Scott Hamilton
Marking 40 years since his first appearance at PizzaExpress Live in London, the revered US saxophonist Scott Hamilton has released a new live album, the first release on the newly formed PizzaExpress label PX Records.
Having appeared at the club in Dean Street, Soho, across six different decades, Hamilton is very much part of the fabric of PizzaExpress Live and this new live album, which features Scott’s UK-based quartet of John Pearce (piano), Dave Green (bass) and Steve Brown (drums), captures a 9-track set featuring an array of classic standards including The More I See You, The Girl From Ipanema and Pure Imagination.
Hamilton was attracting a lot of attention in the late 1970s and by the time he met PizzaExpress founder Peter Boizot in New York in 1978, he had released acclaimed albums on the Concord jazz label and had appeared in Benny Goodman’s septet. Boizot soon invited Hamilton to play at his new Soho jazz club and so began a long-standing relationship between the saxophonist and the London venue. Hamilton now sits among the ranks of several American swing legends who have appeared at the Dean Street club since its first show by saxophonist Bud Freeman in May 1976.
The new live album is important to Scott – and a timely exercise: “It kind of celebrates 40 years of me playing Pizza and the 20th anniversary of this band playing there. We recorded live with this exact group for Concord, released in 2003.”
