Clare Teal: A steady diet of stress, but the show still goes on

I am thrilled to report there is significantly less of me this week than there was last week, which also means there are only 14 days of boring dieting left before my televised Proms concert at the Royal Albert Hall with John Wilson and his orchestra.

Eating less food and exercising like a thing possessed is definitely the key to looser jeans, but I’m sure stress and worry can help too, and there was certainly plenty of that on Thursday afternoon when our pianist rang to say he’d come down with stomach flu. We were due to play The Brecon Festival the next day. Brecon is a huge festival on the jazz calendar. Only two pianists have covered our current show on the rare occasion Grant has been unavailable and neither of them were around.

Suddenly Muddy had one of her inspirational moments and rang Pee Wee Ellis for Jason Rebello’s number. Jason is one of the most talented pianists this country has ever produced and, when not working on his own stuff, can be found playing with the likes of Sting and currently Jeff Beck. He also happens to live just down the road. Amazingly he was free and agreed to step in. With hardly any time to look over the charts and even less to actually rehearse any of them due to getting stuck in terrible Friday traffic, he gallantly went on stage where he played his socks off, and we had a fantastic concert.

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Drummer Benny had flown in from Edinburgh and had another Brecon gig starting immediately after ours. He asked Arthur (our festival helper) the quickest way to get to The Drill Hall, “It’s about 25 minutes away – by car.” The horror that spread across Benny’s ashen face was a picture. It turned out someone had given him the office address instead of the venue address.

Two days later I had a brilliant time at the Canary Wharf jazz festival singing with the newly-formed Jay Phelps Big Band, a group full of sparkle and promise.

We play together tonight at The Snape Maltings as part of the legendary Snape Proms, first established as the Aldeburgh Festival in 1948 by Benjamin Britten who was much inspired by the vast skies and moody seas of the Suffolk coast as, I have to say, are we!