We have four new compositions for you from Charley Gray, director of Jazz Studies at PSU and an illustrious large ensemble composer, our co-director Gus Slayton, Portland guitarist and composerKyle Williams, and NYC-based Portland native (and former PJCE member) Eric Allen, who will be presenting his own unique take on some Christmas music for us.

Tickets are $12 in advance and $15 day of show.  $10 for students  They’re now on salehere. Save a few bucks and get them in advance!

We’ll be featuring essays by each composer on the PJCE Blog in advance of the event to give you a taste of what they’re up to.  So far Eric and Kyle’s essays are up.  Have a look!

Thanks for your support and we hope to see you Dec. 10 to support some great new, local music.

Herbie Nichols has been coming to prominence of late with the Herbie Nichols Project, run by the jazz composers collective in NYC in the 90′s, as well as with Roswell Rudd’s publication of many of Herbie’s unrecorded compositions.  We’ll be tackling some of them in a relaxed evening at Tony’s, part of my first Wednesday series.  These are really great tunes that deserve to be heard more often, hope to see you there.

As you are probably aware, one of my main musical interests these days is the combination of various musical traditions and influences in a non-superficial way (thus the Kora Band), and I was really excited when I found out about these guys several years ago from Kane, and then unexpectedly found them in Portland playing a double bill with the Blue Cranes at the White Eagle.  I later learned that both of them (Char and Robby, who are brothers, by the way) went to school with Rebecca Sanborn, the Cranes’ keyboardist, and then it all became clear!  I was really happy to discover a group that brings in some of my favorite world musics (African and Balkan, specifically) with amazing singing in English (!) and totally pulls it off without even a hint of new age corniness or any watered-down-ness that one may (mistakenly) expect from such a project.

I am very excited to be sharing the stage with them tomorrow evening, Kane and I are going to kick it off with another of our occasional kora/piano duo gigs, this time accompanied by Kevin as I mentioned above, on calabash, and possibly a bit of other percussion as well.  We’ve been working up our traditional repertoire as well as some cool arrangements on old and new Mandinka tunes and we hope that Robby from Round Mountain will join us occasionally on Djembe too.  Then Round Mountain will rock it, as always, so I hope everyone can make it out for what will surely be a special evening!

By the way, you can get a preview of Round Mountain here.  Enjoy!

Also, Alberta Street Public House is at 10th and Alberta in NE, and the show starts at 9:30.  Cool, I think that’s everything…

It’s always enjoyable to put together some trio gigs when Tyson is back in town, as we tend to do, and this trip is no exception: we’ll be playing Thursday night at the Camellia Lounge and Sunday night as part of an excellent new series put on by Ninkasi Brewing at the Blue Monk, which used to have jazz all the time before canceling their music program a number of years ago.  Fortunately they are bringing music back to the club including this Sunday night jazz series curated by Mary Sue Tobin.

The good old piano trio is, of course, a tried-and-true format, but one with which I have never worked on a regular basis.  I have been attempting to compose some new tunes for these gigs and found myself increasingly unable to come up with nice tunes without orchestrating them for a specific group.  For some reason I am always hearing more parts than what is generally possible for a piano trio when I am composing.  I suppose this is an asset in many ways, though sometimes frustrating.  Nonetheless I have come up with some nice and relatively chill tunes for this week’s gigs as well as mining my almost-reorganized piles of sheet music for some nice old and new tunes and learning some Abdullah Ibrahim songs, which I feel will work really well with the specific personnel we have this time.

So, I hope some of you can make it out on Thursday or Sunday nights, and if it goes really well maybe I’ll post some audio too!

Yesterday I was teaching a lesson to a student who wanted to work on solo ballad playing.  We listened to a bunch of examples of the way in which different great solo pianists approach ballads and, of course, this added to my reflections on the art of solo jazz piano.  I immediately noticed something which Randy Porter used to emphasize very frequently in lessons: the importance of playing all the notes in a chord simultaneously.  The difference is really striking between a pianist who arpeggiates chords either out of habit or discomfort and a pianist who confidently states the chord voicing in a big block.  I was especially aware of this while listening to Bill Evans and Brad Mehldau yesterday, though when I started to check out a few Fred Hersch tracks, who I really consider to be one of the greatest masters of solo jazz piano, I was surprised to notice how much arpeggiation was going on.  Upon further listening however, I began to notice the very subtle choices he was making regarding individual subsets of notes that he played together, rather than blanket arpeggiation of the whole chord.

It’s really interesting to consider small factors like these in regards to one’s overall perception of a musician.  Fred Hersch, Brad Mehldau, and Bill Evans all exude confidence while playing solo piano, due obviously to many elements of music they have mastered besides just hitting notes at the same time.  Similarly, my recent difficulties playing long solo gigs stem from numerous issues both technical and musical, but at least I have discovered one concrete element to work on in the quest to improve!

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!