Welcome
CDAWN @ the Vortex
Saturday 6th July at 8.30pm – CDAWN with Carol Grimes, Dorian Ford (piano), Annie Whitehead (trombone), Winston Clifford (drums) and Neville Malcolm (bass).
For more information visit The Vortex Jazz Club
Book tickets at WeGot Tickets
Sing for Joy
Sing for Joy is a community choir for people with Parkinson's Disease and similar conditions, their friends and carers.
We are all sorts of ages, types and genders. All that we have in common is that we have an illness, or care for someone with an illness, and that singing with others makes us feel better.
To find our more about us, please click here.
Sing the Blues with Carol Grimes
Enjoy this exploration of blues vocal style and repertoire, including the challenge of writing and singing your own blues.
Click here for more information about Sing the Blues.
Garden Party for Sing For Joy Choir
A garden party and fund-raiser will be held for Sing For Joy Choir on Sunday 30th June. Food and drink and sunshine. If it rains, we shall move into the house!
For more information click here
Theatre Of The Voice
A Spring day singing workshop with Carol Grimes & Marta Rocamora
Explore how to be authentic in performance. This workshop helps you to overcome stage fright and be present in the music, the song and the lyric. Learn how to communicate with your audience, be it a large or small gathering or a workshop group.
Please note that his workshop will now take place on Saturday, 11th May 2013.
For more information, see the Theatre of the Voice page.
Carol at the Vortex, 9th March
For her show on 9th March, Carol wil be joined by her band C.DAWN: Dorian Ford (piano), Neville Malcolm (double bass), Winston Clifford (drums) and Mark Hewins (guitar). Together they will be performing original and classic jazz songs, blues and roots.
The Vortex Jazz Club. £11. Tel: 020 7254 4097
Ian Shaw writes about Carol
Outside the flabby arena of increasingly disposable pop singing Joni called "junkfood for juveniles", there has always been a welcome, often genre-busting, rich seam of music making. Within this (jazz, folk, blues, soul) seam, the singers can be routed to a certain era of popular song. Pastiche, touristy, sepia, anodyne and familiar.
Not Carol Grimes.
The writer, John Fordham called Carol a "British Jazz Soul legend". Blimey, she probably winced as she read that…
Read the full article here.
Message from Paul Romane
I received the following message from my friend Paul and wanted to share it with you.
On Valentine's Day 2010, my partner died at St. Joseph's Hospice. Our son and I were looked after superbly, as was she. I felt I wanted to give something back, as the Hospice mainly runs on donations. As writing and reading of poetry had been a comfort to me, I thought of producing CD with my poet and musician friends to raise money for the Hospice.
As Benjamin had read at Tersia's funeral, and Jenny and Annie had played as well, I started by asking them if they would help, and it snowballed from there.
Coincidently, all my singing teachers throughout my life ended up on the album: Carol, Gina and Terri.
Paul x
Carol at St James Theatre Studio
Listen to Dorian Ford chatting to Carol, plus excerpts from her gig at the St James Theatre Studio where she wowed the crowd. With surprise guest performances from singers Anita Wardell and Mark Jennett.
To listen click here
The Singer's Tale
I am writing a book… The Singers Tale… thank you Chaucer.
He coude songes make, and wel endite. Canterbury Tales, Prologue, Line 95.
He didn't write a Singer's Tale, so I have done it – how presumptuous of me! He spent time in Blackfriars and Kent and places in between, as I do…
I felt compelled to tell my life – my story…
Read more on my blog.
New album for 2012
Next year there'll be some new tracks from Carol, Dorian, Annie, Winston and Neville. The album is going to be called C.DAWN.
First night: Carol Grimes October 12th
"Oh dear, dizzy again." Photo Kasia Hrybowicz.
October 12th: Carol Grimes Quintet: Carol Grimes (vocal), Dorian Ford (piano), Annie Whitehead (trombone), Neville Malcolm (bass), Winston Clifford (drums)
Dorian Ford writes:
"Carol is like Dickens sings the blues. Where the Thames is the Mississippi.
"I first met Carol when I came to play for one of her jazz singing classes at the City Lit. I reminded her that her son Sam and I both worked as teenage actors together in Grange Hill. This is one of many personal strands of my life which seem naturally to intertwine with Carol's. Perhaps that's why she still likes me playing in her band. But not least of which is our shared love of all kinds of American roots music: blues, country, jazz, singers, songwriters and instrumentalists.
"Carol's current quintet I believe has a magical chemistry where the authentic sound of London in the twenty first century can be heard."
Interview in London Jazz, Sept 2012
For one of the opening gigs of their new 100-capacity performance studio space in Palace Street SW1, the programming team at the St. James Theatre have booked one of the most truthful, authentic singer-songwriters around, Carol Grimes. A legend. In the sixties she was performing alongside Cream, John Mayall and The Yardbirds.
Grimes explains she is very happy to be there at the birth of a new venue: "London needs more venues. If [music] is not live, it dies..."
Read the full interview here.
Interview in Jazz UK, March 2012
During a recent Radio 3 Jazz Library broadcast Ian Shaw, discussing the free-flowing beat poetry aspect of Mark Murphy's work, made the observation that the only jazz singer in England who told a story in similar fashion was the 'absurdly undervalued' Carol Grimes.
Strange, because whenever I have seen her at North London's Lauderdale House, where I have been organising gigs for twelve years, or the Vortex, the rooms have been packed. So too was Ronnie Scott's on he Oscar Brown night, at the Club's first BritJazz Festival in 2010 and more recently when she presented her Songs of London programme.
In 2009 she was an enormous success on BBC TV's Soul Britannia package alongside Madeline Bell, Linda Lewis and Hamish Stuart.
Her website is peppered with enthusiastic postings sparked by a track from his mid-70s album Carol Grimes, with iconic cover of Carol with her young son. The set was recorded in Memphis with the Memphis Horns, including a young Michael Brecker and powered by the legendary electric bass player Duck Dunn.
Carol's back story is incredibly rich...
Read the full interview here.
Interview in Friars, Aylesbury Online, 2012
Carol Grimes is one of the music business' true survivors. A variety of styles over the years stretching back to the early 1970s Delivery (which also featured Aylesbury legend Lol Coxhill) and Uncle Dog and right through to 2012 where she still gigs. Carol played Friars in August 1976 with the London Boogie Band and as you will see has quite a story to her life.
Hello Carol and thank you for agreeing to chat to the Friars Aylesbury website. You may have seen we have some photographs of you on the site which was when you played Friars in 1976 supporting Curved Air as the Carol Grimes London Boogie Band.
I have a vague memory of it (laughs)
It was a long time ago! The London Boogie Band period. It's a great band name and reading up on that period you were getting great reviews and you were being compared to Janis Joplin.
I didn't name that band. I got a call from a guy called Stuart Lyons who was working for Nigel Thomas saying that a bunch of guys in various bands including Boz Burrell and Tim Hinkley (Jody Grind) had got together as the London Boogie Band and had cut some tracks...
Read the full interview here
All content Copyright © 2013 Carol Grimes.