Well, it’s finally come and gone!  A year ago, we decided at the conclusion of the Banff Workshop that the group at that time known as the EPIC Sextet, and now Tunnel Six, should not cease to exist at the end of the workshop, and set out to book an ambitious cross-Canada tour.  Now, a year later, we’ve done it, with great success!

Of course, none of this would have been possible without the generous sponsorship of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Regional Arts and Culture Council in Portland, and Swiss Alpine Landscaping in Winnipeg, and of course I’m more than happy to acknowledge their support of what was a pretty far-fetched idea when we first proposed it last year.

There were many high points and not many low points of the tour.  The low points consisted mostly of driving for 14 to 16 hours at a time.  Those drives were especially rough when we had a gig the same night, or the one grueling time when we packed up after our gig in Edmonton, rolled out and drove overnight through the Rockies, through an enormous blizzard, avoided colliding with an elk, and locked our keys in the van at a Starbucks in Kamloops, to arrive in Vancouver just in time to take the Sunshine Coast ferry to Sechelt and play a great gig kicking off the Gibsons Landing Jazz Festival.

However, that particularly epic journey (and our general fatigue level) notwithstanding, we had a really great time on the road.  We brought our unique music to a wide variety of audiences across Canada and the Pacific Northwest, something none of us had done before on nearly as large of a scale.  I was consistently impressed with the musical chemistry of the band, which was indeed immediately evident from the first time we played together at Banff, but I was unsure what to expect a year later.  In fact, the band sound was even more cohesive and “on the same page” than I even anticipated at the beginning of the tour, and needless to say by the end we had taken huge steps forward in developing a distinctive way of playing together.  As Brian Seligman, the guitarist, and myself were discussing near the end of the tour, we are all very lucky that our individual musical visions intersect in a melody-driven style which is not only rewarding from our perspective but seems (at least from our experience on this tour) to really draw in our audiences in a way that is sometimes difficult with jazz.

Now I’m back in Portland, where (like the rest of the continent last month, as we unfortunately discovered on tour), it is still raining.  The forecasters say it will pass soon, and we’ll have some real summer weather, but they keep pushing back the day when that will happen.  Now it’s supposed to be Friday.  Well, we’ll see about that.  Meanwhile I’m getting all my projects (not to mention office) back in order.  There’s lots of stuff coming up in the summer and the fall, including a new Kora Band record and tour, some big shows with the Bridgetown Sextet, and the Dec. or Jan. release of the Tunnel Six album that we recorded at the end of the tour.  Of course I’ll keep updating this blog with (I hope) more regularity and fun stuff as the summer continues.

Meanwhile there’s plenty of photos over at the Tunnel Six site and we’ll be posting some select tour recordings there soon, which I will also link to here.  Cheers!

]]> http://andrewoliver.net/2010/06/great-tour/feed/ 0 http://andrewoliver.net/2010/05/blogging-at-tunnelsix-com/ http://andrewoliver.net/2010/05/blogging-at-tunnelsix-com/#comments Sat, 15 May 2010 13:06:04 +0000 Andrew http://andrewoliver.net/?p=870 Well after nine months of insane planning, the Tunnel Six tour is finally underway!

Myself and other band members will be blogging it over at our site, http://www.tunnelsix.com

Chad and I are currently driving out to Toronto to meet up with the rest of the band in our enormous tour van, MOOSE WARRIOR:

We’re about to leave Sioux Falls, SD and move on to Madison, WI where we will meet up with my old college roommate and former drummer in my band and in Sound for the Organization of Society back in New Orleans, Kevin Dewan.

Anyway, I will keep updating on here but there’s plenty more over at the Tunnel Six site.  Thanks everyone, and if you’re in Canada or Seattle or Portland, make sure to check our performance schedule!

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!

I thought I would write a bit of a post introducing the band with some of the recordings we made up at Banff for you to enjoy between now and then.  The band came about like this.  We were in the first of three weeks of the fantastic workshop at the Banff Centre.  Chad McCullough, Tyson Stubelek, Brian Seligman, Ben Dietschi and myself were sitting in the pub drinking overpriced Canadian beer, and decided to have a session the next day.  We looked behind us for a bass player and there was Ron Hynes.  How convienient, we thought!

The next day, Tyson and Chad and I summited Sulphur Mountain:

Afterward, we realized that scheduling a jam session right after doing that was probably unwise.  However, the powerful mountain air prevailed and re-energized us.  We arrived in one of the rehearsal rooms and sight read Brian’s tune “Not Yet.”  Here’s us playing it a bit later in the Banff Studio (click to listen):

Tunnel Six – Not Yet

Suddenly, we all realized that something really exciting was going on – the group vibe was unbelievable!  (Actually I remember Ben saying something somewhat flustered like “woah, what a vibe!!”).  It was a bizarre and awesome experience that I’ve rarely had to play with a group of people who had never played together before and to feel as though we had been doing it for years after the very first tune!

Anyhow, we were lucky to be selected for some studio time at the fine TELUS studio at the Centre, the fruits of which you can hear here, and we resolved to play together again in some capacity after the workshop.  After returning home, we started to book this tour, which will take place from May 17 to June 6 of this year.  After hundreds of hours writing emails, grants, and calling venues, we are about 80% ready to go, but the news of both RACC and Canada Council support is really an unbelievable asset to our project, and is truly a big milestone in all of our careers as it will enable this tour to proceed as planned.  We’ll be hitting many major Canadian cities (Toronto, Ottawa, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver, Victoria) as well as performing in Seattle and Portland.

Next month we’ll roll out a new website and all the tour dates, etc. but for now, I hope you enjoy those recordings from Banff and stay tuned for more info, and thanks to Canada for providing both the Olympics and a fantastic arts funding program.  Huzzah for northerly neighbors!