Joe Stilgoe presents his new project, 'The Entertainers' featuring Giacomo Smith. The project is a love letter to the jazz club and the people who can’t live without it. Featuring an exciting new band of some of the great young UK jazz talent.

In March 2020, Joe Stilgoe and Giacomo Smith, both recent nominees in the 2021 Parliamentary Jazz Awards, were about to head into the studio to record an album. Featuring a whole new collection of songs written together in 2019, the music was destined to showcase two of the country’s finest creative talents, and with a headline Mainstage show booked at Love Supreme to launch the project, 2020 was going to be the year of The Entertainers. As we know, things didn’t turn out quite the way they were planned, but the story remains and the music is ever more prescient after the year we’ve all had. These songs are about the world of jazz clubs, the audiences who come and go, the characters who can be found at the bars of any club in the world, from Ronnie Scotts to The Blue Note Tokyo to The Basement in Sydney. Each song tells a different tale and presents a different character - they’re about membership, acceptance, a shared love of something vital, quixotic rules and regulations, the minutiae of everynight life, and importantly, the world of entertainment. The people are the same everywhere you go, and they haven’t changed. The guy in the hat, the woman with the flowers, the one who can’t stop shouting at the drummer, the illicit lovers, the nervous fan, the faded star, the record executive who promises the world…