Well, I did a little interview last week for the Lancaster University TV station, which the interviewer Chris Osborn has just sent me. I can’t quite bear to watch it today, but it should give you a little insight into what I’m thinking and what I’m hoping to achieve by all this work I’ve been doing recently.
Sorry I look so rough, it was a last minute to grab an opportunity and record it whilst I was busy doing other things!
So tomorrow is concert day, but today was exhibition day. To be honest, I don’t know anything about how to put an exhibition together so I pretty much put a load of stuff in some cabinets and then ate a Greggs sausage roll.
The picture above is of one of the cabinets which I filled full of various bits of Hylton ephemera, rare and unseen pictures, newspaper articles, gramophone records, press cuttings books, programmes, that sort of thing.
There’s plenty more there too: (more…)
Outside the Jack Hylton Music Rooms
As we’ve got closer to tomorrow’s concert, I’ve had a number of conversations with people, many of whom didn’t really know what I was doing or why I was doing it. It’s funny but when you express these things out loud they seem to have more resonance.
As is well documented on these pages, I started my interest in Hylton during my music degree at Lancaster University, which began in 1992. By the end of my three years, it was clear I was going to investigate the man a little further. Once that process began, there was always ongoing conversations about putting on a show doing Hylton music. Of course at that stage there was no detail in there, but the idea of me presenting a show with a band playing Hylton music from the Hylton archive and doing it at the university was set literally twenty years ago. (more…)
I realise I ought to be telling you about what’s going on with plans for this week’s big concert/ book launch/ CD launch/ exhibition launch/ everything else, but ironically I’m so busy doing things that I can’t seem to find time to do anything!
So, the script is written, the exhibition exhibits are being packed up, the books are boxed and ready to go, as are the CDs and now all I really need to do is pack up my suits and my baton, and learn all the music! There are more seats being released and it looks like there’ll be plenty of people there. There’s so much to do on Wednesday and Thursday and so many people to look out for that things will be pretty mental but once it’s all done and dusted, I’ll tell you all about it, and be able to report back with photos, video and hopefully lots of lovely stories about meeting and talking to lots of lovely people.
If you’re coming to see it and you’ve been reading this, please do introduce yourself. I’m sorry in advance for not having enough time to talk to everyone, but I’ll do my best to get round you all, especially if you buy a copy of my book!
Once the concert is over, everything will be released and start to be available first from the shop on the official Hylton website http://www.jackhylton.com and soon after in some of the usual online places. For now the book and CD won’t be available in your regular book shops, but you can still get it easily enough from the website.
Right, I better get back to my preparation. More soon…
When I say I’ve been threatening to write my Hylton book for many years, I’m not joking. I’ve talked about it on and off for almost twenty years. One of those years was 2010, when I was writing a different blog and decided to write a synopsis of the book.
I found that post today, by accident and rather liked what I’d written, so if anyone ever asks about Jack Hylton, you could do worse than to read them this:
The story of Jack Hylton is that of one of the Great Britons. A classic rags to riches tale of the son of a mill worker who ended his days as a wealthy, well regarded, well loved theatrical impresario, dividing his time between his sold out theatres in London’s West End and his villa in the south of France. (more…)
Available now to pre-order on iTunes, and available on CD very soon…
Well, this is exciting. The new Jack Hylton compilation album which I’ve put together is now available to pre-order on iTunes. Just click here to see it:
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/id957448157
You can get it at a reduced price right now, with a couple of tracks available for instant download. The rest of the album will download on the release date of January 29th. Nifty, huh?
Of course, the CD version of the album (which, to be honest, I’d prefer you to buy) will be available for the first time at the concert on January 29th, then on jackhylton.com thereafter.
I’ve put together the album myself and it’s my choice of tracks which are both a good representation of Hylton’s career, but also a decent listen. There’s a couple of things on there you’ve probably not heard before and quite a few things which aren’t available elsewhere on CD. So that should hopefully be incentive enough for you to buy! The CD will be priced at £5.99, which I think is reasonable, and in line with many other similar products. It’s also considerably cheaper than many!
Right, that’s enough hard sell for one day. I suspect I’ll mention it again on here once I’ve received the CDs from the pressing plant and they’re on sale.
Well, amongst the never ending score writing which seems to be burdening my life at the moment, today I’ve come up with a real treasure.
It’s a version of “Cheek To Cheek” which the band never recorded. All seemed normal until I realised that the vocal part of the song had no instrumentation and included a vocal in seven parts! This is a real rarity. I’m not aware of any other arrangements in the archive within which all the instruments stop and singing starts in quite so many parts.
It is, of course, quite hard to imagine how it would sound played by the full size band and that many singers. So, if anyone fancies working on it and recording it, we’ll publicise it and stick it on the website.
There we go. That’s all I’ve got to say. The picture above might go some way to helping you understand how hard it is to make the old scores into new all singing all dancing computerised scores. That is, suffice to say, a little bit hard to read!
Better go, lots of sellotaping to do!
To see the newly made files, click here: http://www.jackhylton.com/sheet-music/
To buy tickets for the upcoming concert, click here: https://www.liveatlica.org/whats-on/the-band-that-jack-built
Well, folks, as I alluded to in my last post, sometimes life is more important than the internet and that’s the way things have panned out for me over the last few weeks. I won’t bore you with the details, but I’m back onto thinking about matters Hyltonian. Just as well, really, given how soon the concert is.
So, whilst all that is going on, I’ve been commissioned to transcribe another load of arrangements for Lancaster University Music Society, and the deadline has rather crept up on me.
This week has been spent working on a different style of arrangement and it’s thrown up a few interesting things. The picture above is of an arrangement of “The Man I Love”, which, it transpires, was never recorded by the band. It’s clearly been used, so I assume it was used for some concerts. We don’t have a date, or very much information at all, other than the fact it was arranged by Leighton Lucas. (more…)
Jack Hylton 