Temperance Live, Leamington Spa - Dom Pipkin (piano jazz)

Temperance Live celebrated the end of Mardi Gras festival with an unbelievably arresting display of keyboard skills and vocals by Dom Pipkin.  Traditionally, this New Orleans festival which began on Twelfth Night falls over the weekend of the Super Bowl. Some in the audience had made plans for a long night, planning to adjourn to another venue in Bath Street for that event. Their evening began with what many associate with the deep south -  the remarkable piano jazz of the likes of Professor Longhair, Allen Toussaint, James Booker, Jelly Roll Morton, John Cleary and King Biscuit together with the song writing skills of Percy Mayfied and Willie Dixon.  Add to that list the skills of Dom Pipkin!  His, yet to be recorded composition, “Everybody Gets the Blues” was the standout show-stopper in the midst of eighteen songs and remarkable keyboard displays.

Without fuss, without lengthy introductions, Dom arrived at the Roland electric piano, launching into James Booker compositions before turning his attention to one of his own , “I Don’t Want to go Back to New Orleans” which he admits is really a call to return soon!!   Willie Dixon’s, “Red Rooster” was given one of  Dom’s emotionally involving interpretations of this blues standard, complete with rooster crowing.

Playing in the “saddest of all keys”,  D minor - something Bach did, too -Dom launched into the revered R&B songwriter, Perry Mayfield’s “Louisiana”, before acknowledging his admiration for James Booker’s  clever octave tremolos, single melody line tricks and remarkable rolls in “Life”, one of Allen Toussaint’s 1976 compositions.

Paying tribute to blues geniuses, Professor Longhair and Jelly Roll Morton, Dom composed “Smile and Get on Down” with the required habanera rhythm, before returning to James Booker’s “One Hell of a Nerve”, during which he kept the left hand bass going whilst he downed some more beer!  Plaintive, melodic songs, “Careless Love” and his own “Love Affair With New Orleans” heralded the end of the evening, but not before Dom responded to an audience invitation to play “St James Infirmary Blues”.  A super night with Dom, rewarded with a standing ovation, and then the Super Bowl!