Spring into Jazz

On Saturday evening it was Spring into Jazz at the Memorial Hall.  This was a jazz band who played music and talked about the history of jazz in between.  They were a 5 piece band which consisted of a banjo player who did most of the talking, a trumpet/cornet player, a clarinet /saxophone player, a keyboard player and a guy who appeared to have a thing about playing really huge musical instruments.  The first thing I noticed as I walked in the hall was the massive white sousaphone which was apparently made with 3 miles of pipes.  He also played a double bass.  I don't really know a lot about jazz and didn't recognise many of the tunes but I still really enjoyed it. Jazz has a seedy background.  In the early days jazz was played in brothels.  They man telling the stories was very considerate of the fact I'd brought my 11 year old son with me.  At the beginning he called them brothels and then changed to saying house of pleasure or unmentionable places.  It's roots were in the recently freed black slaves in New Orleans starting roughly around 1890 and getting really big in the 1920s. They told colourful tales of the jazz musicians. Louis Armstrong was born to a 14 year old mother and never knew his father.  His life changed when he got put into an orphanage at 13 where he learn to play the cornet in their band.  There was a guy called Sydney (I forget his last name, but bear in mind I had never even heard of most of these people before Saturday night) who discovered the alto sax when visiting London, then he got deported for brawling.  King Oliver (he wasn't really a king, he just called himself that) had a band with lots of the big names in jazz, but they all left his band when they realised he was ripping them off.  There were lots of tales of musicians being ripped off by record companies, and many more stories of musicians turning to alcoholism.  There was a big blues singer called Bessie Smith who, when the Klu Klux Klan came along with torches to burn down their blues tent, she went out to challenge then to a fist fight and they all backed away quietly.  My personal favourite was the tale of Mr Moore whose act was to dress as a frog and was shut in a box which he had to escape from and the tune that went with it.  Anyway I'm not doing these tales justice.  The guy from the band told them a lot better.

As well as telling good stores they were very good musicians.  We heard many good sax, clarinet and cornet solos as well as maple leaf rag on the keyboard.  The whole evening inspired an interest in jazz I never knew I had and left me wanting to know more about the musicians and what was happening in the world of jazz in that era, and most importantly I wanted to hear more of the music.

Weston School Hi 5 celebration

Saturday was also the day Weston School had it's celebration of the new school being open for 5 years.  I remember 5 years ago walking from the old school to the new one on the first day of the new school.  It was chucking it down with rain when we walked from the old school to the new one whilst singing.  5 years later we went to the new school for the celebration and it was raining again.  They had a stage set up in the main hall where children could perform and lots of displays of things the children had done and photos all around the school.  It was a fairly informal affair, people could wander between the performances and the displays as they wish.  The performances were children playing musical instruments, dancing, telling jokes, singing, a puppet show amongst others.  They were all good, and as the head teacher said in her speech, every child is precious.  A group of the year 5 and 6 girls did a dance and that really stood out for me, and of course my daughter and her friends playing guitar was brilliant in my completely biased opinion.  The school governers put on some free refreshments.  They did drinks and tonnes of tasty homemade cakes.  The kids were all having about 3 each and there was still plenty left over.  It was really hard to limit myself from eating loads but I found sitting at the opposite end of the hall worked quite well as I didn't feel like getting up after spending more or less 4 hours on my feet doing the yard sale.  The event was newsworthy enough for the Derby Evening Telegraph to be there taking photos so I'll be sure to be looking out for that.

Yard Sale

Events to write about here have been like buses lately.  There hasn't been much for a while, then on Saturday we had 3 in one day.  First was the yard sale.  It's like a day where lots of people have yard sales all around the village and recreation in Aston sell maps of the village to show people where they all are.  When I booked the pitch the organiser warned me that traders come round before the sale starts to cream off the good stuff before it opens.  We were told not to set up too early so that it gives people from the village a fair chance at the bargains.  I started setting up at about 9.30 (sale started at 10) and sure enough a flurry of traders appeared before 10am.  One of them told me I'd left it a bit late to set up and started looking in my garage.  He was only interested in one thing, my son's drum kit, which wasn't for sale.  None of the traders wanted anything from my stall and I was quite worried that I wasn't going to sell anything.  We had a steady stream of customers throughout the duration of the sale and in the end we managed to get rid of a reasonable amount of stuff.  People were friendly and quite a few people chatted on their way through.  Quite a lot of people didn't understand the map.  It was a bad map through.  It showed all the wiggly streets as straight lines and didn't look anything like how they really are.  They should just print out a map of the village from google maps and copy it. Towards the end the people began to tail off, not many people were around after 1.30pm.  The best thing about it was the weather.  God must have been smiling down on us.  It was predicted to rain all day but it held off until it chucked it down at 2pm when the sale due to finish.

Aston and Weston Bowls Club

Bowls season started at the beginning of April.  They advertise for newcomers to come on a Sunday afternoon sometime after 2, so this afternoon we went to try it out.  Bowls has an image of being for older people and I hope if any of the members stumble across this blog by accident, they won't be too offended to read that most of the people there were in the older half of the population.  Despite this, they were friendly and made me and the children welcome.  They lent us their equipment and showed us how to play.  I enjoyed it and would like to go again.  My youngest was a bit small for it, she struggled with the balls.  I'd recommend that kids were 10 or over before playing.

Good Friday workshop

Every Good Friday Aston church do a workshop for the children.  First they do an Easter egg hunt.  Some of the bigger kids hide eggs around the church for the younger ones to find.  As there were slightly less kids there this year than usual the kids got more than the usual 5 egg limit.  There were some crafts and some colouring and a favourite amongst the kids was the Easter garden which was made by the children going to look for flowers and plants in the church yard and putting them in the big tray of soil in the church.  They had water sprays for the plants which the kids really loved.  During the whole event they gave out tea and hot cross buns and at the end Tony the vicar got his guitar out and we all sang some songs.

Palm Sunday

On Palm Sunday Aston church had a joint service with the Methodist church, where they start off at the Methodist church and walk to Aston C of E church behind one of the children dressed as Jesus would have done and riding a REAL donkey.  I was pretty impressed by this and apparently they do it every year.  This year they had a girl Jesus which was only fair, why should only boys get the fun of a donkey ride?  As we don't have very many real palm trees growing in Aston, they gave us some greenery from an evergreen tree to wave.  We all sang songs on the way to the church and when we got to the lych gate, everyone put their leaves on the ground for the donkey to walk on.  I didn't have a leaf.  In Jesus time people who didn't have leaves put their coats down for the donkey to walk on.  I had my good coat on so I wasn't about to chuck it on the ground for the donkey to walk over, especially as I've seen that donkey before and it doesn't really care where it does a poo.  It came in for a nativity service once and pooed on the church floor.  I guess the chances of it pooing at the precise moment it walked over my coat are quite low and if I was wearing an old coat I may have risked it. I like to think that if it was the real Jesus riding on a donkey and I was actually there at the time, that I would have put my coat down no matter how good I thought my coat was.  Anyway, I digress.  In church Tony did a family friendly interactive talk through what happened through the week coming up to Easter, which was very informative if you didn't know the Easter story.

Easter Scramble

Yesterday it was the great Easter scramble.  The weather wasn't great but at least it wasn't raining, and weather is important for the Easter scramble as it involves walking around the village looking for clues, each which give a letter which then can be unscrambled to make a word.  Then the children pick out a stick with a number on and then they come back to Weston Village Hall and pick the Easter egg with that number on it. At the village Hall they then do some Easter crafts, making Easter bunnies and chicks, a bit of colouring, that sort of thing.  And of course no event like this would be complete without there being tea and coffee and assorted tasty cakes.  Despite the weather not being that great people turned up in the masses.  It was a great success.  The hall was heaving with people and the little park opposite was full of kids and parents who'd come outside to escape the noise and crowds.  Before the end they ran out of Easter eggs and were turning people away.  Next year it will probably cost 2 Easter eggs on non-uniform day. Or something.  Will be interesting to see what solution the PSFA come up with to prevent an Easter Egg shortage next year.