Yet another St Swithun’s restoration fundraising event took place in the church on 22 July with a recital by Skylark, a group founded by singer Jude Short and keyboard player Roger Lilley. Skylark have been entertaining audiences for 20 years, supplemented more recently by Ondrej Cais (trumpet) and Mike Lewis (double bass).
Their style could be called bar jazz – cool, smoky, and intimate. Skylark’s repertoire is wide, American song book standards, tango, bossa nova, and even two songs by Jaroslav Ježek, aka Czechoslovakia’s Gershwin. Many songs were arranged by Roger Lilley to showcase Jude’s clear soprano and Andrej’s cool, usually muted trumpet, two voices which blended happily together in many of the numbers.
Latin America is a profitable hunting ground for the group, with songs from Uruguay and Argentina featuring among the more familiar Brazilian numbers. The Czech songs added a further note of the unfamiliar; everyone knows ‘Summertime‘ but it’s a fair bet that this was the first time ‘Ze dne na den’ was heard in Chishill!
Skylark give their time freely, so the community owes them a huge vote of thanks – the evening raised a splendid £800 towards the restoration of St Swithun’s, according to the concert’s organiser Angus Gent. Picture and review by Neil Heywood.
