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Memorable Moving Pictures show in Soho
Tom Harrell
[Tom Beetz]
JULIA TOPPIN recommends Patti Smith’s eloquent memoir that wrestles with the beauty and sorrow of a lifetime
MARJORIE MAYO welcomes an account of family life after Oscar Wilde, a cathartic exercise, written by his grandson
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ANDY HEDGECOCK revels in a hugely enjoyable but deadly serious examination of the 1930s, that is an indictment of our own era
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Tom Harrell Moving Picture Quartet
Ronnie Scott's, London
THERE'S something modestly heroic about trumpeter Tom Harrell (pictured). His physical frailty as he walks onstage is manifest — his wild, white hair and beard, his unsteady and shaking gait, his bent back, his languid demeanour, his frustration with the microphones.
Yet, as he blows either trumpet or flugelhorn, his sound is one of beauty, power and ascendant lucidity, shaking the rafters and startling every listener into sudden moments of acute surprise.
Harrell, born in 1946, spent his early musical years in the big bands of Stan Kenton, Woody Herman and George Russell and made his debut at Ronnie Scott's with Horace Silver in 1974.
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