Lady Sings the Blues – Review

I was offered free tickets to see Lady Sings the Blues at Lincoln Drill Hall and it seemed too good an opportunity to turn down so Mary left work early and travelled up from Peterborough. We made it to the venue in plenty of time. Neither of us had been to the Drill Hall before and it’s a good venue.

I didn’t know what to expect other than I had a preconception from the advertising poster it would be a black woman singing the music of Billy Holliday. Instead the band consisted of a bunch of geriatrics who were no doubt competent musicians but they were playing jazz from sheet music. To me jazz should be played from the soul and not from sheet music. These musicians do this gig on a regular basis so why did they need to follow sheet music? The singer did, at times, sound like Billy Holliday but the soul was missing. Another irritation for me was the fact that every time an individual in the band did a bit of a solo there was an expectation that the audience would clap – this happened in virtually every song.

We suffered an hour of this and at the interval Mary and I looked at each and virtually at the same moment we said “shall we cut and run”. I think for the first time in my life I left an event half way through – life’s too short to endure events that you’re not enjoying.