Project updates, the Portland Jazz Scene, and a Slovakian!
Posted on | October 20, 2009 | No Comments
Apologies to everyone who was disappointed with the lack of a Post-Colonial African Groove last Friday, I was somewhat swamped and had some friends from the Bay Area in town, but will resume this week! Meanwhile, here’s a bunch of information packed into a short post:
The Kora Band played at Jimmy Mak’s two Fridays ago with the Blue Cranes, and we packed it out nicely and had a great response! We’re really looking forward to lots of fall activity in Seattle, and we’ll be back down in Portland in the spring.
Via Twitter master Steve Lawson, I’ve discovered what really seems to be the best way of selling music online: Bandcamp. It’s free, extremely attractive, user friendly from the front and back ends, has full quality audio in addition to many MP3 choices and other formats, has full streaming, and has fantastic embeddable widget things! What more could one want? So, here is the Kora Band album “Just 4 U” and our June 09 studio session for your listening enjoyment, if you haven’t heard them yet. The studio session is free to download, and the album is available for a minimum of $7. I’ll be posting some material from our recent Jimmy Mak’s gig for download later in the week as well.
In other news, I just finished mixing the Andrew Oliver Sextet‘s new album at Type Foundry studios with the excellent Jason Powers. I’m really pleased with the way it’s coming along, I feel like we used the studio a bit more as a tool this time, rather than just focusing on getting a transparent sound, which was more the vibe on Otis Stomp. The sextet will be playing Nov. 3 at the Mission Theater as part of Ben Darwish’s new series there.
Speaking of Ben, there have been a couple of articles popping up in the Oregonian and on their website, Oregonlive, about the enormous potential of Portland’s jazz scene right now. You can read two of them by Barry Johnson here and here. Despite such unfortunate events as the closing of Alan Jones’ jazz club the Cave earlier this year, the caliber of musicians and, perhaps more importantly, of audiences in this city is very high. As Johnson suggests in his articles, it will take a new push to connect the musicians, venues, and audiences together (and perhaps to remove some of the stigma around the word “jazz”) to enliven the scene and make it truly vibrant, but I feel a sense of hope and forward motion in the music community here which is very promising!
Despite minor logistical difficulties, Gus Slayton and myself continue to push forward with our own little effort to strengthen Portland’s jazz community, the Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble. We have a bunch of new pieces which will be premiered at our upcoming Oct. 30 concert and we’re very happy to be finishing up our second successful year of performances with this one!
Finally, as you may have noticed in the next column to the right, I am really excited to be playing tomorrow night with Michal Vanoucek, a great pianist from Slovakia who I met at the Banff workshop. He’s been in the states for a couple weeks, recording with Curtis MacDonald in NYC, performing (tonight, in fact, Seattleites take note!) with Chad McCullough in Seattle, and is coming down for a two-piano concert tomorrow. I’m greatly indebted to the Jazz Society of Oregon for making this possible. More details are here. You can expect some standards, originals, lots of Monk tunes, and some Slovak power-jazz.
Coming soon: some new posts in the “Jazz Pioneers” series – as promised, I will focus on Sidney Bechet next. Also the return of the Post-Colonial African Groove this Friday, and some more thoughts on the Portland jazz scene as well.
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