José finds a way, live on Jazz FM

Nigel Williams' final outside broadcast from King’s Place for the EFG London Jazz Festival on Saturday produced some Jazz FM exclusives.

Firstly, American vocalist José James turned for a live on-air performance in-front the King’s Place crowd without his guitar, which had been locked in at Ronnie Scotts ahead of his sold out Saturday night there. Efforts to liberate the guitar were fruitless so the audience were treated to a José James first, his first ever pure a cappella performance, exclusively for the Jazz FM.  He chose to sing Bille Holliday’s 'God Bless The Child' and his hit ‘Trouble’ with his own beat-box backing. 

James just completed a three night residency at Ronnie Scott's in London where he played material from his recent Billie Holiday tribute album for Blue Note Records, 'Yesterday I Had The Blues,' songs from his previous releases and other themes including a long Bill Withers medley.

Secondly, the band Bad Ass Brass turned up to exclusively announce that from that moment onwards, they are to be known as The Big Shake Up.

Band member and founder John Stokes said “It’s been a challenge as a lot of promoters and venues have been reluctant to say our name and just introduce us a “Bad…".  With this in mind, we decided to change our name.”  

He continued: "It’s taken us about a year and we’ve had loads of meetings.  Eventually, we just sat round one night and decided that we pulled a piece of music from the pad and whatever the first tune was we’d call ourselves that”.