KentFolk News May 2006

IMPORTANT :
please see the item in Venues => Bottleneck Blues on a planning application that may badly affect an important blues venue. Your support is needed.

Good venues are rare and have to be well supported and preserved.
We have already lost the Broadstairs Cultural Centre recently;
For a photo-report from there see : www.kentfolk.com/photos/2005/2005-04-10_Prague-Castle-Orchestra_BCC

But the above news of a planning application that affects the The Soul Café (Zaffa) in Week Street, Maidstone, ME14 1RH is very bad news. John puts on world class acts there, people like myself who appreciate the quality of this music travel from all over Kent and beyond to attend. We are fortunate in Kent to have such music - the "South East" region extends up to Milton Keynes but it is Kent that has this jewel in the Blues crown.

I have been plugging the virtues of The Yew Tree Inn, Barfrestone, Nr. Dover. CT15 7JH for a while, but I will do so unashamedly again - regular music every Thursday ! The young new publicans Heather and Charlie run a good house, with a wide range of excellent beers.

And I will also put in another plug for the re-vamped Orange Street Music Club, 15 Orange Street, Canterbury, CT1 2JA; www.orangestreetmusic.com/
No Mans Land were playing there this evening (Friday 26th) - "Ethnic music with a middle Eastern and Greek twist" - Alexi was in fine form on a range of plucked and bowed instruments, and the Cretian dancing made it a special event. (I would love to see some Cretian dance-workshops set up, to complement the local Cajun, Salsa, and Breton ones.) A good spot from international performer Brendam Power, on the harmonica.
A good crowd there, many friends, made an enjoyable evening.

So once again, do support good venues, good music.

Keith Summers Festival :
KentFolk paid its second visit to the new annual Keith Summers Festival, organised by Peta Webb and Ken Hall of the Musical Traditions Club, at the King & Queen, 1 Foley St., London W1W 6DL.
I have uploaded a Gig Report with Photos and I am hoping I may get permission to add down-loadable MP3 Music from this event.
www.kentfolk.com/gig_reports/2006/2006-05-21_Keith_Summers_Festival_King+Queen_London.

New multi-level directories of News :
I hope that these will make it easier to find the news items that interest you personally. Do look back through the last few months news, if you have the time - much is now history, but a number of items are still of interest.

Do keep sending me news and items for the calendar - now that I have built this new format news section I will hopefully be able to go back to chasing gigs from new bands for the calendar.

The news items are titled automatically from the email subject line, so it would help if you can make this informative - and if you intend to send items regularly in one month, a date in the subject line in iso format is a help : i.e. 2006-04-20.

Please send news items as plain text or html (most emailers can be set to produce either of these). MS Word .doc pages are quite a bit of work to convert for the web.
Please do not embed graphics or attachments in your email, they are a lot of work to process, to display on the web, and usually take up a lot of web space unless I re-size them. I can now display .pdf files, but will only do so for high-profile events - they are usually very large, and also suffer from the disadvantage that they are not searchable, so really they are far from ideal. Thus by preference any textual info should be as plain text or html, so it is searchable, not in graphical format.
If you want to include graphics, posters, flyers etc., find somewhere on the web that you can upload them to, and then just put a pointer to this location in the email. This way people have a choice as to whether to download them or not. To read more on how to do this, please see : Having images, photos, posters and flyers in emails for the web in the section :
Web info => KentFolk How-Tos
where there are also general items on how to send items for the KentFolk News pages and also Event information for the KentFolk Calendars.
cheers, Beau.