About Us

Woburn Jazz, previously known as 'The Open Band', is a band of 20 core members, playing an extensive and exciting repatoire of Big Band music, ranging from classic Swing, Mainstream Jazz, Bossa Novas & Latin, Blues, Funk to Contemporary tunes.

The band was established in 1994 and started by Jonathan Hyams & Charles Davies. In 1995 it was under the directorship of Cathi Smith until 2003. The baton was then passed to John Gates until he recently retired to 'just play'. He is still a member of the band and passed the musical directorship on to our then lead Alto player Paul Taverner. We enjoyed a successful year with Paul as our MD, until he had to move on due to other commitments.

We are now under the joint musical directorship of Andrea Rowlands & Christalle Aldridge.

The band meets every Thursday for rehearsals at Woburn Village Hall, and it not only practices music for performances, but also strives to push the boundaries of all the players, to increase their musical skills. This is accomplished through workshops, sectional training and inviting professional musicians to assist us.

In 2016 the band entered the Milton Keynes Festival Of Drama, Art & Music. We were very pleased to win the coverted title of Best Large Ensemble section, and the competition was tough!

We entered the competition again in 2023 and were delighted to win the title of Best Large Ensemble for a second time.

As well as playing at private or festival concerts we have been proud to support many local charity events and in recent years have played for The Woburn Festival, OXFAM's OxJam, Ian Botham's Walk for Leukemia at M&S in Milton Keynes; and in 2017 we played a joint charity event with Leighton & Linslade Concert Band raising money for Milton Keynes Hospital. We raised £4000 between us to enable them to purchase an incubator cot transporter for neonatal babies.