A line or two to note the excellent Chellah Jazz Festival which finishes tonight. The EC Delegation has owned it for many years, and has run it alone for the last two – and the results are very good. I’m not really a jazz enthusiast, and only attended one night, the second, having been obliged to miss the opening for an engagement in Casablanca, but I did hear Matthew Bourne, the wonderful English pianist. We had staying with us at home the inimitable Sebastian Scotney who runs LondonJazz and blogs to a very large audience about jazz: he attended for the middle three evenings of the festival, enjoying it very much, as his blog (which you can find here and which does a much better job than I could of writing the festival up) amply witnesses. The seats may be quite exquisitely uncomfortable (for men of my and Sebastian’s size they certainly are – extreme compression caused the odd noisy contretemps in the audience, though we were innocent), but the atmosphere is inimitable, music rebounding off the mediaeval walls, the moon high in the sky, the breeze in the palms and the crow’s-foot crenellations on the walls in deepest, inky shadow. And among other good surprises, the car-parking was superbly well-organized and the PR-handling by the delegation was (according to Sebastian) quite superb. Congratulations to all involved.
Martin Rose 