Alan Thomson, long-serving bass guitarist for the late John Martyn, plays Backstage at the Green Hotel in Kinross on Hogmanay and New Year’s Day with a band featuring former members of Badfinger and Barbara Dickson and Donnie Munro’s bands. As well as working with John Martyn for some thirty years until the guitarist’s death in 2009, Thomson has also played and recorded with Phil Collins, Eric Clapton, Robert Palmer, David Gilmour, Linda Lewis, Bert Jansch, Jacqui McShee, Julia Fordham, Amos Garrett, and American jazz and bluegrass guitarist John Jorgenson. The Kinross concerts begin at 9pm.

mundellmusic.com

Jazz sous les pommiers, the festival in Normandy which is widely regarded as one of the pace-setting events in European jazz, has announced the first names in its programme for 2016. New Orleans trumpeter Christian Scott’s Stretch Music, Cameroonian singer Blick Bassy, Norwegian nu-jazz group Jaga Jazzist, saxophone-piano duos Charles Lloyd & Jason Moran (pictured) and Julien Lourau & Bojan Z, French bassist Henri Texier’s Sky Dancers Sextet, and Brotherhood Heritage, an international band that continues the musical legacy of South African pianist Chris McGregor’s trail-blazing 1970s orchestra Brotherhood of Breath will be among the acts lining up in the small town of Coutances between April 30 and May 7. The festival has previously played host to Scottish groups including John Rae’s Celtic Feet, the Colin Steele Quintet and the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra.

jazzsouslespommiers.com

Alastair Robertson, of Pitlochry-based Hep Records, continues to champion the late pianist Eddie Thompson with the release of a second volume of recordings from a concert Thompson gave on the rarely seen Bosendorfer imperial model in Mansfield in 1980. London-born Thompson, who was blind from birth, became the first house pianist at Ronnie Scott’s legendary Soho jazz club in 1959 and went on to establish himself in the U.S. where he made friends with Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk and Erroll Garner and spent four years as the resident pianist at New York’s Hickory House. The Bosendorfer imperial has an extra octave at the bass end of the keyboard and Thompson revelled in the options this gave him, playing Stevie Wonder’s Isn’t She Lovely as well as well-known jazz standards including Here’s That Rainy Day and But Not for Me and a Duke Ellington-Billy Strayhorn medley with his trio. Ceci N’est Pas Une Piano, The Bosdendorfer Concert 1980 Volume 2 is available now.

hepjazz.com