Dave Fuller writes;

Music Spoken Here turns 4 today!

 

“Connecting you with new and exceptional musical experiences”

 

On 6th April 2022, just over a year after leaving a 33-year career in IT, an idea I’d nurtured for over 10 years emerged into the world with the registration of the musicspokenhere.club Internet domain. As you may already know, Music Spoken Here is the title of an album by John McLaughlin, one of the first albums I borrowed from the “Jazz” section at Watford library, along with Tutu by Miles Davis towards the end of the 1980s. (For something like 40p per record, you could borrow two or three albums at a time for a few weeks - an affordable path to discovery!) To me, the name encapsulated my vision - a space to build a local community around the discovery, appreciation, support and development of new music, predominantly through the live experience, that had sparked something in me decades ago that I have come to truly value.

 

There was probably no better time to start. We were emerging out of the dark, social interruption / manipulation of COVID that had put an end to live music for nearly two years, when a decade of widespread streaming had decimated the value of music by cultivating an expectation that music should be free and as technology was starting to challenge the idea that people were even needed to create music, or any art form for that matter, to the point, just four years on, where our online digital world has become congested with unavoidable AI slop. I strongly believe that the value of music, in particular live performance, needs repositioning, restating and realising in new ways. Coming at it with no legacy, experience or the accepted wisdom of how things used to work, I have been free from the start to approach each hurdle with today’s mind.

 

Our first gig was Yolanda Charles’ Funk Ultra on Thursday 26th May 2022. I managed to persuade 42 people to come down, many of whom were friends who had seen the band perform a few months before at my local pub for my 51st birthday bash (a preparatory ‘dry run’ of organising a gig on the very day that Storm Eunice hit London and the south east, keeping several friends away from the party and giving an early lesson that has been repeated several times since; in challenging situations, artists and bands are more reliable than audiences!)

 

We’ll be celebrating our four year anniversary properly on Thursday 28th May with the appropriately future-themed Tomorrow’s New Quartet, but it feels good to acknowledge this particular milestone today.

 

Thank you all for being a part of this important, growing community. While the enduring target of financial self-sufficiency remains elusive, we have already achieved a lot together, much of which is carefully documented in The Vault on our website. I have met so many positive, creative and passionate people, made many new friends and learned so much over the last four years. I’ve always imagined it expanding beyond the live music program and there is so much more we can do if we all keep finding the ways!

DAVE FULLER, INSTIGATOR, MUSIC SPOKEN HERE
http://www.musicspokenhere.club

Ian Mann adds;

I’ve been covering the MSH events at The Marr’s Bar on a regular basis since attending my first show featuring a band led by the American drummer Robert Castelli in March 2023. I’d like to thank Dave Fuller for allowing me to do this and for bringing a strand of jazz to Worcester that is not represented at any of our other local jazz clubs, which are far more straight ahead. MSH really does offer something unique for the area and we have had the pleasure of seeing some absolutely brilliant musicians in Worcester over the course of the last three years, musicians who in many cases are rarely seen and heard outside London, although The Midlands and other regional jazz scenes have been featured too. This fourth birthday really is a cause for celebration and I will be there on 28th May to enjoy the music of Tomorrow’s New Quartet. Thanks Dave for all you have done for the live music scene in Worcester and the wider West Midlands. Music Spoken Here is something that you can justly be very proud of. Long may it continue.

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