After the euphoria of the summer school gig I got back to being a spectator.

First stop was The Jazz Romantics at The Village off Ferry Road.  A pitifully small audience for an excellent evening of great American songbook classics.  They were competing with half a dozen Jazz Festival events though.  Why were they themselves not part of the festival?

Then the Edinburgh Schools Jazz Orchestra in the pouring rain.  Not exactly in it but the rain beat on the spiegel tent roof throughout.  This was a set of big band classics interspersed with a few solo or duo pieces demonstrating the enormous talent of our teenagers.  One lad in the band has been at a couple of the Napier summer schools so I knew he was a terrific sax player.  He turns out to be no slouch on the piano either.  Destined for greatness.

Since my next concert was only an hour and a few hundred yards away I slipped into The Angel's Share for some lunch.  I ignored their vast (and pricey) range of whiskies and washed down my very tasty steak sandwich and yummy chips with a velvety smooth Merlot.

The restaurant used to be a post office and my next port of call used to be a chapel.  It's now The Rose Theatre in whose basement we had our gig.  This one was upstairs in the main space.  The Baptists moved out because there wasn't enough room for their growing congregation but three hundred seats was plenty for those who assembled to hear Ryan Quigley and Soweto Kinch being Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.  Ably supported by a rhythm section of first class players they gave us an hour and a half of high octane grooves.
 

I snapped a piccie but only Soweto came out tolerably well.

I was released early enough from the Outside Mullingar rehearsal in the evening to have gone to Soweto's other gig and I was keen but.....

Maybe I'd had a surfeit or old age is creeping up on me so I went home and enjoyed Radio Scotland instead.