A relatively recent arrival on the Northern jazz scene, the Swing City Trio consists of Steve Andrews, tenor sax and clarinet, Roly Veitch, guitar and vocals and Roy Cansdale, double bass. The chaps, all veterans with various bands, came together in 2007 to play the music of the small swing groups that a visitor to one of New York’s 52nd Street clubs might have heard around 1940. Although they have a collective 120 years plus of jazz experience between them, the three have managed to hang on to at least some of their own hair and teeth, but more importantly have also retained 100% of their enthusiasm for the music, a fact that is apparent at every performance. The repertoire, broadly speaking, encompasses the Great American Songbook, but with some interesting and seldom-played gemstones (Fine And Dandy, East Of The Sun, This Year’s Kisses) glistening among the more familiar standards.

The full and proper name for this band is BasKlas and his Ten Doctors of Syncopation, since they are led by Klas Eriksson, who plays the bass (or bas, if you’re Swedish). Formed in Stockholm in 1986, the musicians were mainly drawn from student bands at various Swedish universities. Now they are all very serious businessmen, engineers, lawyers and so on: the best-paid band in Europe, they say – but only when they’re not playing! However, it’s the spontaneity and joy of their student days that they seek to recapture in their performances. Sporting three trumpets, trombone, four reeds and four rhythm (yes, I know, that’s twelve musicians, not eleven, but in any case there are actually thirteen of them) the band play hot, heavy and joyous stuff, specialising in up-tempo stomps and goodtime tunes from the twenties and early thirties. This will be their first public appearance in England.