Jazz show in which the Dave Cottle Quintet sets two new jazz suites to Richard Burton's 'A Christmas Story' and Dylan Thomas's 'A Child's Christmas in Wales', with narrators Sian Lloyd and Griff Harries.
The Dave Cottle Quintet are playing A Christmas Story at the Swansea Grand Theatre on Friday 11 December, as part of the Swansea Jazz Club. It's a night that puts two Welsh voices side by side: Richard Burton and Dylan Thomas.
The show works its way through two new jazz suites composed by Dave Cottle, performed by the quintet and fronted by narrators Sian Lloyd and Griff Harries. The music sets jazz to Burton's A Christmas Story and Thomas's A Child's Christmas in Wales. There's a link between the two: Burton wrote A Christmas Story as a tribute to his hero Dylan Thomas, and it draws on Thomas's 1952 prose piece, which the poet recorded himself and which remains one of his most popular works. Hearing them together like this brings that connection home.
The narrators are well-known voices in their own right. Sian Lloyd is the UK's longest-serving female weather forecaster, having appeared on ITV Weather for 24 years, and Griff Harries is the founder director of The Chamber Orchestra of Wales and a long-time broadcaster with Swansea Sound. On the music, Cottle is joined by Sarah Meek on vocals, Dan Newberry on sax, Alun Vaughan on bass, and Gail James on drums.
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Cottle himself is a fixture of the local scene: he's the house pianist at Swansea Jazz Club and has organised the club's weekly events for almost 30 years. He founded the Swansea International Jazz Festival in 2014 and has played as a sideman with hundreds of international jazz artists. This is new material from him, so it's a first look at these two suites. The show starts at 20:00, and tickets are from £20.
