I went to Hereford on Sunday for a gig at the Black Lion - an old pub (apparently it’s haunted along with quite a few other buildings in Hereford, including Sainsbury’s!?!), but a newish venue for jazz. The Dave Price trio host a monthly jazz night and had invited me to be a special guest on this occasion. The journey was tedious - a 4-hour stopping train from London, but at least I didn’t have to change, and it gave me some time to get Wikipedia working on my phone to prepare the spiel about my chosen dedicated artist (each month the group focuses on a different jazz great and deliver a tribute gig, so I chose to perform the songs of Shirley Horn, one of my favourite vocalists and a true jazz singer.)
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| Solar halo with a sun dog to the left |
With so much travelling to do as a touring singer, I prefer to travel by train - time to work, sleep or read, plus more chance to look out of the window! Today I managed to capture a solar halo on camera (the picture’s a little dodgy because it’s taken through the train window).
I have only seen one of these before - they’re very common but you generally can’t see them because the sun’s bright light overpowers it. A slightly overcast day and dark sunglasses help. To the left you can see a sun-dog, which is like a small vertical rainbow in the cloud.
I remember once being on a train from Hitchin (my home town) to London and seeing a very bright sun dog, and calling my mum who I knew was home-tutoring a young autistic boy at the time. I told them to look out of the window to see the sun dog and the boy said, “I don’t know about a sun dog, but I can see a sun crocodile!”
Anyway, I digress.... back to the music. The only trouble with doing a Shirley Horn tribute is that she was most famous for singing ballads at ultra-slow tempos, and I didn’t want to fill a set - or even half a set - with slow numbers. Fortunately, Horn recorded quite a few live albums and she, too, clearly didn’t want to fill a set with ballads so I had plenty of choice of swinging tunes. I found it incredibly interesting to find out a bit of recording history of this amazing singer, and I enjoyed the research part as much as the singing part. Now I have a tribute to Shirley Horn set all ready. (Click here if you want to book me for it!)
Being a Sunday, the gig didn’t finish too late so I was heading back to my overnight stop by 10pm. Then an early bus journey in the morning to catch the train home.
On paper, having to take a bus for over an hour to the nearest town with a decent rail connection to London seems like a ball-ache. But in reality, it’s a great way to see the country. I had stayed over night with family just outside Monmouth, and took the local bus to Newport in the morning. Local buses are great - they rumble through sleepy villages and along crooked B-roads (sometimes ones that have since been replaced by trunk roads), supplying public transport to the corners of the country that are too small to have a train station.
Monmouthshire is a particularly lovely part of this island, and I enjoyed snaking through picturesque little villages, passing the odd tractor and a great many country pubs, with the Black Mountains a backdrop. We meandered through a lovely selection of interesting places: Mitchel Troy, Raglar, Usk with its Castle ruins, and its bus stop in Twyn square, Coldharbour on the crest of a hill, the old city wall of Caerleon... It was so much better than bombing my way down the A40 in a car for one. A great start to a Monday!
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| Through the Monmouthshire countryside |
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