15 August 2026
I’m so slack about updating my website. Again… But some of you may have noticed that some of my website hasn’t been functioning properly for a while. The server that hosts my site was hacked & it was invasive & difficult to resolve. But it has been & from today all is in order again & for the first time for a few months I’ve been able to update my gig page.
Although I haven’t got as many gigs as I sometimes have. Everything has changed & there seems to be less & less interest in instrumental music of any kind these days. I’m not taking it personally.
But in the meantime my new album (which has taken far longer than it should have done) is getting closer & closer to being finished & released. It’s an odd album in that it has no market as such. It’s with my good friends BJ Cole on pedal steel guitar & Simon Thorpe on double bass along with Mike Pickering on drums & percussion from Dave Pattman on a couple of tracks. It’s an eclectic genre-less album. I’d like to get some gigs for it but it’s hard to know how that might happen.
Also I’ve decided to organise a UK tour for my Italian Trio next year. We had an 8 date tour booked in for July 2020 but we were locked down. And when the clubs reopened the following year it took a while for them to be confident that people would come out & be in close proximity to others. A lot of people were still scared for quite a while afterwards. Some clubs ceased to exist & others went from weekly to monthly & the result has been fewer & fewer gigs on the jazz circuit. Anyway, the bottom line was that it was impossible to book another tour for a few years & by then my Italian friends had taken up teaching jobs to make ends meet & weren’t available very often.
I have two confirmed Italian Trio gigs in June/July next year & there will be more soon. And we’re no longer a trio. I’ve had tendonitis in my left wrist for the last 7 years & to play in a trio setting where I have to play chords behind everything has become too much for me. I can play melodies or solo, or play chords & accompany others but a whole gig of doing both is too much. So, we have my friend Neil Burns guesting with us on this tour.
My last quartet album, ‘Bags Of Vibes’, came out in 2023 & that led to a few fun gigs & now I’m gearing up to record another one. The last one featured Jim Mullen on guitar & I’m weighing up whether I can afford a special guest on the next one.
A lot of my albums are for sale here on my website & some are also on Amazon. If you have a choice please buy from my website in preference as that way I make more money. Amazon take a huge cut & also allocate a fraction of postage costs now they’re so much more expensive than they were just a few years ago. My albums are also available digitally via Bandcamp.
In the last 4 years I’ve done a few gigs as a homage to the vibraphone in jazz which I’m now calling “100 Years of Vibraphone” where I talk about the history of the vibraphone, the mechanics of the instrument (as I regularly get asked) & play tunes associated with the great vibists in jazz – from Lionel Hampton to Gary Burton & touching Milt Jackson, Bobby Hutcherson & Cal Tjader in between. There have been many other great vibists of course but in the limited time available these are the ones whose repertoire I concentrate on.
My T shirts are still selling when I remember to take them to gigs… I still get a kick out of seeing people wearing them!
Below is old news…
When I realised it was pointless releasing my new quartet album in 2020 I released a solo ambient album instead called “Dreamscapes”. That’s gone quite well & I sell the occasional copy. It’s not bad considering very few people know it exists… I thought it was appropriate at the time as it’s an ambient album & (people tell me) is great for relaxation, chilling out, meditation, mindfulness & yoga amongst other things. For the first time ever I decided to not press copies of the album so it’s only available digitally at https://rogerbeaujolais1.bandcamp.com/releases
And a reminder that I’ve digitised all my quintet albums, my Italian Trio album & the Vibraphonic album ‘Acid Jazzizms’ & they are all now available as digital downloads at Bandcamp. It’s also possible to download individual tracks. The links are;
https://rogerbeaujolais.bandcamp.com/
https://rogerbeaujolaisquintet.bandcamp.com/
https://rogerbeaujolaisitaliantrio.bandcamp.com/album/barba-lunga
https://vibraphonic1.bandcamp.com/album/acid-jazzizms
All the above are also available via my Gig Page. T shirts can be bought there too.
The following is what I wrote in May 2020 & I’ve kept it here as it’s an interesting snapshot of what was happening then.
There’s not much to say that everyone doesn’t know already. I’ve had quite a few gigs cancelled & I’m fairly certain that a lot of the ones that haven’t been, will be soon. It’s hard to imagine how venues can open if the audience needs to socially distance. And they probably will till we have a vaccine. Socially distancing in a venue would mean not so many people would be able to come along & there’d be less money taken on the door. As the clubs all work on a shoestring budget it’s difficult to see how they could survive like that unless us musicians all accepted less money. When what we get is pretty similar to what we all got 20-25 years ago when the cost of living was a fraction of what it is now. And of course, even if the audience could socially distance, it’s not possible for the musicians.
Please check my gig page for the latest cancellations (as opposed to the latest gigs).
Below is some info on my last album – ‘Barba Lunga‘ with my Italian Trio (released Jan 2019).
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It features Giacomo Dominici on electric & double basses & Alessandro Pivi on drums & was recorded in Pesaro, Italy in May 2018.
We’ve had a couple of reviews & quite a few radio plays. Below I’ll put links to the reviews & also to a couple of radio interviews. In the radio interviews I talk about how the album came out & includes some background information on some of the tunes.
https://www.thejazzmann.com/reviews/review/the-roger-beaujolais-italian-trio-barba-lunga/
Interview with John Hellings for BBC Radio Hereford & Worcester & Radio Shropshire – https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p070mx4l
Interview with Walter Love on BBC Radio Ulster – https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0003130
You can buy ‘Barba Lunga’ right here on my website. Just go to the Shop. It’s also available as a digital download at Bandcamp (at the link above) & available through Amazon.
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