Swansea Jazzland

Being on tour is great, although it does mean that you end up spending only a small amount of time in a town or city seeing the inside of a jazz club followed by the bright lights of the motorway/inside of a hotel room if you're lucky.  If your gig is scheduled between November-February, it's unlikely that any of the time you spend in the aforementioned town or city will be during daylight hours.

This is how I arrived in Swansea on 19th January.  I had a short walk to my hotel and passed a brilliant sign on my way - a slogan written on the outside of a building site saying "Swansea: 2nd best city after Paris."

The gig was at Swansea Jazzland and I had been invited by Dave Cottle to join him and the rest of the house trio for their second gig of the year.  It was such a brilliant gig - my most enjoyable for a long time.  I had a lot of queries before the gig as to whether my "Hughes" was native Welsh and I was proud to say that my Grandfather was from down the road in Llanelli.  I had even prepared a song in Welsh to appeal to the locals.  Unfortunately, I didn't quite realise that I was on Osprey turf, and my choice of Sosban Fach (the team song for Ospreys arch rivals the Llanelli Scarletts) was booed before it even started!!  I had done a jazz waltz arrangement with a latin feel, so during the solos I think the punters forgot what song it was and just enjoyed the jazz!

We finished a little after 11, and I had to head back to my hotel for a few hours' sleep before heading back to London on the ridiculous commuter train of 03:57 to get back in order to teach recorders at my morning school. 3:30am in Swansea on a Wednesday night is an interesting time: rather than being abandoned, I found the town centre full of young drinkers (there was even a bouncer at the door of MacDonalds).
Amazingly, I made it home in time for breakfast on my sofa... then after all that I ended up being late to school because of the ridiculous amount of traffic in Peckham.  I tried!

I'd like to visit Swansea again - not least for the wonderful atmosphere at that Jazz club, but also it would be nice to see the city in daylight and actually stay long enough for breakfast!