About Gumbo Jukebox

A hotpot podcast of blues, jazz & more

People seem to be doing mixes instead of shows nowadays. It’s like we’ve reverted back to ’80s, recording the chart show on a Sunday off the radio. Chis & Jesse dig through their personal collections and pull out a mix of different tracks and try to give a little snippet of interesting blurb about either the track or the artist. It’s nice to know what you’re listening to before you have to trawl through the track listing after the show. What we have here is a hotpot of music that’ll brighten the day for a few hours that’s for sure.

Jesse

Jesse hails from Chatham in Kent where his love for music was formed mainly through his dads record collection. “As a kid” he says “we only had a radio and record player in the house, so I would listen to my dads collection of Rock and Psyche as we didn’t have a TV”.

Growing up in the 80s, the emerging hip hop scene had a massive effect on Jesse “I started collecting properly at the age of 8 with my first Lp which I bought from WHSmiths. The record was BDP’s By All Means Necessary and from there I got the bug. It was always my main aim to beat my fathers record collection which I’m proud to say I have completely superseded.

Jesse moved out of Kent in the late 90s and headed to Nottingham where he got involved with the vibrant music scene happening there. “I was initially an MC for a couple of local groups but was always a fan and collector of music. Around 2012 I started a night called Kold Chillin at The Old Angel, but after 6 years I looked to something different and that’s where the Rhythm & Blues night Klubfoot was born. I had always collected blues records from delta blues through to jump blues and Doo-Wop but never had an outlet so a chance meeting with the then owner of The Golden Fleece gave me the opportunity to start the night on a bi-monthly basis”.

From there Jesse gained slots at Nottingham’s premier jazz club Peggy’s Skylight and also a regular seasonal night at the The Jamcafe which he now call’s home.

Chis

Chis was ‘born and bred’ in the town of Nottingham, as they say. Growing up with a dad who was always away working, he notes “It was my mum who played music round the house when I grew up. She had a stack of vinyl in the corner of the lounge which she would play to us, Every thing from Oscar Peterson to Neil Diamond to Queen or Quo”.

He started collecting from a very early age. When he was 5 years old his neighbour gave him his first 7”, Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round The Old Oak Tree and he became fascinated by records from that point onwards. “Growing up in Notts there was a good few record shops around so I ended up spending all my school dinner money on vinyl and just raided the fridge when I got home. I’m not sure thats ever changed to be honest, apart form the school dinner money that is.”

After doing a few music courses in his early days Chis ended up playing in a couple of bands who had some minor success but not enough to drag him away from the addiction of vinyl and searching for new music. “The older I got the more I realised how much music was out there that I’d never heard. It wasn’t just the dig, it was the journey to the shops, the meeting of the shop owners and then the sitting down and listen intensely to the record and reading all the liner notes and then going out and researching the artist to see where that would lead me to next”.

His collection has never stopped growing he say’s “When the CD came out all my mates sold all their records or stuck them under the bed and shifted over to CD’s, but I just kept buying more and more vinyl. Prices got cheaper so my collection got larger and in the end a lot of people ended up giving me their collections as they saw it as a bind to carry it all round. If it wasn’t for that love of vinyl I’m not sure I would be doing this today to be honest.”

Gumbo Jukebox

“I got bored of DJing pubs, clubs and my mates weddings where people would only want to hear the same old tunes” says Chis. “I was listening to a lot of great Blues and Jazz and knew that people wouldn’t care for that on a Saturday night in a pub, club scenario. You know, you’re not gonna play Rev. Gary Davis to a bunch of people who wanna dance their arse’s off, no matter how good the tune was.”

Looking for an outlet to play the records Chis was digging out he decided to start a podcast where he could play all the slow blues tunes and the out there jazz records he gathered along the way. “I had a record by Brother Jack McDuff called It Ain’t Necessarily So and thought it was amazing but had no format to play it out to people. So I approached Jesse who had been a mate for years and new he had an extensive collection and asked if he wanted to start a podcast where we played these records we had.”

Jesse jumped at the chance and between them they formed Gumbo Jukebox. Called that because all the stuff they wanted to play was from all over the world and was spread along a blues and jazz line. “We called it A Hotpot Of Different Genres” says Chis, “to make sure people didn’t think it was a cooking podcast or summit we added the word Jukebox to it.”

It’s been a year now for the lads and here’s hoping it last a long time longer cause it seems they’ve got a lot to play.