Today we are publishing the first part of Aymeric Leroy’s interview with Sarah Gail Brand, the trombone player who joined the 20 other musicians who came together in January 2019 to celebrate the Life In Music of Phil Miller at his tribute concert at the Vortex, London, which you can find elsewhere on this site.
This week we are showing episode one of Aymeric’s interview of John Etheridge. Although John and Phil never played together, they knew each other well and John played at Phil’s Tribute Concert on 6th Jan 2019 at the Vortex. John is too well known to need any introduction from me, but if you want to find out more, click here.
We had already posted the DAT-sourced audio to this concert, the band’s only gig of 1994, a release party of sorts for the “Recent Discoveries” album recorded the previous year. As it happens, the vaults also included a transfer of a video recording of the same gig, but with inferior sound from the camera’s own microphone.
Since we published the last OPUS page we have added two new videos. These have come from the Phil Miller Prize competition winners. On the Phrygian Blues page you will find the version performed by Leo Marland and on the Eastern Region page which we are publishing today you will find the version performed by Oliver Canham and Adam Roberts.
The prize of £1000 is offered to students of the RBC for a solo or duo performance of a composition by Phil Miller to demonstrate their understanding of his oeuvre.
On Thursday 19th May the Phil Miller Guitar Prize took place in the Eastside Jazz Club at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. This event has been postponed for the last two years because of the disruption caused by the Covid pandemic. It was in danger of being postponed for a third year when at the last minute we were offered this date. We were unprepared for it as we had been hoping to stage the event later in June but decided to accept this date and put on a pared-down version rather than missing out until 2023.
In spite of the short notice we had a good response resulting in six performances: three duos and three solos.
Fred Baker provided additional entertainment with his trio: our special guest of the evening Mark Fletcher on drums, Mickey O’Brien on Bass and himself on guitar playing some of Phil’s pieces.
The First Prize was won by Leo Morland on guitar with a fabulous performance of Phrygian Blues and the Second Prize was won by a duo performance from Oliver Canham on guitar and Adam Roberts on electric bass with a great rendition of Eastern Region.
We are posting all the performances of the evening starting with the first and second prize winners.
This week we are showing episode one of Aymeric’s interview of Simon Picard. Simon joined in Phil’s band In Cahoots in July 2005. You can watch him playing in the Phil Miller Tribute Concert on this site on Miserable Man, Fool’s Meeting, Nowadays a Silhouette, Second Sight and Nan True’s Hole.