Artists Pete Long, clarinet/saxophone
Adrian ‘Ir-Russu’ Brincat, trumpet
Juergen Valletta, piano
Anthony Saliba, double bass
Alex Debono, drums Synopsis
The music director and saxophone and clarinet player at Ronnie Scott's brings his memories of Malta to the very island he loved as a child. He will be joined by brilliant Maltese musicians for a unique night Jazz with Timpana – an evening not easily forgotten!
Programme
Postcards from Malta (memories from Pete...)
Dragonara Lido
A balmy bossa nova, shimmering with sunshine and the lazy pleasures of a long Maltese afternoon by the water.
Chocolate Mule
A rather less tranquil family memory. An angry minor-key swing accompanies my aunts battling over that most precious of imported commodities: a case of Dairy Milk brought from London.
Timpana
My first encounter with one of Malta’s great culinary institutions came courtesy of my Aunt Ġuża. Hers was magnificent, formidable stuff — about as chewable as the walls of Valletta. I finished my plate, though.
Qui Si Sana
Sliema, 1978: disco was everywhere. This is my musical postcard from Qui-Si-Sana — an exuberant slice of late-70s funk, viewed through the eyes (and ears) of a boy on holiday.
The Walls of Mdina
A portrait of Malta’s Silent City and its extraordinary fortifications: ancient, imposing and saturated with centuries of history. The music attempts to capture both their grandeur and their stillness.
The Old Armchair
The armchair in my Aunty Vicky’s Sliema flat was where I sat, morning, noon and night, listening obsessively to her Glenn Miller album. Somewhere in that chair, during those Maltese holidays, I began to realise that music wasn’t merely something I loved: it was what I wanted to spend my life doing.
Red, Green, Yellow, Blue!
Before standardisation — and long before Arriva — Valletta’s bus terminus was a glorious circus of brightly coloured buses converging on the city from every corner of the island. Four interlocking musical themes collide, weave and jostle for position in an affectionate recreation of the organised chaos.
Pork Pie Hat
One afternoon in August 1978, while approaching Heathrow after a flight from Malta, I looked out of the aircraft window and saw something I have never satisfactorily explained: a dark, metallic, pork-pie-shaped flying object, complete with a ring of portholes. This final postcard is my musical recollection of a very strange end to a Maltese holiday.
Programme Note
At the heart of Auberge d’Aragon lies its arcaded courtyard: an intimate, inward-looking space where the solidity of Maltese limestone opens suddenly to air and sky. Rooms gather around this quiet centre, while the arcades frame shifting patterns of sunlight and shadow. Here, architecture is experienced not only through form and proportion, but through atmosphere: the warmth of stone, the changing light and the sense of enclosure beneath an open sky.
It is an evocative setting for ‘Postcards from Malta’, a newly composed jazz suite by Pete Long, Musical Director of Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Orchestra, inspired by his memories of Malta as a young boy. Like postcards retrieved from a drawer, these are not intended as literal portraits of the island, but as fragments of experience—places remembered, impressions retained, and moments transformed by the passage of time.
Jazz is particularly suited to this act of remembering. A melody can return altered; an idea can be revisited from another perspective; improvisation allows memory and the present moment to meet. Long’s childhood Malta is therefore not simply reconstructed, but rediscovered through the musician he has since become.
The courtyard offers its own quiet parallel. For more than four centuries, sunlight has crossed these stones and generations have passed through this space, each encountering it in a different present. Architecture, like memory, endures while continually acquiring new associations. For one evening, those layers meet. The historic courtyard becomes both setting and sounding board for a series of musical postcards—a Malta remembered from childhood, reimagined through jazz, and returned to the island that first inspired them.
THE VENUE
The Auberge is a low, single-storey building organised on a rectangular plan around a central arcaded courtyard. Behind the austerity of its exterior, the courtyard creates an inward-looking world in which stone, shadow, proportion and natural light become the principal architectural elements. This arrangement reflects the influence of the Italian Renaissance palazzo: rooms are gathered around an internal open space that provides both circulation and a quiet centre to the building.
The contrast is particularly striking. The external architecture presents a restrained face to the city, its decoration largely confined to rusticated corners and a continuous cornice, while within, the courtyard offers openness and changing light. The nineteenth-century Doric portico altered the entrance façade, but the essential organisation of Cassar’s c-16th building survived.
More than four and a half centuries later, the courtyard still allows us to experience architecture much as Cassar conceived it: not simply as walls enclosing space, but as a measured relationship between solidity and openness, interior and exterior, limestone and light; and, tonight, memories, and living performance.
Peter Long
Peter Long is a British composer, arranger, conductor and instrumentalist whose career has combined a deep engagement with the jazz tradition with an increasingly substantial body of original work.
As a composer, Long has written extensively for jazz orchestras and smaller ensembles. His large-scale works include Postcards from Malta, written for an Anglo-Maltese jazz quintet, which explores his family connections with the island and memories of Malta in the 1970s, combining straight-ahead jazz with Latin, funk and contemporary influences. He has also developed a number of major concert projects, including The Jazz Planets, a suite for jazz orchestra inspired by planetary archetypes and the tradition of large-scale jazz composition.
Long’s writing is closely connected with his work as an arranger and musical director. He has produced an extensive catalogue of arrangements for big band, jazz orchestra and ensembles with strings, including work for the Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Orchestra, which he leads, and his own Echoes of Ellington Jazz Orchestra. His concert projects have encompassed the music of Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Frank Sinatra, George Gershwin and Cole Porter, alongside newly composed material.
A clarinettist and saxophonist as well as a writer, Long has performed throughout Britain and internationally. This practical experience remains central to his composing: his music is conceived for individual players and combines the colour and precision of orchestral writing with the spontaneity, rhythmic vitality and improvisational character of jazz. Clive Davis of The Times has described him as a “National Treasure,” reflecting his standing within the British jazz landscape.
Juergen Valletta, piano
Juergen Valletta is a 22-year-old pianist/keyboardist who started playing classical piano at age 13. From early on, he began playing with other musicians in a band setting. Later, he became interested in more modern genres and started studying jazz and modern keyboard. This opened up a plethora of opportunities as he started performing with others more frequently in several events and concerts. Additionally, Juergen is a session keyboardist for Aidan Drakard as well as Brass House Unit, playing in weddings, corporate events and even concerts. Throughout his career, he has worked together with other established musicians and bands such as Malta Philharmonic Orchestra, Big Band Brothers, Joseph Calleja, Nicky Brown, Emeli Sandé, and world-renowned conductor Anthony Gabriele amongst others.