A few months ago I went to hear Sam play and sing with a different group of his over at Bethel Lutheran Church where he explained his “coming out” as a country music fan.  I was very happy to hear about this, I often rail at great length about the “jazz education establishment” and how it encourages homogeneous listening tastes, and Sam’s unabashed love for simple country tunes really comes through strongly in his compositions.

A few months ago we went into the studio for a couple days and had a great time making a new record, “The Gettin’ Place,” which is being released tonight at Jimmy Mak’s with the great Blue Cranes, fresh off the road, opening up.  I’ll post a link when the album is available online, meanwhile enjoy these videos from the studio!  You can also read a nice interview with Sam over at Oregon Music News.

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!

Tonight at Redeemer Lutheran Church in Portland will be the final performance in our second year of concerts by the Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble, one of my favorite ongoing projects.  As I was just making up the program here, I went back through our old programs and determined that we have already debuted 30 new works written and arranged specifically for our group, and will be premiering 6 more tonight!

Despite the immense logistical (and sometimes financial) difficulties, this is an endeavor which I’m very happy to have started and hope to continue for many years.  One of the best parts of this whole project is putting out the call to composers and seeing what comes in.  Each time, I worry that we will get a bunch of pieces which won’t fit well together, or are too hard, or too easy, or whatever, and each time I am pleasently surprised by the way in which the compositions we recieve fit well into a cohesive program.  This time is no different, though for perhaps the first time since we started out, we will be presenting a program of works which are a bit more in the “modern big band” vibe.  Lots of straight 8th notes, slower tempos, and nice epic buildups.

I’m especially excited about Dan Duval‘s new piece “Glass Beads”, which he has spent many months on, it’s really a great composition and has come together very nicely.  Also of note, Stephen Connolly will be in town from eastern Washington to conduct his arrangement of Nick Sweet‘s “Tricks and Tests” (which you may remember from our July concert), with Nick on trombone, vocalist Lindsey Stormo will be singing on a new reflective piece she co-wrote with Sam Howard, we’ll play new tunes by myself (based on precipitation records) and Kyle Williams (based on Salvador Dali), and we’ll be performing “Just Me” by JW Davis, the first local composer to contact us out of the blue and ask to have a piece performed, along with a reprise of Gus Slaytons “Deep Fjords” from our fall 08 concert.

All in all, it promises to be a great evening!  I’ll post the audio next week, meanwhile if you’re in Portland stop by!

Friday, October 30, 2009, 8 PM
Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble
Redeemer Lutheran Church
5431 NE 20th Ave. (at Killingsworth)
Portland, OR 97211
$10

http://www.pjce.org

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!

We have 9 pieces on this program, all of which are new to us, and 6 of which are premieres!  I feel quite lucky that all these fantastic composers have lent their talents to our group.  A preview:

- from Andrew Durkin, “Grabby McGee”, which features major triads, synth vibes, and a maniacal calypso ending (classic, for those familiar with the IJG)
- from Eric Allen, “Casually Imported Unicorn,” which is second only to “Senioritis,” which some of you may remember from last year, for his most EPIC composition thus far.
- from Galen Clark, “Cave Dweller,” an arrangement of a great groove tune from the Trio Subtonic book
- from Gus Slayton, “Fearless Frogs,” an undeniable groovy thing!
- also on the groove track, “Caribbean Project” by Levis Dragulin, who also arranged John Zorn’s somewhat Klezmerish “Kisofim” for us, featuring a woodwind intro and organ!
- my “Finished Projects” (see previous post)
- from Michael Owcharuk, “The Cat and the Watering Can”, a cute (but not trite) reggae thing with lots of great flute work by Lee Elderton.  Michael is coming down from Seattle to play it with us!
- and from Nick Sweet, arranged by Stephen Connolly, “Tricks and Tests,” a beautiful wispy composition and arrangment.

This organization is really about as “grassroots” as they come, partially due to the logistical difficulties inherent in organizing a 14-person ensemble, and partially due to Gus and my busy schedules.  I think it’s about time to bring some more people on board for ease of organization and functionality.  I still have aspirations to incorporate as a nonprofit, perhaps later this year or early next year.  This, however, is a huge task and requires probably more time than I have to spare.  Does anyone with experience in nonprofits or in large group jazz bands have any suggestions for the future health of our organization?

Meanwhile, stop by the concert tomorrow night at the Old Church!!

http://www.pjce.org

So on Thursday night I was invited to play in the Creative Music Guild Large Ensemble directed by Swiss virtuosic improvising saxophonist Urs Leimgruber.  The CMG is a great Portland-based nonprofit that brings many fantastic creative improvisers to town.  They are now moving into involving more local musicians as well, which is fantastic.  We had an 18 piece group (2 drummers, 2 bassists, piano, harmonium (I played my low-quality but endearing Indian harmonium which my college roommate brought back for me from a trip there), cello, violin, 4 electronics guys, 4 saxes, guitar, pedal steel) – many of them musicians I haven’t met or worked with before – the amount of people doing crazy innovative and “under-the-radar” things in Portland is immense!  Anyway, Urs led us in some vaguely structured and cued free improv – his discussions about the primacy of sound over everything else really helped the vibe and I feel that at least by the end of our hour-long set we went some really fascinating places sonically.  His obsession with playing extremely softly was also rather mind-0pening, especially with such a large group.  Having all those people with no input mixing boards and what not was very intriguing to me, as I rarely work with that crowd.  However, I am only starting to realize the sonic possibilities of collaborations of that genre.  Yes, more projects!!

Before our set, Urs played a riveting 40-minute solo set involving bird-like multiphonics with three or four separate registers of material going on at the same time, the disassembling of his tenor mid-performance, and a great interaction with a passing freight train. Here’s a short YouTube clip of Urs for an idea of his sound:

It’s always a great pleasure to hear masters of free improvisation, people who are able to create genuine structure and hold the interest of the audience in an extended solo performance, which brings me to the ever-popular issue: How does “the general public” react to “avant-garde” / free improvised creative music?  Are people’s opinions clouded by weird preconceptions?  Is it more attractive to the audience if the artist’s theories or ideas (or compositions, for that matter) are explained, as in a modern art gallery with verbose paragraphs near every painting?  I posed these questions to my girlfriend (not for the first time) after the rehearsal with Urs on Wednesday.  We didn’t come to any definitive conclusions, but I always enjoy these discussions.  I tried to argue that if this music is presented in the right way (whatever that is), that non-musicians and people heretofore unexposed to it will respond positively – there is not the whole baggage of the jazz tradition to understand and internalize before you can hear the form or chord progression of the music.  Someone may argue at this point that the tradition and precendents of avant-garde music also must be understood on a certain level, and although I admit that having a knowledge of that tradition does add to my understanding and enjoyment of the music, I still believe that the inherent simplicity of the idea, even when it is very structured out with graphic scores a la Wadada Leo Smith, etc., contains a certain directness which open-minded listeners can hopefully access with relative ease.  At the end of everything, Steph countered that no matter what, it is still art music and therefore in the realm of a very small audience sector – I suppose this is true but then again, attempting to bring as much music to as many people as possible is something I hope to remain positive about for a long time, lest I lose my motivation due to cynicism.

I am reminded of a time I took Steph  to a Paxselin gig, before we were even dating – and her reaction to what was relatively free improv on short, simple heads, was remarkably positive (at least compared with the way my non-musician friends had reacted to such things in the past) – she related everything to movement or abstract art in some way, which I thought was a fantastic initial reaciton.  Incidentally, this also reminds me of the directions Tony Malaby‘s discussions of free playing often went last month at Banff – he began his artistic career as a painter and often described things in surprisingly concrete visualizations “I will put some pointillistic stuff in above the pianist’s more cloud-like foundation”.  I have tried to keep this in mind in various free playing situations recently to, I hope, great effect – though I am yet unsure as to how clear this has been to either the listeners or the other musicians, it is at least a fascinating exercise.

This is, of course, an ongoing discussion which I will probably reprise soon enough.  If anyone has thoughts, disagreements, agreements, let’s hear them!  Meanwhile, stay tuned for some exciting news on new serieses, grants, and other positive happenings in the Portland scene!

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, the new material was (is) some fantastic stuff, including a Balkan-inspired party tune by MST, a very dark tune the score to which is part-novella by Tom Garcia, and a very Phillip-Glass-esque Chris Mosley tune.

We recorded at my new favorite studio, Type Foundry, in the industrial area near the Fremont Bridge (here’s a shamless plug for the bridge for non-Portlanders – check out the Wikipedia article and especially note the section about how they built a pretty bridge because everyone was annoyed at the recently built ugly bridge.  I love Portland.)  The studio is super awesome (and huge!) and the engineer, Jason Powers, is also very excellent and very audio-centric – I always appreciate it these days when engineers are comitted to getting great sounds straight from the mic choice and placement and the choice of preamp rather than relying on the ability to change the sound fundamentally in ProTools later on.  Jason seems to have a great sense for that aspect of recording (which is not surprising considering he does a lot of work directly to 2-track tape instead of the computer) and it was much appreciated.  The fruits of our labor won’t be heard for some time – there is typically at least a year delay between recording and when we put out a record with this behemoth of a group, but hopefully “Poem” will tide everyone over until then.  Head over to the Circumvention site (or iTunes) and pick up a copy!

Here’s some photos from the studio:

By order of the fire marshal, The Cave and the Green Onion must close their doors. Ironically, one of the very things that made The Cave so warm, inviting, atmospheric, and acoustically fantastic is also the thing that caused the fire marshal to cringe… the low, exposed beam ceiling.

In the 10 months The Cave has been open, it’s been our mission to invite the most innovative, original and simply great musicians there are, to create art in front of us. In this I believe we have been staggeringly successful.

Staggeringly successful is not an understatement – in a very short period of time, at least in my opinion, the club has done a lot to revitalize the scene in Portland, presenting consistently high quality and uncompromising shows and building up an impressive regular audience and (as you can see on their site) a very impressive roster of locally and nationally known musicians who have played there.  A lot of this is thanks to master drummer Alan Jones, who started the club and who worked tirelessly to promote it and bring in high quality performers.  Alan was one of my early musical inspirations and remains one of my favorite musicians in any genre, anywhere in the world.

It seems that, in the past number of years, more clubs have closed than opened – Jazz De Opus, Brasserie Montmartre, the Blue Monk (well they’re still open but don’t have music anymore)…but still we press onward.  Despite all this, I have hope for several reasons:

1. Though I am often criticized for being negative, I remain perhaps overly optimistic at heart about music and the music scene…
2. If anyone will find a way to reopen their club and continue to present music, it’s Alan Jones.  Incidentally, my dad (click here to see some of his photos of my kora band at the Cave in memorium) stopped by the club yesterday and talked to the owners, who said they are already working on new possibilities, so in the long run, things will probably not only reopen but even improve…
3.  The motivation of young jazz musicians in town is remarkable and very slowly I sense that the scene is coalescing into something more coherent and, therefore, weilding more power.  I dream of one day starting both a label and a concert series and furthering this effort of solidifying the “scene.”  Incidentally, Andrew Durkin and I have been having an interesting dialogue on this.  More later.

Perhaps I am being a bit too dramatic about this, as I’m sure that Alan will reopen the club (see #2), but events like this always cause one to sit back and reflect on what’s going on with jazz, the local scene, the national scene, etc.  Meanwhile there’s still lots of great music going on in Portland so don’t sit holed up in your house!  Live music is still one of the most affordable sources of entertainment out there, even during a recession!