Mike Denham’s Sunset Café Stompers - 1924 – When Jazz Got Hot
In the roaring twenties, the music was as hot as the nightlife! One hundred years ago, the careers of legendary jazz icons Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller and Bix Beiderbecke started to take off.
The Sunset Café Band includes some of the UK's finest interpreters of this great music, led by Mike Denham at the piano. Hear entertaining tales of the time and be transported back to the sizzling, syncopated rhythms and electrifying energy of the Jazz Age.
The Sunset Café Stompers are a very popular New Orleans style band from the West Country, led by pianist Mike Denham. Their music is rooted in the bars and bordellos, the dance halls and the street parades of New Orleans in the 1910s and 20s, and later in the clubs and speakeasies of Chicago and New York, as musicians migrated to the big cities to find work.
They take their name from a famous jazz-age night-spot on Chicago's notorious South Side. Al Capone owned it, Louis Armstrong starred there. The Stompers play the music of that period - great tunes from Scott Joplin, Irving Berlin, Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller - but the band's wide-ranging book also features songs by artists as different as Patsy Cline, Marilyn Monroe, the Inkspots, Fats Domino... even Elvis. Beneath it all lies that elusive, enthralling beat – the pulse of New Orleans.
"One of the best bands of its kind in the land" – Just Jazz magazine
The band:
Mike Denham - piano
Steve Graham - trumpet/cornet
Pete Middleton - trombone/arranger
Trevor Whiting - clarinet & saxes
Keith Hall - banjo & guitar
John Coad - drums
Pete Ward - bass
Hamish Maxwell - vocals
Tickets: £20
Free to children of 12 and under, accompanied by a paying adult, and students £5
Performance starts at 7:30pm, doors from 6:30pm with bar available.
Tickets can also be purchased by ringing 01460 54973 or visiting us during opening hours.
