Georgia Mancio and Alan Broadbent headline at Jazz Hastings

Two major jazz musicians, one relatively new and one incredibly well established, will be performing at the next Jazz Hastings session. Georgia Mancio and Alan Broadbent will be performing songs from their new, as yet unreleased, album. Julian Norridge reports.

Multi award-winning vocalist, lyricist and producer Georgia Mancio is one of Europe’s most respected, adventurous and multi-faceted new artists. Her multi-lingual music references classic jazz and Latin alongside her own compositions. In 2021 she won Best Vocalist at the Parliamentary Jazz Awards and was nominated in the same category for the Jazz FM Awards.

As a producer, Georgia curated the now iconic Revoice! Festival in association with the Pizza Express Jazz Club, which featured among many others the first UK appearance of the great Gregory Porter. She went on to produce Hang, which included some of the biggest names in British jazz.

For the last few years, she has worked closely with the Grammy-award winning pianist and composer Alan Broadbent. Originally from New Zealand, Alan won a scholarship to the Berklee College of Music in Boston in 1966. Three years later, aged 22, he was asked to join the Woody Herman band as pianist and arranger.

He subsequently moved to Los Angeles, where he worked with such legends as Nelson Riddle, Sarah Vaughan. Mel Tormé, Johnny Mathis and Barbra Streisand. In the early ‘90s, he was asked to join Natalie Cole as her pianist and subsequently conductor. He wrote an orchestral arrangement for her second video with her dad, When I Fall In Love, which won him his first Grammy Award for “best orchestral arrangement accompanying a vocal”.

His first album with Georgia Mancio, Songbook, was released in 2017. It was launched at a sold-out headline show at Ronnie Scott’s (“…unequivocally, one of the gigs of the year”: Jazzwise) with subsequent performances across Europe and the US, including Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York.

Their second album together, Quiet is the Star, was released in 2021 to widespread critical acclaim. It was nominated for several best album awards. They have also produced two books featuring The Songs of Alan Broadbent and Georgia Mancio.

For this session, they will be playing songs from their new album, A Story Left Untold, which is due for release on 1 May. This will be a very stylish evening.

Georgia Mancio and Alan Broadbent Quartet Jazz Hastings, Tuesday 29 April, East Hastings Sea Angling Association (on the Stade behind the lifeboat station). Doors open 7.45pm for 8.30 start, tickets £15 on the door, £3 for under 18s.

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