Well I’ve been a bit absent from the internet of late, partially due to nice weather and partially due to various trips and a typically nutso schedule in general.  However, I’m back and ready to type, as it were, armed with some great upcoming shows for the rest of the summer and into the fall, as well as some more Post-Colonial African Grooves of the Week (starting up again on Friday), the reprise of some more thoughts on Morton and other jazz pioneers, and more.

Speaking of Morton, my first big show this summer (yes, here in Portland the sun has only recently come out for good!) is a double-bill I’ve been looking forward to for some time, featuring my old-timey band the Bridgetown Sextet and the Midnight Serenaders,  one of my favorite bands of any genre in Portland, at Jimmy Mak’s, Portland’s classiest jazz club, this Saturday night!

I don’t always mention Bridgetown stuff on this blog, but it has really turned from sort of a fun side-hobby band into one of my favorite projects of late.  My good friend of many many years Scott Kennedy and I started the group a couple of years ago after a long history with the style.  We met in 5th grade, at which point I was a nerdy classical pianist and he knew nothing about music.  Several years later, we both began to develop an interest in ragtime and early jazz, and around that time I decided to teach myself trumpet and we both picked up some drumming from my high school band teacher after school.  Meanwhile, I began moving from classical to jazz piano and Scott decided to teach himself piano from scratch, starting out rather amazingly with the Maple Leaf Rag, hardly the world’s easiest piece of music.

After many years of blundering through attempts to play as a duo and occasionally add other musicians, Scott and I found ourselves back in Portland after college, and decided to put this group together.  We figured that we would just call the best musicians in the style who we could find in town and see if they would do it, and miraculously they all said yes!  We’ve made a very strong effort to play the music in a fresh and energetic style reminiscent of the original vibe of the music, rather than in any sort of “preservationist” manner, and I feel that we’ve developed a uniquely exciting way of approaching the repertoire, a sentiment which, fortunately for us, has been echoed by Portland’s vibrant swing dance community!

So, all in all, we’re excited to bring the old-time stomp down to Jimmy Mak’s on Saturday and of course to share the bill with the Serenaders, who have really been instrumental in bringing attention to old-time jazz and swing in Portland over the past 5 years.  We were recently in the studio recording the first half of a new album, so here are some excerpts from those tracks to whet your appetite for the show (click to listen):

King Porter Stomp

Who’s Sorry Now

Buddy Bolden’s Blues

I’m Gonna Stomp Mr. Henry Lee

Our first album, “Authentic Old-Time Jazz and Swing” is available over at Bandcamp, you can check it out below and click on the album art to get there!

And I would be amiss not to finish by listing the personnel who make this whole thing happen.

Bridgetown Sextet:
Scott Kennedy – piano, drums
Andrew Oliver – cornet, drums, piano
Doug Sammons – guitar, vocals
David Evans – clarinet, tenor sax
John Moak – trombone (on recordings linked above)
Dave Bryan – trombone (currently in the band)
Eric Gruber, bass

We’re just about to head into Two Sticks studio in Seattle to record our second album (our first, Just 4 U, came out in April of 09) with Don Gunn, our favorite engineer.  This one will be out in September on Origin Records, continuing my excellent relationship with them!

So, come out to Jimmy’s tomorrow night for this show if you’re in Portland, it’ll be a great one!  Reservations at 503-295-6542.

It’s always interesting how tunes develop over time, and we’ve been playing many of the tunes in our book for over a year, some for even longer.  When we pulled out our old classic “Szesc” yesterday night, I realized just how much faster we play it now than when I wrote it 5 years ago.  Certainly this is not a surprising trend, but in this specific instance it was nice to actually be able to pull it off at that tempo after so many train wrecks back there in the past!

The newer tunes have come together really well too.  I feel like we may be on the verge of getting tired of playing them, but we haven’t quite gotten there yet so they’re really tight and still full of energy.  I do forsee some significant new repertoire for this band in the coming year, however.

I’m really happy to have the opportunity to take this sextet on the road after almost 5 years of playing together, and we’ll keep you posted on happenings as we make our way southward.  The Medford Mail-Tribune has a nice preview of our show on Thursday in Talent (a small town between Ashland and Medford), here.  We’re teaming up with some great bands in Eugene (Douglas Detrick Quintet) and San Francisco (the Nice Guy Trio), and we may even see some sun for a change as we head southward (though admittedly there is sun outside my window right now in Portland, though one never knows how long that will last…)

Anyway, for a refresher, here’s the tour schedule.  Tell your friends!  Happy weekend everyone…

Wednesday, April 14, 2010, 9:00PM
Douglas Detrick Quintet
Andrew Oliver Sextet
Sam Bonds Garage
407 Blair
Eugene, OR
$1-$5 cover

Thursday, April 15 2010, 8:00-10:00PM
Andrew Oliver Sextet
Avalon Bar and Grill
105 W. Valley Rd.
Talent, OR
$10

Friday, April 16, 2010, 9:00PM
Andrew Oliver Sextet
Darren Johnston’s Nice Guy Trio
BlueSix Acoustic Room
3043 24th St. (at Treat St.)
San Francisco, CA

- 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!

Well, Reptet‘s reputation seems to be preceding them these days.  We’ll be opening for them tonight over at Portland’s hipster central, the Doug Fir Lounge.  It’ll be great to bring some of what Tom D’Antoni calls “indie jazz” into the room and I’m always happy to hear a set of crazy music from Reptet while enjoying their newest animal costumes!

Speaking of hipster central, Portland’s Willamette Week weighed in on tonight’s proceedings:

[JAZZ SCHMAZZ] If there were ever a genre that needed a little bit of goofiness introduced into the mix (you know, just to keep it honest), it would be jazz. This self-serious style of music is taken down a few pegs by the Seattle group known as Reptet, with its penchant for wacky costumes and goofball tunes like “Chicken or Beef?” The band is capable of reining in the piss-taking, though, as proven by its latest 7-inch, Agendacide, which features two sharp tracks of cool Sun Ra-style post-bop.

Rather than commenting haphazardly on this idea, I will save it for a soon-to-come post…

Meanwhile, you can check out a note written by Matt Groenig to Reptet as well as hear “Chicken or Beef” over at Oregon Music News’ preview of the show. I’m definitely looking forward to this one!

Last night was a really fun gig over at Jimmy Mak’s with the Sam Howard Band opening for the new Ben Darwish Group.  I’ve recently been in the studio for a few days with the Howard Band (which is Sam, myself, Scott Pemberton on guitar, and Russ Kleiner on drums), and it was great to get out and play a show after working up all the music for the recording.  We had a great time, though the audience was talking a lot.  This was interesting actually – I certainly found it to be frustrating but at the same time, as Scott pointed out, “maybe they were just talking the whole time about how great we were!”  It was an interesting lesson in engaging the audience though, which is a consistent difficulty in improvised music.  It was also educational in relation to Thursday night’s gig in Seattle with the Kora Band at the Columbia City Theater, which was really a great success in many ways, and in which we managed to really draw the audience along with us as the set progressed.

Mark DiFlorio, the kora band’s drummer, and I had an interesting conversation about this very topic after the gig and he expressed a feeling that we succeeded that night in engaging the audience by a sort of magical blend of individual phrasing and group tightness – certainly I’ve been very happy of late with the progression of the group sound, especially since we commited our repertoire to memory in October, but there is, as I was alluding to above, some mysterious element in whether or not the audience is engaged in an improvised solo.  Playing a solo with phrasing that is easily digestable by the audience is really a challenge, especially after jazz school tought many of us to play the “hippest” thing in a more technical sense, and seemed in some ways anyway to de-emphasize the importance of melodies that can be latched on to in jazz soloing.  In fact, the other day I was speaking with John Hollenbeck, who graciously gave me a ride from Seattle to Portland after his gig up there at Earshot, and his response to the issue was: “The most important thing is just to keep in mind that you are ALWAYS playing a melody.”

I would also like to send some kudos over to Ben Darwish (whose new website is also killing by the way), for putting on a great show last night with his new group, featuring many of our finest local talents, Tim Willcox on sax, Bill Athens on bass, and Randy Rollofson on drums.  Everyone really was playing at their best, and Ben’s tunes are always clever and fun to listen to.  The group seems to have developed a band-specific vibe really quickly, as this was their first full show together.  Ben has also been adding some tasty vocals in, which brings me to my final point, which I’ve been thinking a lot about recently.  As I and many of my peers in town (and friends elsewhere, for that matter) are getting a bit older, I am really starting to see a positive progression in the direction of stylistic individuality.  On one had, we have always all sounded in some capacity like ourselves, but certainly for me as I get farther away from jazz school and from my youthful brand of excitement, I feel that my playing, composing, and bandleading are finally moving in a natural direction based heavily on my tastes in music.  It feels very logical to pursue as a player the types of music that move me as a listener, and I have been noticing a lot of this type of motion in the scene.  Chris Mosley‘s new album, for example, is quite a step from his previous one, which was great but certainly more in a jazz vein than his beautiful and atmospheric new release (which you should all check out if you haven’t heard it!).  I had similar thoughts listetning to Ben’s new group last night.  One of the things that I feel is great about being a musician today is this sort of ability to honestly pursue one’s musical interests to whatever end it may lead, and it’s great to see it happening right here in Portland.

I’m really looking forward to 2010, which promises to be a great year for many of my projects, and I’ll attempt to keep a bit more activity up here on the site as well.  Meanwhile, before New Years, there’s still the Sextet/Reptet gig at the Doug Fir, a Duff’s Garage hit with Bridgetown, and a night of Zimbabwean music at Hip Bone Studios – more on all that coming soon!

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?