Jools Holland Master Class

Jools Holland learned boogie woogie from his uncle at eight years old in Blackheath. By his mid-teens he was playing paid gigs in South London pubs. At sixteen he co-founded Squeeze. He left just before "Cool for Cats" and "Up the Junction" made them household names, co-presented The Tube with Paula Yates, came back to Squeeze, left again and in 1992 launched Later with Jools Holland on BBC Two, which is still running and is still the programme every musician in the world wants to play. He has an OBE, an autobiography called Barefaced Lies and Boogie-Woogie Boasts and has placed himself, as he once put it, at the centre of a global community comprising just about anyone who is anyone in music. He is also Boisdale's Patron of Music, and this is the first time he has brought this show here.

The Masterclass is not a concert. It is an evening with Jools at the piano, illustrated live with music, in which he reflects on the career, the stories, the friendships and the performances that have put him at the heart of music history for fifty years. He is joined by his full band including Ruby Turner, Dave Swift, Ed Richardson, Louise Marshall and Sumudu Jayatilaka, the people who have been on stage with him long enough to have their own stories about the same nights. A Q&A gives the room a direct line to Jools in the kind of informal setting that does not happen at the Royal Albert Hall.

There are very few people in British music who have been in more rooms, with more artists, across more decades than Jools Holland. This is a rare chance to hear what those rooms actually felt like.