THE BAND
Our story.
Hi, I’m Chris - Chief Biscuit. That’s me in the hat.
01 — INTRO
It Was Obvious
The Hot Jazz Biscuits started fairly simply.
A load of us met while studying music at university, playing together, hanging out and generally having a great time.
We played in all sorts of bands, but jazz was the thing that brought us all together. So when uni finished, what was I going to do?
Get my mates together and keep playing jazz.
Choosing the musicians was the easy bit. My mates happened to be ridiculously good players.
There were basically two rules from the start: play music we actually enjoy playing, and no knobheads.
Nearly twenty years later, both rules are still doing a pretty good job.
02 — VERSE ONE
Then It Got Funky
At first, we were a jazz band.
We played weddings, bars, dinners and events, travelling around with trumpets, saxophones, upright basses and a frankly unreasonable number of jazz standards.
Then we landed a regular dinner-dance night at a casino in Manchester.
They wanted Soul and Motown.
Luckily, we absolutely love Soul and Motown.
What started as another gig quickly became a huge part of what we did. The band got bigger, the horn arrangements got bigger, and before long we were spending as much time playing Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin and The Temptations as we were playing jazz.
That changed everything.
03 - CHORUS ONE
Good Musicians. Good Tunes.
Weddings started coming thick and fast.
And the formula was actually pretty simple: really good musicians, playing really good tunes, properly.
Everything played live, with a set that kept growing as the band did.
We wanted the arrangements to sound good, the band to enjoy playing them and the dancefloor to feel like something was actually happening.
It worked.
The Biscuits became a proper party band.
04 - BRIDGE
A bigger Biscuit Tin.
As the band grew, so did the group of musicians around it: people who knew the tunes, knew each other and enjoyed playing together.
That gave us more ways to build the right band for each gig. The lineup could change while the music, the relationships and the approach stayed familiar.
05 - VERSE TWO
The Music We Grew Up With
Having my brother in the band created another fairly useful accident.
Rich sings.
But he also raps.
Which meant that alongside the Soul, Funk and Motown, we suddenly had somebody perfectly capable of standing at the front of a wedding band doing tunes most wedding bands wouldn't go anywhere near.
So the music we grew up with started creeping in.
Hip-hop. 90s garage. Dance tunes. Pop songs we actually liked.
The set became less about what a function band was supposed to play and more about what we'd genuinely want to hear if we were on the dancefloor ourselves.
And it has kept evolving ever since.
06 - CHORUS TWO
The Biscuit Tin.
These days, the Hot Jazz Biscuits are a regular team of musicians who have been playing together for years. Different voices and musical strengths give us room to build a lineup around the music you want and the people available for your date.
The same wider team covers ceremony piano, drinks-reception jazz and the evening party. Good musicians, playing together and having a bloody good time.
07 - OUTRO
Still Not Finished
And we're nowhere near done.
We still love weddings and parties, but we're doing more and more of our own live music too.
Funky Good Times in Shrewsbury gives us somewhere to take the big Soul and Funk band out and really let it off the lead.
Our regular jazz gigs give us somewhere to go back to where all of this started.
And there are always more ideas kicking around the Biscuit Tin.
New shows. New line-ups. New music.
The band has changed a lot since a few mates started playing jazz together at university.
Thankfully, the important bits haven't.
Good music.
Good musicians.
No knobheads.
See you at the next one.
