Hot Club Sandwich is coming to town, which is always good news.
As I said last week, these guys are about my favourite band in the country – along with the Windy City Strugglers, Brilleaux and a few others – so let me tell you a little about them.

It all started almost 20 years ago, back in 1992, when singer/guitarist Andrew London was invited to record a couple of sessions for National Radio. Back in those days it happened every week – Nat Rad would get in bands to record half-hour programmes of songs. It allowed bands who often couldn't afford to do so otherwise to get into a really good studio and make their mark, and it built up an invaluable archive of New Zealand music. (I wonder what happened to all those session tapes – did they just get dumped during some cost-cutting measure like so much rare early footage from TVNZ?)
So Andrew was asked into National Radio. Andrew called Terry Crayford. Terry is a bit of a legend in Wellington. He was the piano player anyone called. He played with Beaver and with Malcolm McNeil and toured with everyone from Jimmy Witherspoon to The Seekers. Terry is the man who wrote the Fair Go theme and he is no doubt chuffed by the longevity of that programme. He is also the father of Jonathon Crayford, the internationally-acclaimed jazz keyboard player who some might remember seeing in Tauranga at jazz festivals.
Terry does a sideline in bass guitar and the two of them headed into the fabled recording studio in Wellington's National Radio building and recorded a set of swing standards in the style of Stephane Grappelli and Django Reinhardt's Hot Club of Paris band, the 30s institution responsible for the popularity of the gypsy jazz sound that has now spread around the world.
Sadly that studio is no more. It was one of the best purpose-made studios in the country, even having a parabolic-shaped roof to deflect noise from overhead airplanes. MPs decided they needed more offices so they tore it down. There was such a public outcry that they never built the offices – it is now a parking lot.
But out of those sessions came the idea of adding a little 'filling” to their sandwich and doing some gigs. And they did. In the following 15 years the guys have played over 1000 shows with various musical compadres. Violinist Fiona Pears was a regular with the band in the early days before she headed off to England where she now regularly fills concert halls. There was also virtuoso harmonica player Neil Billington and for several years the clarinet, sax and flute of James Olsen.
You can see those last two on the DVD the band put out a couple of years back, along with Christchurch guitarist Bob Heinz – another legend of the music scene – for whom they named their 2007 album, Riding with Bob.
What really moved the band along though was that Andrew London suddenly started writing songs. I guess he may have been doing this for years and not told anyone but a decade or so ago the floodgates seemed to open and songs just started pouring out of him. Songs about rugby fans, television evangelists, politicians, weddings, male insecurities, technophobia, youth culture, household appliances, pretentious socialites, coffee, all written with sophisticated wit and the lightest of touches.
The band has now released seven albums and a live DVD recorded in old St Pauls church in Wellington. To everyone's great surprise (not least the band) one of their albums was noticed in the States and got a four-star review in Downbeat magazine. That's pretty high cotton, whoever you are. The review said they were 'warmly appealing with eccentric edges” and described 'devilishly clever word play for an old-time music of their own that can provide the exhilaration of watching a trapeze artist toeing the wire a few hundred feet high”.
The band is currently out on the road somewhere in the South Island on an AOTNZ tour. It will bring them to Tauranga on Sunday, August 1 at Mills Reef Winery for an evening show. Tickets are $20, available from Mills Reef (ph 576 8800).