Biography

Chris Hodgkins has been the Director of Jazz Services, the national organisation funded by Arts Council England to provide services in information, touring, education, communications and publishing to the UK jazz community, for over 21 years.

He was raised in Cardiff, and in 1974 co-founded the Welsh Jazz Festival with Geoff Palser. He was instrumental, four years later, in establishing the Welsh Jazz Society with David Greensmith. As a professional trumpeter, Chris has toured the UK and Europe - also appearing at the Sacramento Jazz Festival in the States - and The Chris Hodgkins Band made a name for itself supporting the likes of Buddy Tate, Humphrey Lyttelton, Kathy Stobart, Bud Freeman and Wild Bill Davison. Chris relocated to London in the early-80s and, in a change of direction, began his award-winning administrative career. In 2002, he was presented with the prestigious Services to Jazz Award at the BBC Jazz Awards. In 2005, Jazz Services won the Best Website category in the first Parliamentary Jazz Awards; Chris was made a Fellow of The Chartered Institute of Marketing the same year.

Chris fronts two outfits: Chris Hodgkins Trio, featuring Alison Rayner on double bass and Max Brittain on guitar, and Chris Hodgkins Quartet, the same line-up with the addition of Diane McLoughlin on soprano/alto sax. In 2005, Chris Hodgkins Trio released Present Continuous; Future Continuous followed a year later. Chris Hodgkins Trio plays a mix of mainstream and swing, its repertoire consisting of little-known standards, bebop standards, tunes from the great American Song Book and original compositions.

Chris’ most ambitious project to date is the album Boswell’s London Journal, a suite of 15 tunes co-composed by Chris Hodgkins and Eddie Harvey (who also did the arrangements). James Boswell, best known as the biographer of Dr Samuel Johnson, kept a daily diary between the years 1762 and 1763; this account of a very different London to today, as seen through the eyes of a 22 year old Scot, provides the inspiration for the album.

Boswell’s London Journal includes a piece entitled London, evoking Boswell’s arrival at Highgate Hill and his first view of the capital city. The Meeting commemorates Boswell’s not entirely successful first encounter with Dr Johnson on 16 May 1763. Friendship flourished however, and High Exultation documents the evening of 25 June 1763 on which Boswell and Dr Johnson wine, dine and discuss such things as ghosts, poetry, fathers and sons, and going abroad; Boswell retiring home ‘in high exultation’. Greenwich Excursion was inspired by Boswell and Johnson’s boat trip down the Thames to Greenwich; Most Miserably Melancholy charts one of the author’s recurring bouts of depression. Boswell’s London Journal offers an emotionally charged landscape that amply illustrates the human condition, from the low and the vulgar to profound conversations with Samuel Johnson; the real-life incidents in the London Journal offered the composers a wealth of rich material for the album’s 15 original tunes.

Boswell’s London Journal, by Chris Hodgkins Quartet, is out now.

photo courtesy Mike Jackson

...talented trumpeter, Chris Hodgkins, who plays in the unfashionable classic style of Ruby Braff and the great Louis Armstrong... this is his best album yet... a tuneful tribute to Dr Johnson's biographer, craftily arranged and gracefully played
Jack Massarik on Boswell’s London Journal, Evening Standard Jazz CD of the Week

Chris uses his fine tone and time to hold interest with the lightly decorated melodies, and cuts loose confidently for his well shaped and executed solos
Jazz Journal

accomplished playing, astute and imaginative material
The Jazz Rag

This album is an unqualified triumph. A stylistic span of compositions from connoisseur standards to contemporary delights; neat, sweet originals and arrangements by all three participants; regular use of all the tonal opportunities including mutes; cosmetic details such as the use of four and eight-bar conversations between players alongside extended outings – all these clever devices and more keep the listener, well, listening. Chris’ trumpet playing is an intriguing but entirely convincing meld of stylistic influences in which you can regularly spot echoes of Miles, Sweets, Clark, Chet, Cootie, Roy Eldridge, Louis, Ruby and our very own Humphrey Lyttelton. Amid this stylistic quilt however, Chris is basically a fine trumpet-player. The result is an album worth detailed attention. A job exceedingly well done! I loved it!
Digby Fairweather on Present Continuous

In recent years Chris Hodgkins’ playing has achieved new heights. He can, and does, surprise any audience lucky enough to hear him with the kind of multi-faceted concept which can move anywhere from the angry heat of a Roy Eldridge to the mid-period delicacy of a harmon-muted Miles Davis. You can hear these moods and more on this CD, which, as with his first, features just three players. To ensure that an album with such minimal staffing maintains its interest, you need skills, inspiration and diversity; all of them present and more than correct here. Chris Hodgkins’ second solo album, done and dusted. And according to my scorecard, that’s two sets to love!
Digby Fairweather on Future Continuous

Click here to download a PDF of Chris Hodgkins' CV.

 

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