Welcome To The Club CD

Joe Stilgoe and the Entertainers, the new powerhouse jazz supergroup, have put together a record like no other a pure love letter to jazz clubs around the world, and the people who frequent them.Titans of the UK jazz scene, singer and pianist Joe Stilgoe and clarinettist Giacomo Smith have come together to form The Entertainers, which features members of Kansas Smittys House Band, Joes own band, and guest vocalists Emma Smith and Pete Horsfall.Each song on Welcome To The Club tells a different tale and presents a different character from jazz clubs the world over the music is about membership, acceptance, a shared love of something vital, quixotic rules and regulations, the minutiae of everynight life, and importantly, the world of entertainment.Joe explains Giacomo and I started writing this album during the first lockdown. His beautiful jazz club, Kansas Smittys, had been closed. All music venues had, but we werent to know then that this would be a permanent full stop for the place. We swapped stories about the people who came to the club, and to the clubs wed both played in around the world. We realised that the characters you might see in Ronnie Scott039s or Birdland in New York or Blue Note Tokyo are the same the roles always repeated even though the cast changes.