Well not really! Not personally. Tierney Sutton didn’t come round our house to sing just for Erica and me.

Wednesday of last week Erica and I celebrated our 37th wedding anniversary. I say “celebrated”, but Wednesday was a fairly busy day. An Equality and Diversity Forum meeting all morning, lunch with Brian Pearce, Director of the Inter Faith Network for the UK, and participating in a Royal Commonwealth Society inter-faith dialogue session at the Commonwealth Club kept me pretty busy.

I went straight from the Commonwealth Club to the basement of Pizza on the Park to listen to the Tierney Sutton Band.

Tierney Sutton is a wonderful jazz singer who happens to be a Baha’i. Or is she a Baha’i who happens to be a wonderful jazz singer? Whichever way, her voice and her band are worth some sacrifice to hear live. Rob Weinberg was kind enough to book a table for a number of friends at Pizza on the Park, where they have weekly live jazz.

In addition to Rob, Erica and me, Arman Danesh was there. So were Sean and Tebby Hinton, who are about to move to China with their children, Sarah and Ollie Perceval (Sarah’s the wonderful storyteller and teacher who conducted last weekend’s storytelling course, and Kerry Ann Smith.

The basement was well filled for the gig. We ate our pizzas and waited for the lights to go down and the band to come onto the small performance area.

Sutton sings a mixture of standards from the American song book, some happy, quite a lot are sad. The thrill comes from the arrangements (which the band does consultatively) - I had actually had to listen quite hard sometimes to detect the melodies on which the arrangements were based - Sutton’s voice - spot on pitch and she’s a great exponent of scat singing - and the band’s ensemble (it’s “togetherness”). Tierney told us the band had been together 15 years. They listen; they listen hard to each other; and they are, each of them, great musicians. Somebody in our party referred to them as “tight”. This was not a reference to a state of inebriation - they were drinking bottled water on stage - but to the way they all slotted their jigsaw of parts together to make a glorious whole.

Tierney said nothing about her faith during the gig, but she did say that the band works collectively on the arrangements - an oblique reference to the Baha’i practice of consultation.

I love jazz. I listen to quite a lot of recorded music. But there’s nothing to beat the real thing, live in front of an audience. It’s a great way to celebrate 37 years of marriage - particularly at a time when marriage is increasingly out of fashion or seen as a “lifestyle choice” rather than as a lifetime commitment.

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