About Seven Jazz
Seven Jazz is a voluntary organisation supported by Jazz Yorkshire and the PRS for music foundation to promote jazz from Yorkshire and around the UK. Seven Arts Centre, our home, is a friendly venue with great acoustics and a wide range of drinks and food. It is in Chapel Allerton, Leeds, close to the city centre with good public transport and free local parking. We run about 60 gigs per year and about 40 workshops in total. Our gigs are every Sunday between 1.30pm and 4pm with the best of regional bands, and alternate Thursday evening concerts that feature national and international jazz stars. We also run a number of instrumental workshops for people who want to learn more about the music or to play with other musicians; We also feature regular "Jazz Cafe" jam sessions where we encourage people to play and sing with a top local rhythm section - a jazz talent show. We also organise the bands at the open air Jazz Sunday at the Chapel Allerton Festival in September.
We want people to come and enjoy the music and have fun - Seven is a family friendly place and kids under 16 can come to our Sunday concerts free of charge. We also have concessions for people who are unwaged and for students and have a loyalty card for our Sunday gigs (the 6th gig is free!). We offer reduced price season tickets for our evening gigs and full time students can get into our evening gigs for £5 if we have tickets left.
Seven Jazz is run by volunteers - the people who help and you will see at gigs are Martin Briggs, Steve Crocker, Tom Swire, Steve Ross, Colin Watson and Jean Watson. We have two music students at the college who help - Louis Peakall and Alex Watson. We have an informal advisory group of musicians including Caroline Boaden, Rommi Smith, Ronnie Bottomley, Jamil Sheriff and Paul Smith. Our ever growing Saturday workshops are run by Martin Townshend, Richard Ormrod and Colin Byrne at Seven with Dom Moore running the one held at the Methodist Centre, Chapel Allerton. We also have lots of people who just come and support us by coming to the club and enjoying the music. We are always looking for help - just come to one of our gigs and offer.
The Jazz Committee band are pictured playing at Seven's third anniversary party on 7th July 2010- Steve Crocker (double bass) Jami Sheriff (keyboards), Colin Watson (guitar), Paul Smith (drums) Jean Watson (vocals) and Martin Townshend (tenor sax) - photo by our cameraman Tom Swire