HE MAY BE INTO his fourth decade as a professional musician, but it hasn't stopped Georgie Fame from maintaining a punishing schedule of international concert and recording commitments.
Fame became a pop star in the 1960s, but it was his love of jazz that would take him down other roads and into associations with Van Morrison and Bill Wyman. And the singer-pianist is showing no signs of slowing down.
'I'm trying to ease off this year,' he says, unconvincingly, 'but I'm in a position where I only work with friends, and fortunately I've made so many over the world that my diary's always full.'
It's also fortunate that he enjoys travelling. His current touring schedule takes him to New Zealand and Australia before he returns to Hong Kong this weekend to hook up with the musicians he worked with in the 90s when he played several residencies at the Jazz Club - guitarist Eugene Pao, bassist Paul Candelaria and drummer Anthony Fernandes.
'I'm doing a few big-band concerts in New Zealand with Roger Fox's Big Band, I'm also working with a quartet with a great New Zealand tenor player, Brian Smith, who I've known since the 60s when he lived in Britain and worked with Maynard Ferguson's Big Band. I'll be delighted to be reunited with Eugene and Paul and Anthony. I think Dave Packer has disappeared somewhere,' he says.
Packer, a well-known name in Hong Kong, now lives in France and his harmonica playing will be missed, but there will be no shortage of friendly faces in the audience - including a few expatriate Brits of a certain age who remember seeing Fame and his backing group, the Blue Flames, at London's Flamingo Club in 1962.
