The Lamours at Birmingham International Jazz Festival at UC Berkeley Botanical Gardens

In the balmy summer evenings guaranteed for Birmingham in July, there are few more attractive settings for an open-air concert than the elegant Botanical Gardens. With the bandstand at the bottom of a leafy glade surrounded by picnickers and other concert-goers, the Gardens offer a quintessentially English experience. This year the Botanical Gardens concerts feature two acts from opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of both experience and style, but both guaranteed entertainers. On Friday 12th the Lamours, featuring the fabulously talented Lola Lamour, are youthful, energetic and elegant, presenting the music of seven decades with such panache that they have built a huge reputation in only one year...

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In the balmy summer evenings guaranteed for Birmingham in July, there are few more attractive settings for an open-air concert than the elegant Botanical Gardens. With the bandstand at the bottom of a leafy glade surrounded by picnickers and other concert-goers, the Gardens offer a quintessentially English experience. This year the Botanical Gardens concerts feature two acts from opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of both experience and style, but both guaranteed entertainers. On Friday 12th the Lamours, featuring the fabulously talented Lola Lamour, are youthful, energetic and elegant, presenting the music of seven decades with such panache that they have built a huge reputation in only one year. On the last night of the Birmingham International Jazz & Blues Festival it’s the turn of the reliably crazy Bob Kerr and the Whoopee Band, probably one of the last representatives of a great British tradition that stretches back through the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band (where Bob cut his teeth) to the likes of Sid Millward and Freddie Mirfield whose band matched lunacy with the musicianship of the young Johnny Dankworth! According to the Birmingham Mail, the Whoopee Band is ‘an extraordinary and gloriously idiosyncratic phenomenon.’

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