Jazz Suite Artists

Paul Kelly

Paul Kelly started learning trumpet at the age of ten and forty years on reckons he's still learning. A music scholar at school, he discovered jazz at the age of 14 and it has been a lifelong love ever since. He spent most of his twenties organizing and promoting jazz including concerts by Carla Bley, Eberhard Weber, Art Pepper, Clark Terry, Sun Ra, Gil Evans, Stan Tracey, Keith Tippett, Chet Baker and many others and around 30 national tours by a wide variety of artists. He was the jazz and rock reviewer for the Birmingham Post for 8 years and between 1980 and 1984 had his own weekly three hour jazz radio show - "Kelly's Eye" - on Birmingham's BRMB Radio. Since moving to Plymouth in 1992 he has performed with Sam Richards' Heliocentric Omniversal Traveling band, the Jazz Conspiracy and the Jazz Doctors, the last of which recorded a critically acclaimed CD - "Friday 13th" - at the Barbican Jazz Café in 2000 - the only jazz CD to have been knowingly recorded there and released. Paul has also organized many music Festivals in Plymouth including the Soundwaves Fringe, the 1999 Eclipse Music Festival the Orange Music Festival on the Hoe and most recently, Plymouth Music Week - which returns to Plymouth this October. His jazz tastes are eclectic and his set tonight will feature music from some of his favorite jazz trumpet players - Miles Davis, Chet Baker, Harry Beckett, Hugh Masakela and Abram Wilson. Perhaps surprisingly, this is his first gig as frontsman. He hopes it won't be his last.