Category: Music

Germany – Tour Diary #3

I’m finally getting around to writing the last installment of the TD from my trip to Germany, now that I have been back home for almost a week.

Before the first concert on Thursday, there was a press conference. I have never participated in a press conference that was held largely in a language that I don’t speak (“Ich möchte ein Bier bitte” doesn’t count as speaking a language). It was fun. There were enough Americans there that they were kind and spoke English to us.

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The concerts on Thursday and Friday were great. We did different music on each of the 4 sets. Most of it was some form of organized improvisation. A few pieces had more or less standard notation for some sections, several had purely verbal instructions, and one had newspaper clippings. Liz Allbee put together a piece based on the morning paper. It included a chess game and the family tree of the N. Korean rulers. It was amazing to me how those factors affected the music. She could have given us simple verbal instructions that were free from extra-musical implication, and gotten very similar musical textures, but her inclusion of these other ideas profoundly affected the content of what we played. It was a lesson learned for me. Maybe I just liked the piece because I got to be “The Great Leader.”

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We rehearsed each day, and people were writing new material throughout the process.

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L to R: Almut, Sanne, Toby, Claudia, Katrin, & Helen

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After rehearsal on Friday, Jim took Quin and I to his favorite döner place in Dortmund. It is nice to have some local knowledge. Since musicians often live in (or near) the hood, they also often know where to find the best ethnic food. Jim Campbell is a great musician and a fun hang, I am glad he was on the gig. The food tour guiding was just an added bonus.

On Saturday, Quin, Helen, and I played with Georg at The Loft in Köln. It is a great space with some history, and the music was a lot of fun that night. Hopefully there may be some recorded evidence of that night.

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I was told that when in Köln, one must drink Kölsch, so I did.

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Of course the tour diary must end with a food pic. This was the pork shoulder from our great dinner at Aubergine in Bochum, late night after the gig in Köln.

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Germany – Tour Diary #2

We had our first rehearsal yesterday evening. The group is twelve musicians, and I think most of us only knew a small number of the others before yesterday. Georg Graewe, the German pianist, organized the concerts, but he is not playing with us. Saxophonist and clarinetist Tobias Delius is the musical director. Roman Sieweke (from Essen, Germany) is playing alto saxophone. The two trumpet players are Sanne van Hek from Amsterdam, and Liz Allbee, who is from Oakland, but is now living in Berlin. The strings are Claudia Kienzler from Luzern on violin, Katrin Mickiewicz from Berlin on viola, and Helen Gillet from New Orleans on cello. Others are vocalist Almut Kuehne from Berlin, vibraphonist Els Vanderweyer who is from Belgium but living in Berlin, Quin Kirchner (Chicago) on drums, and Jim Campbell, who lives here in Dortmund, is playing this great cassette tape set up.

We rehearsed a number of pieces last night and this morning. Some are for the entire group, and others use subsets of the ensemble. The shows tonight and tomorrow promise to be quite varied, and very musically interesting.

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Seen here are Katrin, Helen, Jim, Els, and the back of Liz’s head at rehearsal last night.

After rehearsal we had a nice dinner at a tapas restaurant near the venue. I love the way a rehearsal and good dinner can make good friends out of musicians who only met hours before.

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Right to left are: Quin, Claudia, Roman, Sebastian & Nadin who are the behind the scenes folks who are making this happen, and Sanne.

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Right to left: Sanne, Katrin, Almut, Georg, Liz, and Els’ hand. Jim, Helen and Toby were on my end of the table thus avoiding an appearance in the dinner shots.

I am very much looking forward to the concert tonight.

Yesterday afternoon before rehearsal, I heard a bit of a street band near the market. They were playing Autumn Leave when I took this picture.

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Internet spawned jealousy

In the pre-internet days, I wouldn’t have know that Ornette Coleman sat in with Sonny Rollins on Friday night until way after the fact. But this is 2010. As it was happening in NY, I looked at my twitter feed here in Louisiana, and read, “Right now the band is Sonny Rollins, Ornette Coleman, Roy Haynes & Christian McBride. ” Thanks Jason. I am jealous that I wasn’t there, but happy to have at least been cyber aware of the occurrence.

First hand accounts are available from Jason Crane and Phil Freeman.

Unchained Melodies: Improvised Music in New Orleans :: offBeat :: Louisiana and New Orleans Online Music Resource

The September 2010 offBeat has a nice article by Zachary Young on the New Orleans “out” scene

Unchained Melodies: Improvised Music in New Orleans :: offBeat :: Louisiana and New Orleans Online Music Resource:

“People tend to have a certain character in mind when they think of the avant-garde musician: the conceited eccentric, blowing silly noises out of his horn in an ostentatious attempt to distance himself—it’s a predominantly male community—from the mainstream musical world that shuns him. Whatever the picture, it certainly doesn’t look much like trombonist Jeff Albert.

The music of Albert’s own quartet lives between the worlds of the composed and free-improvised. But he can often be found playing a variety of more straight-ahead styles, with groups like George Porter, Jr.’s Runnin’ Pardners or the John Mahoney Big Band. He thinks of the idioms not as opposed to one another, but rather as different points in a continuum. ‘In my conceptualization, it’s not that it’s all that different,’ he says. ‘It’s just that in my band, it’s my version of how I organize this music.’”

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Jeff Albert Quintet at Open Ears Music Series. Photo by Caitlyn Ridenour.

Sant’Anna Arresi Day 1 (for me)

I am writing this on Monday, August 30 in Sant’Anna Arresi, Sardegna, Italy, although depending on the internet connection scene, it might not actually get posted until I get back to the States. I am here to perform with Hamid Drake’s Bindu Reggaeology band. This post is labeled Day 1 (for me), because it was my first day here, even though it was the seventh day of the festival.

I arrived in Sant’Anna Arresi yesterday afternoon, after 24 hours of travel from New Orleans to Chicago to Rome to Cagliari (all by plane) then a van ride from Cagliari to Sant’Anna Arresi. Riding through the beautiful but very hilly Sardinian countryside in a van on very little sleep and nothing but airplane food in the previous 15 hours isn’t all that pleasant, but once I got to the hotel and had a shower and a few hours sleep, I felt much better.

I got to hear the festival concert last night, which was a wonderful performance. It was Conduction® No. 192 “Possible Universe” by Butch Morris. He had an all-star cast on hand. It was essentially a double orchestra and was placed on the stage in stereo, with one of each instrument to each side. The only musician without a double was Alan Silva on synthesizer. The guitarists Jean Paul Bourelly and On ka’a Davis were on either side of Silva with Chad Taylor and Hamid Drake on percussion to the outsides of the guitarists. Silvia Bolognesi played bass on Hamid’s side, and Harrison Bankhead was near Chad. The horns on the Taylor/Bankhead side were Meg Montgomery (trumpet), Greg Ward (alto sax), David Murray (tenor sax & bass clarinet) and Tony Cattano (trombone). On the Drake/Bolognesi side, they were matched by Riccardo Pittau, Pasquale Innarella, Evan Parker and Joe Bowie.

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I had never seen a Butch Morris conduction before, and it is quite an experience. Initially it was similar to some electroacoustic concerts in that I was seeing things happen on stage but was not completely connecting the actions with specific sounds. As the music progressed, I began to be able to connect Mr. Morris’ signals with the musical behaviors that they instigated. He exacts very specific and subtle control over the musicians. When it works ideally, the ensemble becomes on instrument that Butch plays, but that instrument still contains all of the personal sounds of Evan Parker, and David Murray, and Joe Bowie, etc. It was refreshing to see so many world class soloists forego their egos and submit to being part of a beautiful and organic sound that was completely controlled by someone else. It seemed to me that this system requires large amounts of trust going each way, from Morris to the musicians, and from the musicians to Morris. I’ll save the blow by blow description of the music, and simply say that it covered a lot of ground from the quite noisy to the quite accessible, and I enjoyed it greatly.

The pre and post gig hangs were great. I made some new Italian musician friends. Trombonist Tony Cattano (col lenga?) is a great hang and a great musician. Silvia Bolognesi also plays in the Italian band of Marcello Bennetti, who also has a New Orleans based band in which I play. Tony, Silvia, Pasquale and I explored the ways that musician jokes do and don’t translate across languages. I had the requisite trombonist gear chat with Joe Bowie, who is a warm and personable cat, and got to hear David Murray lay some of his unique “zen” ideas on us. I also got to spend some time talking to Greg Ward. Greg played one gig with a Chicago version of my quartet a couple of years ago. I really enjoy his music and company. He has a new CD that is about to be released, and he laid a preview copy on me last night. I’ll be sure to post something about it, once I have given it a few listens.

It was a great evening last night, and I am looking forward to getting to play tonight.

(Added 1 Sept) Originally I thought there would be a second post in the series for this trip, but there won’t be. Too much school stuff to do. I’ll leave it with, our gig was great fun, Ernest Dawkins and crew sounded great after us, Butch Morris is a very interesting dude and a nice cat to hang with, it takes 24 hours (for real) to get from Sant’Anna Arresi to Mandeville, LA, and the caprese salad in the Rome airport isn’t bad.

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One more note: beware of the man in the hat. His name is Mack, and he runs a cool little bar, and apparently likes to get musicians loaded. Approach with care.

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Why do we insist on underestimating our audiences?

The idea for the post you are reading was in part instigated by this post by Andrew Durkin about this post by Anthony Dean-Harris, and the procrastination inertia was broken by these two tweets by Lucas Gillan.

To summarize quickly, in case you didn’t read all the stuff I just linked above: Anthony is afraid to play Nels Cline on his radio show, because he thinks it will drive away listeners, and Lucas linked to a video of Christian Scott on Jimmy Kimmel Live and then asked, “I really wonder what the studio audience and viewers at home, most of whom probably don’t even know who Thelonious Monk is, thought of it.”

There are so many places to go with this, but I’ll start with, why do we insist on underestimating our audiences? People like honest music, even if they don’t know it already, or know or understand the history behind it. As one piece of evidence, I offer up this man. It is not at all uncommon for me to talk to people at the Open Ears Series that will tell me that they don’t really know jazz, and just wandered in to the club, but enjoyed what they heard. (NB- Open ears usually programs fairly left of center, and sometimes just downright weird stuff) Audiences sense honesty and react to that. One doesn’t have to know Monk or his music to get into a young man making a passionate musical statement. BTW Scott’s tune on Kimmel wasn’t all that out. It was just a guy wailing over a simple harmonic vamp, while the drummer went nuts. If he played guitar instead of trumpet, we would have called it classic rock.

It is our job as musicians, radio programmers, bloggers, and friends to spread the word about good music. It is not our job as musicians to guess what people want to hear, it is our job to make the music that we hear, and do it honestly. It is not the job of radio hosts to pander to some perceived infantilism in the audience, it is the job of radio hosts to play good music. We don’t need to pander to audiences, or even nurture audiences. Good music will do the nurturing, all we have to do is let people know that they are welcome to come and listen and make of the music what they will. We just have to invite them in. They’re grown ups, they can listen for themselves.

That for which we should all strive

Meet The Jazz Audience: Michael Jones : A Blog Supreme : NPR:

“I’ve never heard anything like it. This is what jazz should be about. No programs—just all heart. I’m so happy that I can’t describe it.”

NPR’s jazz blog has been doing these cool “Meet the Jazz Audience” pieces, and I love this one. The audience member we meet is named Michael Jones, and he is being interviewed during the Powerhouse Sound set at this year’s Newport Jazz Festival. His reaction should be the goal of every performer.

New music from Jeb Bishop & Jacob Garchik

I try not to be too trombone-centric in my listening or writing, but this post is about new music from two trombonist led trios.

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Jeb Bishop has just released a CD by his new trio that features Jason Roebke on bass, and Frank Rosaly on drums. Jeb was one of my favorite trombonists before he became a close friend, collaborator, and colleague. I think this is some of his best recorded work. I was honored that Jeb asked me to mix and master this CD (or at least turn the virtual knobs and faders until he liked what he heard). I spent lots of time with this music in my ears throughout the mixing process, and I still like to listen to it. That’s a pretty strong endorsement. You can hear samples at CD Baby.

In other trombone trio news, Jacob Garchik has posted a recording of his trio that was made at Ibeam in Brooklyn on April 10, 2010. There is a zip file of 256k mp3s, and youtube video of the entire concert as well. Check it out here.