Groove Crusade
Thursday, 27th November 2025
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Jazz Fest, our summer jazz festival, will be back at Riverside on Saturday 5th July 2025!
Set up in 2019, just before the worldwide pandemic lockdown, Groove Crusade exists solely to celebrate the enduring legacy of the Crusaders, for nigh on 50 years the group of US musicians who developed, indeed pioneered, the links between jazz, blues, soul and funk.
The players in Groove Crusade have, collectively, over 250 years’ experience in the music business, including studio and live work with artists as ridiculously diverse as Max Bygraves and Tony Christie at one end of the spectrum to Sting and Jack Bruce at the other, via a host of great jazz names. And venues? Sydney Opera House, Carnegie Hall, Hollywood Bowl, Glastonbury; one or other band member has worked stages such as these at some point.
What brought Groove Crusade together is a common love of the music of the Crusaders, and an acknowledgement of how that has influenced their own individual professional careers, playing , writing and arranging. If ever a band was a labour of love, this is it.
Drawing on the Crusaders’ entire recording career, from early days as a Texas hard-bop band to international renown as live and session musicians, Groove Crusade strives to recreate as best it can the feel – above all the groove – for which the Crusaders were justly renowned.
We hope you can feel it.
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