Hello all!
A belated Happy New Year to you all, and thanks for subscribing to our newsletters. We love sharing our latest events with you and hope that you can come along to our shows and encourage your family and friends to join us.
We wanted to take a few moments to reflect on 2024 – our first full year as The Front Row Big Band. It was a very busy time with many highlights.
Our Highlights
One of the highlights was when we were contacted by The National WW2 Museum of New Orleans and were delighted to be booked to take part in their 80th D-Day Anniversary tour. There were a few veterans and children of veterans travelling with their extended families and it was interesting to hear the reasons for their trips. One man asked us to play Kalamazoo, as his mother had met his father in Suffolk when he’d served in The USAF, and she had moved back to the USA with him. Kalamazoo had been his mother’s favourite song. It does make you realise how evocative music is to so many people. It was a privilege to be there and play the wonderful wartime big band classics.
We worked with the Norfolk legend Olly Day at Cromer Pavilion in April with great success and hope to be back there in the Spring of 2026.
Our “Front Row at The Movies” show premiered at the Pavilion Theatre Gorleston in October and marked the debut of our superb singers, Crystal Cowban and Laura White, who will be working with us regularly in 2025.
We played four “Jazz At The Hall” gigs in The Eaton Suite at Dunston Hall. It’s a more intimate setting for the band with only a 65-seat capacity. In our April gig, there was an acoustic set, all instrumentals and not a microphone in sight!
The Most Wonderful Time of the Year!
Finally in 2024, came our last concert of the year, “A Swingin’ Christmas”, in the much larger Sunningdale Suite at Dunston Hall. It was a great success with another packed room and an audience who left very much in the Christmas mood.
We wanted, as a band, to be playing with world-class performers so when our bandleader, Martin, met the brilliant trumpet player Mike Lovatt whilst depping on a gig with The Syd Lawrence Orchestra, he asked Mike if he’d like to come down to Gorleston to be our first guest star. Luckily for us, he agreed. So was born “From Lovatt With Love” which played to a packed and enthusiastic audience at Gorleston Pavilion Theatre in February. Mike and the band had a fabulous time.
So, with success under our belt, we asked the superb vocalist Matt Ford to be our special guest in 2025 in our “Perfectly Frank” show at The Pavilion Theatre Gorleston on Sunday 16th February 2025 at 2.30 pm. Matt Ford is considered to be the UK’s finest Big Band singer and will bring his inimitable interpretation of twenty of Sinatra’s finest arrangements from the pens of Billy May, Nelson Riddle, Quincy Jones and more. The Front Row Big Band is delighted to be working with Matt and will be playing instrumental numbers from Tommy Dorsey, Harry James, Count Basie and Quincy Jones, all bandleaders that Sinatra worked with over the years.
“Perfectly Frank” tickets are selling very well, so don’t delay, book today and, to be Perfectly Frank, you’ll guarantee yourselves a memorable afternoon of timeless top-drawer entertainment.
The Big Band sound is Alive & Swinging with The Front Row Big Band
PS – We have several very exciting projects coming up later this year. More news very soon……