The Hot Box #121

It happens to be Ella’s anniversary of her first concert in Ireland and also her birthday. Join Donald for 100% Ella!

As the title suggests, here are some big bands you've never heard of! The Lloyd Ryan Big Band? The Jazz Pacific Orchestra? Ring a bell? All on the 119th Hot Box!

The Hot Box #118

Your latest edition of The Hot Box with Donald Helme. Put the kettle on, sit back and relax with #117!

Keeping you all in suspense as to what happened Hot Box #115, heres episode #116!

John Pizzarelli, Bobby Short and Mose Allison. All will be revealed on The Hot Box #114!

Our delve into new releases for our first edition of 2024. Happy New Year!

Donald Helme brings you a festive Hot Box. Merry Christmas & A Happy New Year.

The latest edition of the ever popular "Hot Box".

The clarinet has been an endangered species for most of the last 50 years, and despite much admiration for modern-day exponents such as Anat Cohen, it remains on the outer fringes of jazz. Hot Box takes a look at clarinet from the heyday of Benny Goodman, Sidney Bechet and Jimmie Noone through to today’s most admired exponent, Anat Cohen. Some critics have suggested its decline is due to the difficulty of playing it: “It was invented by three people who never met each other” was the comment...

After the great reaction to Hot Box 108’s focus on big bands, we felt that a second dip into this big reservoir of music was advisable, if not inevitable. Some of the best ever herein!

Big Bands! A selection of recordings of big bands modern and not-so modern.

Stimulated by the upcoming release of John Donegan’s album Light Streams featuring his Irish Sextet, Hot Box 107 checks out some new releases, and a couple of returns to recent albums for a second look.

Hot on the heels of a little exploration of the role of the Hammond organ in jazz (HB104) a listener suggested we take a look at the role of another “minority” instrument in jazz music - the vibraphone. So we have. Starting at the beginning we hear from Lionel Hampton through to some modern-day masters like Warren Wolf and Stefan Harris. And we find Roger Beaujolais along the way. Who?

This edition of the Hot Box is comprised 9 pieces of new material, with all of it coming from USA and Canada.

In which we devote over an hour to the Hammond organ! In vogue during the 1960s and having star exponents like Jimmy Smith, and latterly Joey DeFrancesco, the Hammond B3 occupied a secure slot in instrumental jazz. Has it lost that? Hot Box this time is Organic!

Tony Bennett died on July 21st, aged 96, representing in a very real sense “the end of an era”. Across much of the history of crooning and singing jazz, Bennett succeeded in transferring a reputation amongst older fans of the Great American Songbook to an entirely new generation. He never lost his conviction that good music, good songs would eventually triumph. Hot Box 103 peeks into his enormous catalogue………

Some jazz journalists have been using phrases like “the end of an era” since the death of Wayne Shorter and Ahmad Jamal. In this Hot Box we pay tribute to a few of the jazz greats who have left us in recent years…….or stopped performing.

As the title suggests, this is a new record for the hot box. Five fantastic tracks, one hour show! Dollar Brand (Abdullah Ibrahim) kicking things off with 13 minutes of magic.

We made it! 100 episodes of The Hot Box. Thank you to all our listeners and subscribers for sticking with me. In this episode we feature two tracks from our good friend Linley Hamilton, with Gerry Buckley starting us off. The new Hot Box website is now online, http://www.hotboxjazz.com

This episode brings us one away from 100 epsiodes of The Hox Box. Included this week are some new releases and two tracks from the Canadian jazz pianist Oscar Peterson.

New Stuff! Its Donald's first show on JazzÉIRE!. This show features all new releases for this Hot Box www.jazzeireradio.com

After the great reaction to Hot Box 96, we decided to do a second edition devoted to the fantastic 42 volume series of solo piano recitals known as the Maybeck Series. Recorded over 6 years from 1990 to 1996, the concerts took place in the wood lined hall designed by the now iconic architect Bernard Maybeck, with just 50 seats in the audience and a perfectly tuned Yamaha grand piano.Long unavailable on LP or CD it is now available on Spotify, but here Donald takes us through more of the...