Mumbles Mostly Jazz and Blues Festival

The Brian Breeze Rhythm and Blues Band with Taff Williams

Two of Wales’s finest rock and blues guitarists join forces for a special one-off performance!

Where: Festival Pavilion
When: Monday 4th May
Time: support band Cubanita starts at 8pm, followed by two sets from Brian Breeze and Taff Williams; concert ends at 11pm

Monday night means party night at the Admiral Mumbles Mostly Jazz and Blues Festival, and 2009 promises to be a total blinder. This year one of the finest rock and blues guitarists from the Swansea area will be on stage with another of the finest rock and blues guitarists from the Swansea area…

Brian Breeze

Brian Breeze received his first guitar for his 13th birthday and started playing gigs in South Wales in 1962. A seminal moment was when, at 14 years of age, his band supported Johnny Kidd and The Pirates at the Ritz Ballroom in Llanelli; this was when he first heard the great rhythm & blues guitarist Mick Green, who inspired the young Brian to start playing blues as well as rock.

Since then he has played in many bands in many European countries. He achieved minor chart success with The Untamed in the mid-1960s, then replaced Jim Mullen when he joined Cream lyricist Pete Brown. He has toured with Maggie Bell, Deke Leonard, Lyndsey Muir and many others. He began to write for television in the early 1980s and has since gone on to write the music for films, documentaries and many other TV programmes, while also working as a musical director and session player over recent decades.

Brian still performs live as a guitarist and vocalist, working with various different combinations of musicians, playing a mixture of jazz, blues and R&B.

Ray ‘Taff’ Williams

With a pro career stretching back some 40 years, Ray ‘Taff’ Williams has met all the greats, from Hendrix to Freddie King, Clapton to the odd Beatle. In the 1960s he was a member of Eyes of Blue, who won the annual Melody Maker competition at the London Palladium, along with a Decca contract. “Stevie Winwood was one of the judges, along with Lulu and Billy J Kramer,” Taff recalls. “There was a party later back at the Cromwellian Club. I remember Eric Clapton telling us about forming Cream because we’d worked with Jack and Ginger when they played for The Graham Bond Organisation, and we knew Pete Brown.” The stuff of legend, indeed…