Me and Mr Jones

One of the perks of working for BBC Music (apart from bumping into Melvyn Bragg in the lift or encountering someone dressed as Pudsey Bear in the gents toilet) is getting to hear stuff you'd never come across otherwise, and sometimes even having your precious muso-snob preconceptions overturned. Last week I found myself in the BBC Radio Theatre for a live broadcast of Radio 3's Jazz Line-Up. First on the bill was trumpeter Sean Jones. Mr Jones is a Lincoln Centre (er, sorry, Center) alumnus; from poking around his website I'd pegged him as one of those shiny, technically gifted, well dressed but kind of anonymous jazzers that roll off Wynton Marsalis' production line every couple of months. The music samples sounded polite, overproduced and sort of...dull. So I wasn't expecting much.

But sheesh, they were (to use proper jazz parlance), cookin'. Or even smokin'. And though to a Home Counties reared white middle aged baldie like myself the concept of 'cool' is a bit foreign, these guys definitely had something. And Mr Jones can really play the trumpet; loads of notes, sure, but all the right ones and in the right order...

We'll be putting some of that set on the Radio 3 site from Dec 3rd...but till then, here he blows...