Louise Gibbs

For this academic year my Route 66 is the M62 and East of Hull and West of Chester will pinpoint the moon and sun. And if there’s no Detour Ahead I’ll rest midway in Leeds. I’m thrilled to be teaching jazz, popular and even some classical voice students, performance, improvisation classes and a choir at the Universities of Chester, Hull and Leeds this year. All that youthful talent and enthusiasm (and travel) is keeping me busy. It sounds such a cliche but it’s true that your students teach you so much. As much as I’m passing on what I know …

Scotland the Brave! Louise Gibbs and the Septet will perform Seven Deadly Sings and a set of Thelonious Monk and Monk-inspired tunes in Edinburgh and Glasgow in November. The Septet: Krzysztof Urbanski (alto/baritone sax), Riley Stone-Lonergan (tenor sax/clarinet), Kim Macari (trumpet/flugel), Chris Greive (trombone), Sam Leak (piano), Simon Read (double bass), & Katie Patterson (drums). …

Check out http://youtu.be/mzk7iZdjWCM for video of Louise Gibbs and The Septet’s premiere performance of Envy-Seven Deadly Sings. The video was made by film maker Ken Yates. …

CD Review from Jazzwise, Issue 185, May 2014

**** (4 stars)

Hot on the heels of Soweto Kinch’s The Legend of Mike Smith, comes another treatment of the Seven Deadly sins, this one a 50-minute song suite for voice and septet by vocalist, composer and educator Louise Gibbs. Both in its conception and execution, 7 Deadly Sings (Gibbs’s fifth recording for 33Jazz) is an unqualified triumph. Each movement is inspired by the distinctive ‘voice’ of one of the instrumentalists, with the voice, naturally enough, featured first in a brief ‘Prologue’. Emerging out of an extended cymbal roll, we first hear …

The CheerSing workshops (part of the Yorkshire Festival 2014 and the Tour de France) are proving to be lots of creative fun – with an enthusiastic response from participants. We’re winning over keen singers and folk reluctant to raise their voices in public – let along sing. Making up and chanting slogans about life and bicycles is the way to go it seems. So is finding new ways of making a bigger, brighter more efficient vocal sound. Age is no barrier, either. So far participants have ranged from 9 months (the babe lay on the floor clapping along) to, as …

Review for: Seven Deadly Sings CD from London Jazz News (February 2014)

“Vocalist and composer, Louise Gibbs, has turned out an ambitious and challenging fifty minute “song suite for jazz singer and septet” that succeeds on many counts. The 7 Deadly Sings accords a sin for every instrumentalist in the septet to express themselves on. (My favourite is the bassist being Sloth –  but that’s not very nice, or fair, now is it?).

The distinctive cast of players that Ms Gibbs has assembled here acquit themselves to the task at hand exquisitely. Tim Whitehead’s brooding and moody tenor sax …