Artist: Chris Hodgkins

Date of Release: 01/01/2009

Catalogue no: BELLCD 513

Label: BellCDs

Price: £10

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Track Listing

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.

Reviews

01/01/2009 Jack Massarik

...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