The Woods Thursday!
Posted on | February 27, 2010 | No Comments
This Thursday at The Woods, one of Portland’s newest and most intriguing venues (an ex-funeral parlor, in fact!), my sextet will be performing alongside A Cautionary Tale, a great member of the vibrant indie-rock scene here. Advance tickets are available here from Brown Paper Tickets (Only $7 for 2 bands!). We’re looking forward to this venue and bill!
Pampelmoose has some nice things to say in their preview: “Andrew Oliver is just one of a new generation of composers and performers that are dazzling the Portland jazz scene over the last 5 years or so. Tonight, he takes to the stage of The Woods with his Sextet, a sharp combo that works a cool jazz/post-bop vibe that pulls in rhythms and energy from the influences of world music, indie rock, and radio pop. Pay particular attention to the loving and lovely interplay between the group’s two sax players Mary-Sue Tobin and Willie Matheis and their sharp, nimble guitar player Dan Duval. When they weave around each other, it can turn into a beautiful kind of tangled mess of interlocking melodies and ideas.”
Phew! Hope we can pull that off…OK, see you Thursday!
Olympics and Arts Funding
Posted on | February 18, 2010 | No Comments
Well I have been enjoying the Olympics as much as the next guy or girl, but the real topic of this post is the fact that Tunnel Six, a Canadian-American collaborative group that was founded at the Banff workshop last spring, has recently received a generous grant from the Canada Council for the Arts for our upcoming tour in April and May of next year, so Canada has provided lots of great things in my life of late! This is the same tour for which I recently received a grant from Portland’s Regional Arts and Culture Council for our concert in Portland and the recording and production of an album at the end of the tour.
I thought I would write a bit of a post introducing the band with some of the recordings we made up at Banff for you to enjoy between now and then. The band came about like this. We were in the first of three weeks of the fantastic workshop at the Banff Centre. Chad McCullough, Tyson Stubelek, Brian Seligman, Ben Dietschi and myself were sitting in the pub drinking overpriced Canadian beer, and decided to have a session the next day. We looked behind us for a bass player and there was Ron Hynes. How convienient, we thought!
The next day, Tyson and Chad and I summited Sulphur Mountain:
Afterward, we realized that scheduling a jam session right after doing that was probably unwise. However, the powerful mountain air prevailed and re-energized us. We arrived in one of the rehearsal rooms and sight read Brian’s tune “Not Yet.” Here’s us playing it a bit later in the Banff Studio (click to listen):
Suddenly, we all realized that something really exciting was going on – the group vibe was unbelievable! (Actually I remember Ben saying something somewhat flustered like “woah, what a vibe!!”). It was a bizarre and awesome experience that I’ve rarely had to play with a group of people who had never played together before and to feel as though we had been doing it for years after the very first tune!
Anyhow, we were lucky to be selected for some studio time at the fine TELUS studio at the Centre, the fruits of which you can hear here, and we resolved to play together again in some capacity after the workshop. After returning home, we started to book this tour, which will take place from May 17 to June 6 of this year. After hundreds of hours writing emails, grants, and calling venues, we are about 80% ready to go, but the news of both RACC and Canada Council support is really an unbelievable asset to our project, and is truly a big milestone in all of our careers as it will enable this tour to proceed as planned. We’ll be hitting many major Canadian cities (Toronto, Ottawa, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver, Victoria) as well as performing in Seattle and Portland.
Next month we’ll roll out a new website and all the tour dates, etc. but for now, I hope you enjoy those recordings from Banff and stay tuned for more info, and thanks to Canada for providing both the Olympics and a fantastic arts funding program. Huzzah for northerly neighbors!
Bantus
Posted on | January 28, 2010 | 1 Comment
Back in June I received an intriguing phone call from one Matt Gordon, who had gotten my number from Kevin Van Geem (the drummer in my sextet) and needed a substitute keyboardist to play (get this) marimba parts on a gig with a Zimbabwean singer, Loveness Wesa. Needless to say, I was more than slightly interested, and ended up playing the gig, at the Salem World Beat Festival. In the process of doing this, I learned that I had actually been subbing for Nathan Beck, the director of Boka Marimba, a Zimbabwean marimba band I have been fascinated with since my youth, when I would go down to the Saturday Market and watch them play for extended periods of time, one day vowing that I would somehow find a way to join the band. Then I discovered that the guy playing drums on that gig in Salem, Eric Orem, had also done the same thing, and now was in the band! Anyhow, I fumbled through the marimba parts on my keyboard at the Salem festival and had a great time. Then, when I was about to fall asleep one night several months later, I got a text from Loveness asking me to join the band. So, although I have not achieved my childhood fantasy of joining Boka, I am really happy to be a member of the Bantus Band, which is even better for me anyway, since I don’t play marimba at all!
Loveness’ music is squarely in the great tradition of Zimbabwean electric pop, pioneered by such artists as Thomas Mapfumo (with whom most of the members of our band have spent some time touring) Oliver Mtukuzi, and Jonah Sithole (check out this link for a fantastic cassette of his group courtesy of WorldService) with lots of other regional and even South African influences as well. It’s great fun and is one of the first non-jazz projects I have been involved in for quite a while, which is a huge breath of fresh air for me! It’s easy to get caught up in the frighteningly insular jazz world, and this band provides a great opportunity to play dance music, something I don’t do nearly enough (though the Bridgetown Sextet has been really fun on that front as well, in a different vein). It’s also been a great lesson in the importance of very specific methods of working through relatively simple chord progressions, especially since myself, the guitar, and the marimba are all inhabiting the same sonic space, more or less. I’ve learned quite a bit about some elements of the mbira tradition (though there’s much much more to learn there), and of course it’s been great being in a group with no written music! Unlike some of my other bands, where one of the most difficult steps towards putting on a great show is to memorize all the music, there are no charts to begin with in this band (although I confess to writing down a few of the trumpet lines for myself) so we’re set to go in that regard, although the classically trained part of me can’t help but wonder which method is more efficient in the end. And, finally, Zimbabwean pop was really my first introduction to African music (I spent countless hours on trains in France listening to Mapfumo during my time studying there in 2004 and 2006) so it’s a sort of “full circle” thing to be playing in such a band.
It’s been an interesting few years since I finished up jazz school at PSU, and I’ve found myself (in typical fashion) making occasionally impulsive decisions about what direction to go in musically and which kind of projects to start and to focus on, and I feel that only recently am I gaining a bit more of an objective perspective on being a musician and on what I want to do. Being in this band has taught me a lot about the importance of playing the music I love, regardless of whatever preconceptions may have been instilled in me from being in jazz school, or being on the jazz scene, or just being a jazz nerd! It’s a bit surprising to me how easy such external ideas can become internalized in some sense, but I’m really glad to have opportunities such as this come up to remind myself about the best parts of being a musician for me: having fun, making people happy, and connecting to the audience through groove!
Here are a few tracks we recorded in December – there’s a couple more at our site too (click to listen:)
Loveness Wesa and the Bantus – Mbire
Loveness Wesa and the Bantus – Sevenza
Loveness Wesa and the Bantus – Njelimana
Well, after all that I would be amiss not to mention our upcoming show this Saturday night in Portland. We’re putting on a concert to help raise funds to bring Loveness’ mother to Portland from Zimbabwe. It’s a worthy cause – life in Zimbabwe is hard and is not getting any easier with Mugabe’s government continuing to cause great hardship for the population. We’ll be playing from 7:30-9:30 at the Ainsworth United Church of Christ – it should be a great time. Full details as well as some new recordings we made in December are all at our site http://www.bantusband.com
Photo credit: Maureen Oliver. More photos of the band are at her blog here.
Sextet @ Jimmy Mak’s Tonight!
Posted on | January 22, 2010 | No Comments
After a relatively long hiatus, my sextet will be back at Jimmy Mak’s tonight, alongside the excellent Trio Subtonic. This will be our first show with them and, for that matter, our first time playing the “headlining” slot at Jimmy Mak’s, so tell all your friends!
For a preview, here’s “Public and Republic” by Dan Duval from our forthcoming album “82% Chance of Rain” (Click on the link back there to listen).
I’ve been really happy with the progress of this group in the past year, I feel that the disparate and unique combination of musical styles and personalities has come together really nicely at last, and I’m looking forward to another year of progress and great music. Come help us kick it off this evening!
Kora Band Retreat
Posted on | January 16, 2010 | No Comments
After the recent holiday festivities, I was lucky enough to do something I’ve always wanted to do, and hope to repeat again: go off to a proverbial (or almost literal, in this case) cabin in the woods with a band for a weekend and work on new music! The Kora Band’s trumpeter, Chad McCullough’s parents were gracious enough to let us use their nice house on the Puget Sound in the small hamlet of Allyn, WA for a weekend of working on new music, old music, and of course, eating fresh oysters which we harvested from the sound at low tide, threw on the grill, and ate with nothing but a small amount of salt and pepper. Certainly the freshest thing I have ever tasted:
Oops, I digress. Anyway, it was really a fantastic experience and I promise that the purpose of this post is not to make anyone jealous! I do want to share some pictures and thoughts on the band and experience though. Chad’s father is an avid collector of old signs and (get this) vintage gasoline pumps, and though the pictures we took don’t do it justice, check out this vintage Shell pump that adorns the living room! (Mark took this one while Kane was showing off his bizarrely awesome fusion drumming chops:)
Anyhow, besides the gas pump (or maybe including it), we had a nice little setup in the living room, where we found ourselves rehearsing up to five times a day (sometimes unwittingly: after dinner on Saturday night, we mysteriously started gravitating back towards our instruments. “Are sitting at our instruments?” I found myself saying, and next thing we knew, we had come up with a great idea for our March 20 gig at Empty Sea Studios in Seattle, a great space focused on smaller acoustic groups. We’re going to try something a bit different and do the whole show without drumset, in a more “intimate” and acoustic format. Never fear, Mark will not be exiled, but will play only calabash and other percussion, and we’ll have Kane on kora and acoustic guitar, rather than electric. It should be a cool evening, and a shift from our regular sound:
In addition to working up some of our old material in the more acoustic format, we learned a bunch of new songs, some of which we performed at our Hidmo gig on the 10th. I’ve written a new tune (”Kora Tune #6″ for the time being) that I’m really proud of – I think it’s the best integration of my general musical aesthetic with some kora-specific material to date, and it really came to life in a sort of more epic way than I intended, which is always nice! It’s been, and continues to be an interesting journey figuring out exactly what sort of things to do as a composer to work with the unique qualities of the kora. On one hand, I don’t want to just sound like I’ve written some modern jazz and stuck a kora in it, but on the other hand I don’t want my own musical ideas to be completely overshadowed by the kora itself. This tune feels like the right direction and I hope to have some more time to work on music during this brief hiatus (more on that in a minute). We finally got the Rail Band’s tune “Maliyo” together, more or less – that’s one we’ve been trying to learn for 6 months but the deceptive beat placement continues to elude us! One day we will rock it for sure. Kane taught us a new tune “Amadou Sekou” by ear, which is always one of the best ways to learn anything of course, and the time afforded us on the retreat was great for that method of learning, which we usually don’t have time for, what with me living in Portland and the rest of the band in Seattle. Chad brought in a tune by a German trumpeter, Volker Goetze, who has a great duo project with a Senegalese kora player, and of course, for good measure, we added another tune from the library of the great Franco, “Bolingo ya Moitie-Moitie.” Watch for all of those tunes coming up in our spring gigs!
In addition to all that playing and eating, Kane brought his set of Mandinka drums and we worked on some traditional rhythms, which was really fun, though I felt a bit self-consciously white while doing so. Nonetheless, I think it was really good for our general progression in hearing some complexities of African rhythms. It was also very viscerally exciting, though quite loud (check out Chad and Brady in the background):
And, finally, we had some time to sit down and listen to some interesting recordings from West Africa, past and present (Kane brought a large portion of his unique CD collection, which was awesome). I’ll leave you with a few more photos and a recording that I discovered on the retreat from Bembeya Jazz National, one of the foremost nationally sponsored bands of Guinea post-independence, which advertises the national airline, “Air Guinee” Check out the awesome intro: “Security? Speed? Comfort? AIR GUINEE!!!” (click to listen)
Bembeya Jazz National – Air Guinee
And here’s Kane and I listening to it, in true African music nerd fashion:
(In doing further research on this, I discovered that Air Guinee lost their only jet plane (the others were all Russion turbo-props) in a botched takeoff in 2004 (long after this song was written, admittedly). Fortunately no one was killed, but they just left the jet in the field where it crashed at Freetown airport in Sierra Leone, where it can be seen to this day!!)
In conclusion, we were very lucky to have the opportunity to go on our little retreat and we’re really excited for our upcoming gigs this year. We hope to go into the studio in the late spring to record our second album and perhaps even embark on a short tour in the fall. More on all that coming soon! Meanwhile, here are some other classic moments from the weekend. Chad and subsequently Brady are out of town until March, so we’ll be having a brief hiatus until then, but our spring is pretty full of gigs after that point. One more note, I apologize for not having post-quality audio ready of any of the new material, but I will be sharing lots of that after we work it up a bit more in the spring. Thanks for reading!
Happy New Year!
Posted on | December 27, 2009 | No Comments
I hope that everyone’s holidays have gone well so far, and that everyone has a great New Year and appropriate celebrations. I’m very much looking forward to many projects coming up in the next year, and I thought I would post a bit about some exciting news and events:
- I recently received a Project Grant from Portland’s Regional Arts and Culture Council for a recording project with the new Canadian-American collaborative band Tunnel Six that was put together at the Banff International Jazz and Creative Music Workshop this past May. I’m really happy to be a part of this high-caliber group of musicians, and am very thankful to the RACC for helping to fund our project. We’ll be touring in May and June, starting in Toronto, with a foray into the midwest (Chicago, Minneapolis), and then across Canada (Winnipeg, Edmonton, Calgary, Victoria, Vancouver) and back down into the U.S. to finish our tour in Portland. The RACC funding will allow us to spend two days over at Kung Fu Bakery Studios recording our first full-length album at the end of the tour. You can hear some of the stuff we recorded at the Banff Centre studio at the Tunnel Six site, and I’ll be keeping this site updated with info on that tour as it unfolds.
- I’m also pleased to announce that the Andrew Oliver Sextet’s new album, “82% Chance of Rain,” will be coming out on OA2 records (a subsidiary of Origin) in April-May of next year, along with our first tour to the Bay Area! Over at the Sextet page is a sample track from the new album as well as some older recordings, and I’ve just posted some selected tracks from our Portland Jazz Festival gig from last year, recorded at the Cave by Patrick Springer, on the Audio page as well. We’ll be performing alongside Trio Subtonic at Jimmy Mak’s on Jan. 22, so don’t miss out on that one!
- I’m about to embark on a few days out at a cabin with the Kora Band, where we will be learning a bunch of new music! Since I live in Portland and everyone else in Seattle, it’s often hard to find rehearsal time, so we decided to just go hang out for a weekend and work. This is pretty exciting, I’ve always wanted to do something like this with one of my groups and I’m glad we’re able to pull it off. You can hear us Jan. 10 at Hidmo and March 20 at Empty Sea Studios in Seattle, and we’ll be coming back to Portland for a show with Loveness Wesa and the Bantus, a Zimbabwean band that I’ve recently had the pleasure of joining, on March 19. More details forthcoming on that one too!
Well, that’s all for now. I’m looking forward to keeping this blog and whole website a bit more updated as this year progresses too, so come back frequently for new content and information. Best wishes for the new year!
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