Manchester Jazz Festival Opener

The Manchester Jazz Festival launched last Friday night and we were lucky enough to have been invited down to soak up the atmosphere and share a little snifter of wine or two with the organisers. It was a nice relaxing affair, as perhaps you might imagine, enlivened by an interesting, music-based concept – everyone at the gathering was given a round black sticker, to be placed on a large musical stave pinned to the wall of the festival’s temporary home, the Pavilion in Albert Square. These notes were placed quite randomly by the collected officials and media freeloaders (that’s us) and then...this is the good bit...sight read by a saxophonist to launch the festival. The result wasn’t exactly Eric Alexander, but it did have a certain charm (probably entirely thanks to the skills of the man with the sax rather than our collected sticker efforts). We caught the moment in time, rather shakily, on video: