Thursday 12 November 2015

Mid November already!

I love it that 20 miles from where I live in the centre of Exeter there are the stirrings of what could be a really exciting arts development. Ashburton is currently home to one of the most diverse musical "scenes" that you could wish to find. It already has a very small, but beautifully formed venue in St Laurence Chapel, and there a mighty attractive set of smaller events (often on a Sunday afternoon) at the lovely Royal Oak pub. However, tentative plans are afoot to buy and covert the wonderful Methodist Church that sits on the main road through the town. At the moment the plans are embryonic, but developing, and the Congregation are keen that the building should continue to be a community asset.
It really is worth putting "Ashburton live" into a search engine and finding out more (they also tweet @ashburtonlive). I think it would be really exciting if it gets funding and gets off the ground. As an aside the best gig (bar none) that I've been to this year was the Partikel gig at the Chapel.
There have been a plethora of new albums in the last month, and finding time to fit them all into the show has, at times, been problematic. I'll write a little more about some of them ahead of the annual task of trying to build a top 10 albums of the year. I'm pleased to say that I think the majority will be either British of European in origin, which either says something about the relative paucity of new U.S. Jazz musicians, which I think is unlikely- I think it must be that the major labels are abandoning anybody that doesn't fit the cloning instincts of their accountants!

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