequencers have been replaced with software capable of storing and organising in digital form whole ‘scores’ of multi-track ‘sequences’ of notes that amount to whole songs or even orchestral arrangements. Sequencers have, in other words, evolved into virtual musicians. Strange to think then that back in the eighties the idea of repeating eight or sixteen notes in regular measure automatically still seemed pretty cool. But cool it certainly was, and I got to it straight away. I tuned in a fairly simple but effective eight-note row in my CS-30. Then added some key shifting stuff underneath on the CS-15 tuned to a fifth.

Rick on a much examined gatefold

When I had bought the CS-30 synth, I had justified the expenditure by pretending to myself that it was to be a replacement for the SC-15. But, inevitably, I never did get around to selling the supposedly redundant CS-15. Electronic polyphony was just too much fun. One of the songs from this period of the band’s life was a veritable keyboard extravaganza. The guitarist shifted onto my Vox Continental, filling the sound out while I had both hands full with the two synths.

The reader should remember that these were monophonic synths, capable of producing only one note at a time. For even the most rudimentary polyphonic harmonising you needed two of them, one for each hand, necessitating a certain amount of Rick Wakemanesque pouncing about with your arms outstretched and a tortured look on your face. Never mind adjusting the sound; I wouldn’t even get a chance to scratch myself during these songs.

* * *

In September 1981. I got myself a Korg analogue Stage Echo, a state of the art bit of kit It cost an outrageous four hundred pounds. It boasted a loop of quarter inch tape about thirty seconds long, and five brilliantly clear hi-fi quality playback heads. This machine contributed considerably to my overall sound. It also had a marked effect thereafter on the sort of music I wrote for the band. Indeed, in these days of intense and purposeful practising, my echo-keyboards became one of the defining elements of the band’s emerging sound. A real paradigm shift.

Long loop of the Stage Echo

One song was in swing time, with a sort of three-against-two cross-rhythm going on; a direct result of my experiments with the exquisite Korg Stage Echo. I set the delay time in sync with the triplets (three notes played in the time of two). To have a bit of fun with this, I started the tune off with a couple of bars of the echo-triplets in isolation on my (left-hand) bass-line synth; a real curve ball to the listener. This was a nice touch, similar to Pink Floyd’s One Of These Days or Brian Eno’s Third Uncle, (both of which start off with the same echo-triplets trick on bass guitar.)

My enthusiasm for cross-rhythm experiments soon matched that of our new drummer at the time. Speaking of the drummer; If I was a bit of a commodity fetishist in the area of music equipment, he wasn’t far behind me. He had drums, pedals and cymbals that cost a frightening amount of money. At one practice session he came along with a new cymbal about which he was particularly excited. It was a Pang cymbal; a cymbal that made a sound like “pang”. He kept thumping it (as drummers will) just to hear all the different “pang” sounds he could make with it. After a while, our singer, in jocular mood commented, “I’ve got a tin bread bin at home that sounds a bit like that”. The drummer curled his lip.

As well as scanning the Belfast Telegraph’s ‘Musical Instruments For Sale’ column pretty much on a nightly basis, I also regularly had a rummage around in the second hand shops down in Smithfield Market. It was there, an a Saturday in January 1981, that I came upon a Mini Korg 700-S. It was going for a hundred and fifty quid, and, on a whim, I bought it.It’s a pity I hadn’t found it a few years earlier. It wound have been just right for The Cars covers, since it was a Mini Korg that Greg Hawkes used on the Cars’ debut Album. 

The cute 700

The 700-S had real Luxury of limitation appeal. It was a very simple and small machine, one of the earliest synths produced for mass consumption. It was all metal and wood, and its minimal row of control switches was tucked in on the front panel just below the two and a half octave keyboard itself. This darling little synth owed more to the design of the home organ that to any other early synthesisers. The switches were marked with quaint non-synth-like terminology, such as ‘vibrato’ and ‘bend’. The whole thing was a breath of fresh air. It was really cute.

Suddenly I had become a three-synths man. Two hands and three synths: was this really necessary? Well, strictly speaking, no. But it was very convenient. It was my lot to produce highly precise sound and music with fairly imprecise equipment. More often than not I would find myself playing one song and at the same time setting up some bit of equipment for the next, like Dr. Frankenstein in his lab frantically making his final adjustments. Having the facility of a third synth, all set-up ready to go would mean that things would be a bit easier on stage. In any case, hte truth was, of course, that I could not have resisted the 700. It was just too cute. It even had a wee door on the back panel, behind which you could store the mains lead.

Down on the shop floor, so to speak, I built some boxes to protect the band gear, and while I was at it I put casters on just about everything that moved. My own personal set-up was as large and unreasonable as ever. By now I had two speaker cabinets, the old four-by-twelve orange monster, plus a new cab containing an outrageously powerful,  four hundred Watt, fifteen inch speaker, and a high frequency horn.  I built boxes for the trusty old CS-15, the CS-30, and my mixer-amp. Along with the brass hinges and magnetic catches, I put a finishing touch to my handiwork with some old leftover paint from my dad’s garage. It was a mixture of green and white emulsion paint. I suppose mat black might have been a bit more rock ‘n’ roll, but pale green was the best I could do with what happened to be available on the garage shelves (and let’s rememder this was a garage band). When the guys saw the boxes at the next practice, to my chagrin they seemed to find it all very amusing. While I was expecting them to be impressed by my workmanship, they could see only the paintwork. The singer didn’t miss his chance. “Hey, Keith”, he chuckled, “what’s with the bathroom cabinets?”; very droll, I’m sure.

Keyboard Memories (Part 1)

In october 1977 garage band wasn’t computer software. It was a way of life. Still just sixteen, I was already in my second garage band. As a keyboard player I was a rare enough commodity, and sought after.  All I had was a Crumar Roadrunner electric piano, or ‘e.p.’ (as those of us in the know like to say, or at least that’s what we used to say in the seventies, before ‘e.p.’ for some reason stopped being a cool thing to say). It was a small keyboard, light-weight in every sense. Viewed end on, it was about the size of a paperback book. It did not sound very good. It certainly didn’t sound anything like a piano, and, worse still, it didn’t even sound like a proper electric piano either.

Crumar Roadrunner Mk. 3,
(more colourful than my Mk.1)

I had bought myself my ineffectual little e.p. for my sixteenth birthday, six months early, when I was still a schoolboy. I paid for it with hard-earned paper-round money, although my Dad did pitch in to help meet the extortionate price. Three hundred quid it cost, with a little Zenta combination amp and speaker thrown in. What a rip-off. I blew the speaker clean out of the little Zenta combo within a matter of weeks. 

Still, I was very excited on the day that I got my electric piano. It had been my obsession to own one from the age of about twelve, at which time I started delivering papers to get the money. Any electric keyboard would have done, but to my reckoning, an e.p. was the only thing that I would ever be able to afford. Sure, a Hammond C3 or a Moog synthesiser, as used by my hero Keith Emerson would have been nice, but one of these would have cost ‘thousands and thousands of pounds’ I imagined, (and I wasn’t far wrong). Anyway, the fact that Keith Emerson hardly ever used an electric piano didn’t really dampen my ardour. I had other heroes who did use them, Mike Ratledge of the wonderful Soft Machine, to name but one.

Mr. Ratledge

In the seventies when people spoke of an electric piano what they had in mind was a Fender Rhodes or a Wurlitzer, the sort of thing used by Stevie Wonder on Living for the City, or 10cc’s I’m not in Love. All the groovy jazz-rock guys used them too: Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, all those guys. (Supertramp built an entire career on the back of a Fender Rhodes.) 

The Rhodes and its imitators were great musical instruments, but unfortunately my little Crumar was only a very poor cousin to the real McCoy. Actually it was an utterly different species of keyboard altogether. The beauty of Wurlitzer or Fender machines was that, while they were electric and therefore very much rock ‘n’ roll, they were not electronic. They were sturdy, heavy, mechanical beasts, made mostly of wood and metal with balanced keys and all, something like a rock ‘n’ roll vibraphone in a box with a piano keyboard stuck on the front. My Crumar on the contrary was entirely electronic. It had no moving parts. It was plastic, and it had a plastic sound.

So why did I get the sadly inferior Crumar? Well, it was a simple case of mistaken identity really. The problem was that I was just a kid from Belfast. What limited knowledge I had of keyboards was gleaned from watching Top of the Pops, a very poor source of information considering that the bands were usually miming along on completely irrelevant ‘dummy’ instruments. Consequently, I had some very confused ideas about what an e.p. would look like if I ever got to see one in the flesh. 

Incomparable Fender

In my ignorance I fell foul of a music shop guy in a suit who wanted my money (and my Dad’s money). He saw me coming. Battered down by his sales pitch, I was even prepared to believe that the only reason why the Crumar sounded so weak in the shop was because I couldn’t play it the way Mike Ratledge would have. I was wrong. No one could have made the Crumar sound sophisticated and groovy. I blew my young life’s savings on a pig in a poke. 

Following the demise of its speaker, I replaced the squeeky little Zenta amplifier, with a four-by-twelve speaker cabinet. ‘Four-by-twelve’ means that the cabinet—or ‘cab’, as we like to say—  contained four twelve-inch speakers. You can imagine how heavey it was for a less that muscular youth such as myself. The new amplifier with which I powered this monstrous cabinet, was a commensurably monstrous hundred-watt valve job. I acquired these two bulky bits of gear through the Belfast Telegraph’s ‘Musical Instruments for Sale’ column for the not unreasonable price of one hundred pounds for the lot.

A few months later, standing in garage with my new band, I may not have had a great sound as yet, but thanks to my huge amp and cab I had plenty of volume. And volume was what mattered. I was ready to rock, and it seemed that I was going to get a chance to do just that.

By the Summer of 1979 the band started to move away from rock ‘n’ roll standards and the likes of the Thin Lizzy and Tom Petty covers. Instead we began to reflect the times by practising up a few contemporary songs. We added Nick Low’s I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass, a Nine Below Zero styled Dirty Water, The Motors’ Whiskey and Wine, and, more to the point, three Stranglers songs: No More Heroes, Hanging Around and Princess of the Streets. From my point of view, The Stranglers were a happy choice. Their keyboardist Dave Greenfield was an inspiration.

Tacky but weird

We did add some older tunes too; Get Back (The Beatles), Through the Grapevine (Marvin Gaye), and Roxy Music’s not quite so old Virginia Plane. Like most singers to have a go at Virginia Plane, Barry had to settle for a mumbled approximation of Brian Ferry’s completely unintelligible lyrics. But that’s rock ‘n’ roll for you.

For all of these songs I was still making do with my unfortunately ineffectual Crumar electric piano. It served well enough as a substitute for a rhythm guitar in most of the songs, and even as a weak impersonation of a real piano for a few songs, notably Breaking Glass. It even just about served as a real electric piano in Grapevine and Get Back. However, an important part of Virginia Plain was of course the trilling Mini-Moog synth break by Eno, (he wasn’t called ‘Brian’ back then). The best I could do here was to invest in a rather tacky effects pedal called a ‘Flanger’, a device more usually used with a guitar. It wasn’t the right sound but it was nicely weird.

The Beautiful Vox Continental 

Then I revolutionised things by getting hold of an old Vox Continental organ, my second keyboard. The Vox had been the object of my covetous affections for some time. I first spotted it about a year earlier in Baird’s music shop off York Street. It had been lying in a sorry state under some other equally dust-covered and broken down relics, in a corner of the workshop that looked like a graveyard for the keyboards of yesteryear. I couldn’t see all of it as it lay half-buried in this premature grave, but I could see enough of it to know that this was love at first sight. Just about every week for months and months I had gone into the shop to make sure ‘my organ’ was still there. On each visit I had pleaded with Ray Baird to get somebody to drag the old beauty out and fix it up so that I could buy it.

In anticipation of my actually getting my hands on it, I had enthused about the Vox to family and friends. I would describe everything that I had as yet managed to see of it. “The black notes are white and the white notes are black”, I would report in my excitement. For this was indeed the case, It had been the fashion in sixties organ design to reverse the piano keyboard colour scheme. It was space-aged, you see. But, few people seemed to understand just how exciting this feature was to connoisseurs such as myself.

Lennon with Continental at Shea

Eventually my dream came true. The coveted Continental got fixed and I bought it for a delightfully reasonable eighty-five pounds. Baird’s was not one of those capitalist bloodsucking shops such as the one wherein, two and a half years earlier, I had been relieved of my childhood savings. My new organ had an orange-red top, a tubular-steel chrome-plated Z-shaped stand, and the black notes were indeed white and the white notes were indeed black. It was the very same type of organ as was used by Alan Price on House of the Rising Sun, the same organ as the one that was once played in Shea Stadium by John Lennon using his elbows. The Vox was a glorious piece of living rock and roll history.

Initially, the only song that the band added, specifically suited to my new sound, was The Velvet Underground’s What Goes On? But it was clear that from now on we would have a much broader choice of playable material for our ever-changing set. The Vox was a joy. A step in the right direction. With its sustained note, its vibrato, and its powerful if cheesy tone the organ eclipsed my old Crumar. It was like passing from boyhood into ... well, slightly older boyhood.

* * *

With my recently acquired Vox Continental organ, I was fast turning into a real keyboards guy. However, it became obvious to me that, to complete my image, I needed a synthesiser to set on top of the organ. It was 1980; Synthesisers were basic equipment, and I needed to get with the programme.

As peer pressure goes, mine was a particularly sorry case. I didn’t personally know any other keyboard players and so, ludicrously, in lieu of any real ones I adopted as my peers the pop-star keyboardists on television. Guys, that is, who had professional careers with managers and record companies to pay for all the gear they could want. With this inappropriate bee in my bonnet, and in spite of relative poverty (I was on £34 a week as I remember), I bought a synth. It cost four hundred and twenty-five pounds and it broke the bank. It was a Yamaha CS-15, a state of the art user-friendly mass-consumption monophonic job. ‘Monophonic’ means that you can only play one note at a time. A polyphonic synth, (one upon which you might play chords), was the stuff of which really ludicrous dreams were made, and well beyond my reach. 

CS-15 knobs

The CS-15 was great. Its ergonomics were spot on. The controls could not have been simpler, and I learned the ropes in a day. The real joy of my new toy lay in the things it could do that were strikingly unique to a synthesiser. There was a pitch-bending joystick for my left hand, with the aid of which I could achieve a passable impression of the Clangers. Also I could set the synth to slur the change in pitch from one note to the next, like the clarinet glissando at the beginning of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue; an effect called ‘portamento’. Now, during practices it was with child-like delight that I would say things like, “Oh, wait a minute guys, I just want to put a bit of portamento on my synth here”. I was in my element.

With the combined forces of organ and synth it seemed that anything was possible. The first few things I did with the CS-15 were a big thrill. Ghosts of Princes in Towers by The Rich Kids was one of our new covers and it got injected with a series of slippery notes on the synth, gliding down underneath the guitar intro. It was a really exciting discordant dive-bomber-effect, which then resolved into forceful concord as the Vox and the other instruments kicked for the first line of the song. 

The Cars made an inspirational

debut Album

Bye Bye Love and Moving in Stereo by The Cars, which we had been practising for some time, were suddenly transformed into much more convincing renditions. With my raised standards, I was embarrassed to think that initially I had played versions of these synthesiser-rich originals using only my Crumar electric piano through a dodgy flanger effects pedal.

The early Who number Can’t Explain received my special attention too. Our version now opened with a solo on the CS-15 in which I tried to get the same whooping and wailing effect that Keith Emerson achieves in the song Lucky Man. Ever since I first heard Emerson launching into that Mini-Moog solo, recorded in 1970 at the dawn of the rock ‘n’ roll synthesiser, if such a thing there be, it has never been too far from the top of my list of all time favourite hair-raisingly exciting moments from the history of recorded sound.

The band also achieved a faithful rendition of Bill Nelson’s Furniture Music resplendent with a particularly authentic synth sound. And we made in-roads into Stay Young and Revolt into Style from that same wonderful Sound on Sound album. Stay Young was a showcase for the Continental as well.

The downside of all this was that I was turning into as much of technician as I was a musician. The CS-15 was primitive by today’s standards. It took a lot of work just to keep it under control. Most notably it lacked the facility of programmability. I had to make my settings for each song from scratch, every time. Before playing any song that had a synth part, I had to remember a lot of detailed settings and twiddle a lot of knobs. I broke into a sweat as I anticipated nightmarishly technical situations in hypothetical future live performance. 

Keith Emerson of course

As it turned out, at the first gig, (Tuesday 24 June 1980), the technical difficulties were more nightmarish than I had imagined. But surprisingly they didn’t involve the CS-15, which functioned with admirable reliability. It was the Vox Continental that caused the trouble. On the morning of said gig, my beautiful vintage organ broke down and I couldn’t get a peep out of it. In a panic, with less than an hour to go before the gig, I hired a Farfisa organ as a replacement. It just wasn’t the same. Yes it was, like the Vox, nicely sixties looking, and the sound was raw and cheesy, but it was the wrong kind of cheesy. Furthermore, only on the bottom one and a half octaves of the keyboard were the black notes white, and even then the white notes were not black, but merely grey.

There was a follow up gig lined up for the following Tuesday, and I really wanted to use my Vox. It was, therefore, with great timing that I spotted another Continental in the Belfast Telegraph’s trusty old ‘Musical Instruments for Sale’ column. I bought immediately. Happily, my black notes were once again white and my white notes were black. 

Farfisa grey notes

While Continental number 2 turned out, over time, to be no more reliable than number one, at least it wasn’t any less reliable. A few days later, Continental number one recovered of it's own accord. Henceforth I was to take along to gigs whichever one of the two identical antique organs that was working the best. The remaining ‘out of service’ Continental would be exiled to my Dad’s garage. Strangely, this sort of harsh treatment invariably turned out to be electronically therapeutic.

With the minimal justification of just one passably successful gig, the band was injected with confidence and a sense of expectation. Now that we felt sure of being a great success, we needed a proper name. With our follow-up gig only three days away we had to pick something fast. During a rehearsal I gazed absent-mindedly at my CS-15 synthesiser. My gaze settled on the waveform selection switch on the Low Frequency Oscillator. The selections showed symbols for sine, saw-tooth, and reverse saw-tooth waveforms. The fourth selection read ‘S/H’, which stood for ‘sample and hold’, a selection that produced a random modulation in pitch or tone when applied, respectively, to the Voltage Controlled Oscillators or the Voltage Controlled Filters. “Sample and hold”, I muttered. The Band had its name.

At some point during that summer the guitarist and I got together, and put some music of our own together. A few days later our singer put words to it and our first original number was added to our set. Interestingly enough, the tune begins with a drone or ambient ‘bed’ on the SC-15 with its Voltage Controlled Filter being modulated by the Low Frequency Oscillator set to the sample and hold or ‘S/H’ waveform. This was very apt I thought, but it was also a particularly delicate sound to set up. It would be unprofessional to fiddle about in the middle of a gig, while the audience waited for me to get the sample and hold settings just right. Instead, I planned to do the business in advance. Then, as I would turn just one knob to bring up the sample and hold drone, it would be a case of ‘here’s one I made earlier’. Consequently, this song was placed at the beginning of our live set. Its sample and hold opening providing a sort of introduction to the band, (not that anyone ever noticed).

The CS-15 was stretched to its capacity for this first composition. As time went on and we added other original songs the very act of overcoming the limitations of my primitive little monophonic synth was to give our music some of its defining characteristics. On further reflection I began to realise that this was not necessarily bad thing.

Limitations may well be luxuries to be savoured. Further down the road some musicians can end up yearning for the earlier days of less choice. I remember seeing Andy Summers on a TV documentary about the electric guitar. He was demonstrating his big programmable digital effects machine. With a note of nostalgia and irony, he said that he liked programme number sixty-seven best because it sounded, “like a Fender Telecaster through a Vox AC30 amp”. The lesson seems to be that increasing technical possibilities too dramatically will not necessarily serve the creative impulse, and can even stifle it. What is true for equipment is probably true for musical or compositional expertise as well. 

My friendly-uncle-type-advice to young would-be popsters, therefore, is this. If a lack of money means that you are far behind in the technology race, and you have no choice but to experiment and stretch a low-tech bit of gear as far as it can go—or if, similarly, you are obliged to augment your, as yet under-developed, musicianship with as much imagination and inventiveness as you can muster—have faith. These limitations might well be the seedbed of your good music-making. Things may never be as good again.

Jazz bookings

No gigs lined up. Anybody want some jazz?

http://www.belfastjazz.co.uk/performance.html

please get in touch!