A Jazz venue of 1970's LONDON..

The "HOPBINE" east lane Wembley was a Truman's public house that was home to many of the decades top and upcoming musicians, it became the "Place to Be" if you were a fan of Rock, Blues and Jazz music.

At that time I was living in South London, the journey was somewhat tedious, so sadly I never got to visit the place often. However I had a friend that did (a serious jazz fan) that was not just an audience listener but an accomplished electronic technician and recording fan, he had found a spot as recording engineer at the venue and visited with his recording gear for many of the Tuesday evening sessions.

Fast forward now a few decades, Bill H as he was known moved from his home in Croydon to a new location in Northamptonshire, not far from where I had moved to in the mid 1970's, inevitably we met each other again while travelling the great commute from Wellingborough to London so were able to continue a friendship over our similar hobbies, I introduced Bill to computing and the use of a PC to prepare music in the digital form to simplify the storage of his massive music collection. He always proudly showed me his collection of live recordings made at the Hopbine and told me of his friendship with musicians that were nameless to me at the time, like Tommy Whittle, Kenny Baker, Tony Lee and many others, he was on a mission to enlighten me about modern jazz, we had many a laugh over my love of Trad jazz and almost total disdain of anything remotely connected with that "Evil instrument" the Saxophone which  in the end I came to love after hearing some REAL players like Coleman Hawkins, Bud Freeman, Lester Young etc.

Bill would often play me some of his better live recordings and I became quite used to hearing what I regarded as REAL recordings, recordings that took on the environment sound of the location, recordings that gave you the feel of really being there, none of your contrite perfectly balanced multi-miked studio stuff we hear today on modern CD's, the sound was realistic, true to how an audience member would really hear it.

Sadly, after 20 years I lost my friend Bill to that terrible Parkinson's disease, to that end I made a promise to keep his tapes and make some of the content available to other like minded folks.  The first batch of these have been prepared and posted to various jazz blogs (7 volumes Bill's Legacy) and I am about to embark on the next set, as yet no definite amount, still many more tapes to analyse and with almost total lack of written notes to go with them it will be all down to recognising styles and making informed guesses.

 Adopt sepia mode 

The session starts with "Undecided now" : Sid Robin & Charlie Shavers (1938)
Followed by "Out of Nowhere" : Johnny Green & Edward Heyman (1931)
Then classic "Limehouse Blues" :  Philip Braham & Douglas Furber) (1922)
ends with the beautiful "Autumn leaves"  : Joseph Kosma & Jacques Prevert (1945)
(listen to the bright live uncompressed piano from Tony Lee)

History:

These recordings were made by Bill Hugkulstone using a home made mixer with a Tandberg 3000X tape recorder, these long-lost tapes were found in his attic during a house clearance after his death in 2013, they have remained in my possession since then, only to be played on a recently restored Akai X360 tape machine, so again honoring my promise to him to make them available to other fans, here is one session.

Technical bit:
The original 7.5 IPS two track tapes had been damaged in parts by over recording with a 4 track machine, fortunately there still remained part of the original two track recording undamaged and this was recovered by using the X360 reverse play facility and blocking the head raise/lower mechanism, there is some loss of quality here, and a rise in background noise, these effects being repaired in the digital domain with iZoptope RX5 after the analogue tape was digitised with a Roland R-09 HR digital recorder.
  

Gonzo 2019

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