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BiTS: Tell me something about the tune which you’ve taken from Duke Ellington. I’m a great
Duke Ellington fan and the arrangement of that, I could actually hear Barney Bigard playing.

GM: Had you ever heard that tune before?

BiTS: I have heard it before, yes.

GM: You had? Okay. Well, that was another one where I put it on the shelf to say not many people
have heard this. The bass clarinettist on that was a big Duke Ellington fan and he had never heard
it. I don’t know of other people’s arrangements of it, and I also knew that I could do it in a way –
you would never do it the way Duke Ellington did it because he already did it [chuckles]. You’re
not going to beat him, so
I did it more like Fred
Astaire walks into a club
in Paris in 1936 and sees
a lovely young lady and
asks her to dance and a

musette band is playing
‘Lady Of The Lavender
Mist’, and that’s how I
envisioned it. That’s how
I did it.

BiTS: I gather you
actually saw Ellington
and his orchestra play
live?

GM: Yup, I did and Duke
saw us play live, which
was quite a thrill that he would come to our gig. Yeah, man, I’m the luckiest guy you ever talked
to [laughs].

BiTS: How long did the whole of this project take, Geoff? From first indication that you’d got
sufficient tunes or maybe the start of sufficient tunes to put together an album. How long did the
whole thing take? It must have been ages.

GM: Ten years.

BiTS: Really? As long as that?

GM: Yes. I went over to Amsterdam two or three times a year. Two or three times a year, I would
go to Amsterdam and rehearse and then eventually record. Then rehearse, record, rehearse,
record and I would write in between, and I would travel and play music. Play gigs myself and
keep the pocketbook full and go over to Amsterdam and keep working on it and then COVID
came, and it was a good time to stop [laughing]. I had some other ideas, and I went well, you’re

not going to get them done, man. Let’s wrap this thing up so I spent time writing the album notes,
which I enjoyed doing. What have you got there, 80 pages or something?

BiTS: There was none of the current trend to do things and put them together electronically,
you didn’t record stuff on one side of the Atlantic and have it added to the other side or vice
versa?

GM: No, no.