Despite our great fatigue from late night driving, Dan and I employed the good old jet lag tactic of staying up all day and being outside as much as possible.  It was great to hang out with my old friend Colin Williams (whose class we had taught earlier in the day) and relax before our evening gig:

Our last gig of the tour was certainly the best.  We played at a very hip, tiny room in the Mission called BlueSix, along with Darren Johnston’s Nice Guy Trio, a fantastic trumpet-accordion-bass trio from SF.  Their music was really fun and jaunty, and a great pleasure to hear.  Our set went really well too, many of Dan and Kevin’s families and all of our Bay Area friends showed up, and with the addition of the Nice Guy Trio’s fans, we packed the place!  The audience was extremely attentive and appreciative, always a pleasure (and unfortunately rare), so thanks to everyone who came out down in SF. I only have one bad picture from the show, but you get the idea:

San Francisco is always one of my favorite cities to visit, and it seems that I always schedule it so I have almost no free time there.  This held true again on this trip, as Kevin and I had to blast out of town the next morning since we were both subbing with Portland’s most rockin’ Afrobeat band, Jujuba, in Mt. Shasta City the next day.  That was lots of fun too, though the scheduling was a bit rough.

Overall a fun trip with a bit too much driving, and a good kickoff for the new CD, “82% Chance of Rain.”

Lots more touring coming up in the near future:  The Tunnel Six cross-Canada tour kicks off in just about a month in Toronto, and the Kora Band will be on tour up and down the West Coast in September, among other things!  What a busy year.  I feel very lucky to be able to do all of these things, it’s a great pleasure and privilege.

I’m going to re-focus some energy on this blog in the near future too, I’m considering reprising some “serieses” that I had started (Jazz Pioneers and the Post-Colonial African Groove of the Week), as well as maybe interspersing one on jazz in Portland.  Stay tuned!

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!

- 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!

I’ve been writing a lot recently, including some new music for my sextet and kora band as well as for a new trio I’ve been playing with occasionally with Dan Duval and drummer Stephen Pancerev, as well as arranging some music for the Portland Jazz Orchestra‘s Christmas concert (specifically “The Christmas Song” a la Vince Guaraldi for their Peanuts-themed show, which should be a kick).  It’s nice as the weather deteriorates to focus more on composition, especially as no one seems to really want to leave their houses much (as evidenced by our annoyingly low turnout at the Kane/Andrew duo gig at Egan’s last week…)

Anyway, I’ll be posting PJCE and Sextet audio very soon for your enjoyment, meanwhile you can mark your calendars for the Kora Band’s big show Dec. 3 at the Columbia City Theater with the Seattle African All-Stars, and for the Sextet’s CD release at Jimmy Mak’s January 22!

More soon….

Makin’ It Happen – Andrew Oliver

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.

While I was at the Banff workshop this last spring, there was a lot of discussion of bodily tension and relaxation.  I felt that this was particularly relevant to me, as I was still working through some tendonitis issues even at the workshop itself, though I have fortunately resolved them almost completely since then.  Nonetheless, many of the faculty discussed the inevitable issues of bodily injury as a musician, and as several months have gone by since then for the ideas to gestate, I have some new thoughts on the issue that I hope will spark some interest and/or discussion.

Bassist Matt Penman presented one of the most intriguing clinics of the workshop in which he discussed his intense metronome-based practice regimen and the importance of having good time.  It became clear in the course of the workshop that not only does he have phenomenal time, but he has an amazing ability to be relaxed while playing any style, tempo, or feel.  An important part of his practice regimen involved putting the metronome at its slowest setting and working on fitting between 1 and 12 notes evenly between each very slow click.  At the time, I could clearly see many benefits of this regimen in the development of a good time feel, but after watching him play at that week’s faculty concert, I began to realize that his amazing ability to remain calm and collected even in the most musically exciting moments was likely related to this type of practicing in which one is not only developing a strong sense of time, but also an ability to conceptualize everything based on the “least common denominator”, that is, breaking even the fastest tempos or most complex meters down to the simplest and slowest beat and conceptualizing everything else in relation to that slow pulse.

This is a concept which my long-time teacher and mentor Randy Porter emphasized to me many times when I was somewhat too young and excitable to really understand what he was talking about.  When I was at PSU, Darrell Grant presented it in a somewhat different way – he would often discuss the importance of remaining “one step detached” from what you are playing, so that you can conceive of the entire arc or shape of the solo you are playing while playing it, which can be, in my experience, one of the first things to go when I become totally invested in a solo.

Back to Banff, pianist/keyboardist Adam Benjamin, in his typical wisdom, summed everything up very nicely when he said: “You don’t have to have tension in your body to create tension in your music.”  For the past month or so, I have been trying to keep this in mind while playing.  I find myself almost unable to remain relaxed in musically tense and exciting moments, and the other day I realized that part of this tendency comes from physically tensing up while listetning to exciting pieces of music as well – obviously the intent of the music is coming across and affecting me as the composer/performer intended, but it is a strange quagmire to be in as a musician myself!

I do not have a definitive solution to this problem other than continued awareness of it, but I am certain that remaining more relaxed physically while playing is certainly an important element of progressing as a pianist, and more than that, I am fascinated by the contradiction between physical relaxation on the part of the musician and tension on the part of the audience, and the cerebral/phyiscal divide therein – the musician knows mentally what will create excitement and tension in the audience, but must execute it without him/herself becoming tense.

Anyone have thoughts on this?

That’s a good one for musicians and artists to think about, especially with the inevitable constant rotation between weeks (like this one for me) when I barely have enough time to eat meals and weeks when all my students are on vacation and there are no gigs!  Phew.  Here’s some of what I’ve been doing recently – I suppose it’s egotistical of me to post a somewhat boring list but I suspect some of it will be of interest, and I promise the first in my upcoming series of posts on early jazz heroes is only a week away!

We just finished up a nice weekend of recording at Type Foundry with the Sextet, the results of which we will be releasing as a new album in the winter sometime.  It was really great to be back in that studio, with engineer Jason Powers, who is very easy to work with and gets great sounds.  We’re all really looking forward to mixing that in September, and hope to have it out by Jan. or Feb.

I was in Seattle all last week, rehearsing with the Kora Band and playing with Chad McCullough and Mark Zaleski – all of it was very fun and musically productive – I have been enjoying my frequent trips to Seattle, it brings things nicely into focus sometimes to be in a different environment while working on music, especially composition.

Speaking of which, I’ve just finished up a piece called “28 Days Without Rain…” which was the first thing I heard the announcer say on KUOW, the Seattle NPR station, when I arrived there last week.  They set some sort of record I believe.  Anyway, this was was written for a concert this Friday by the Seattle Jazz Composers Ensemble, a new medium-sized group up there headed up by Michael Owcharuk.  More info on that here.  I’m excited to hear this one, it features an unusual instrumentation including tuba and horn.  Actually it’s the instrumentation from the original “Birth of the Cool” material, which will also be performed on the gig.  Be sure to check that one out on Friday at Lucid if you’re in Seattle.  I won’t be there but will be eagerly awaiting the recording!

And finally, my sextet is playing twice this week, once at my Jazz Bakery @ DiPrima series tonight, and once at the Vancouver Wine and Jazz Festival on Saturday.  I’m really looking forward to both – the festival will be a great opportunity and the DiPrima garden will be extra pleasent in the mid-80 degree sun we are finally getting some more of here!  I’ll post some of the audio from those gigs next week.  More soon!

Matthew Berrill, an Irish clarinetist who I met in Banff, decided to do a short “Northwest Tour” afterward, visiting Vancouver BC, Seattle, and Portland.  In Seattle, Chad McCullough put together a quintet to play some reflective music he wrote at Banff with me, Matt, a bassist named Devin, and John Bishop on drums.  We did a short recording session, the fruits of which I hope to share with everyone soon…when Matt made it down to Portland, we also had a mini-house concert in my backyard, which was amazing!  The lack of venues in Portland these days, and increasing number of fantastic players (Chris Lawrence, for example just moved here last month and is killin!), is leading me (and some others) to want to do something about it!  One solution are small house concerts, of which I hope the recent one won’t be the last – even the neighbors I thought we might be annoying were enthusiastic and stopped by!

Meanwhile, I am organizing the summer PJCE concert on July 10 – the first rehearsal last night was very promising – lots of great new music in a variety of styles, as usual.

I don’t really have a concise wrap-up of Banff events and subsequent thoughts, but hopefully I can craft one soon.  Meanwhile, Dave Douglas has a nice section of his blog on it here, and Adam Benjamin (who was on faculty the first week), has written a nice post today as well which is very wise and succinct and deals with many of the reasons that Banff seems to be somewhat more successful than many other endeavors in jazz education.

More to come, and more freqently, I promise!  Thanks for reading.

Anyway, I thought I would at least attempt to keep up with the happenings up here on this blog, partially for all you curious readers out there and partially for myself, as there’s so much going on I’ve already forgotten a lot of things in 2 days!

My good friend Tyson Stubelek (a great drummer) and I flew up on Sunday into Calgary and rode up into the mountains with our friend Chad McCullough from Seattle.  It’s been nice to have a couple friends that I already knew up here, though I have already met an amazing amount of great players and composers in the past 2 days, many not from the U.S.  The international focus of the workshop is very welcome, it’s great to make connections with people from as diverse places as Belgium, Australia, and Korea, not to mention all over the U.S. and Canada.

We’ve had a lot of great workshops, combo sessions, jam sessions, clinics, etc even in the short time we’ve been here!  I’m really excited to be hanging out a bit with this week’s piano teacher (the faculty rotates each week), Adam Benjamin, a very perceptive and excellent musician.  Today Dave Douglas led a very intriguing and mind-opening composition clinic, and yesterday we all played Terry Riley’s epic “In C” (all 60-some students at once)!  Very fascinating stuff, great interactions with the faculty and other students, and a great facilty too!

I also want to share a couple pictures of this place.  It’s the best envoironment I’ve ever experienced for being creative – check out the view (and the piano) from the room I spent a few hours in this evening:

And the view from part way up Tunnel Mountain at 9 PM!! (Yes it stays light till after 10 – great for productivity).  This is a fantastic hike not 5 minutes from the door of the music building that I have already done 1.5 times and hope to do daily:

Phew.  Anyway, I don’t want to ramble on too much here.  More substantial updates to come soon, I am excited to rehearse my Andrew Oliver Sextet book with a great group of primarily Australian and American musicians tomorrow, we’ll be performing at the on-campus jazz club (which has 3 sets per night of student performances open to anyone to sign up for in any sort of configuration) on Friday night.  Also in the works are a performance with Toronto-based Ben Dietschi and a group to represent the Pacific Northwest with Chad and Portlander-turned-New Yorker Ben Dobay.

Hope everyone is doing well!  More to come!