East Grinstead and Worthing celebration of a Century Of Swing

The band’s musical director Mike Paul-Smith explains: “The new album came out in April but it has been in the pipeline for a lot longer than that. We recorded it a couple years back during Covid. We were lucky during Covid that we received some of the cultural recovery fund support, the government backed money and it was one of those situations where you had to spend the money. We had a little bit left over in the pot in March 2021 and we decided that we would go into a studio and do a recording.

“The opportunity was there and it was all a bit last minute. The easy option would have been just to have recorded some of the songs that we've been playing for years but we decided to set ourselves a challenge. With three weeks’ notice myself and Simon, one of the trumpet players, decided that we would write a whole new album from scratch, our own arrangements of jazz standards, just putting our own ideas on them. We took songs from the 30s and 40s and arranged them for us, for instance if we wanted to feature our sax player or maybe if it was something that we thought that the drummer would sound great on, we would put in a solo. And the response has been great and now this is the first time that the album has toured.

“In a way it's the continuation of a tour that has been going since before the album was released but this is our first big post-pandemic tour that has gone as planned. There were some dates in the Christmases during the pandemic but there were problems obviously and then we had the horrible omicron winter where everyone seemed to go down with Covid and it ended up as half a tour. So this is really the first proper tour we have done since.

“But I don't think that things are completely back to normal yet. We do swing and jazz music and obviously that's music that can be enjoyed by anybody but we know that our demographic tends towards the slightly older people and lots of theatres are saying that those are the kinds of people that have not yet really completely come back but I think they are now. It's just happening slowly.”

The Down for the Count All-Stars started life as a group of school friends in Buckinghamshire in 2005, in the Aylesbury Music Centre. As Mike says: “All of us took part in student orchestras and jazz bands and had amazing opportunities to perform at places like The Royal Albert Hall, on tour at The North Sea Jazz Festival and at great concerts with famous jazz artists. Without the fantastic environment at our local music centre, we never would have had the idea to form the band and try to do the same sort of thing ourselves.

“We all went off to university to four different corners of the country but we maybe got back together once a term for a wedding or whatever and then after university we all congregated back in London and that's when we started playing more regularly.”

Mike qualified as a doctor, doing his pre-clinical years at Oxford and then the clinical years at UCL: “But I never actually practised as a doctor. I passed the finals but about a year and a half before sitting finals I decided that I really wanted to make a go at music.”

Mike would never say never about going back to medicine but certainly for the moment: “I can't see it happening. We're just having such a great time with the band.”