Tonight @ Doug Fir!
Posted on | December 15, 2009 | No Comments
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!
Recent shows and reflections thereupon
Posted on | December 5, 2009 | 2 Comments
As you can tell from the infreqent and cursory nature of my recent posting activity, things have been pretty hectic, and I’ve been doing a lot of travelling to Seattle recently to prepare for (and finally play) our big show last Thursday night at the Columbia City Theater. I’m back in Portland for a solid month now, and without too many gigs am finally settling down to do what I hope will be a decent amount of composing and practicing, as well as getting ready for the holidays. In this post, I thought I would just recap a couple of shows that I’ve been involved in recently, and share some of my recent thoughts about the Portland jazz scene in the process.
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!
Columbia City Theater Tomorrow!
Posted on | December 2, 2009 | No Comments
KEXP Tomorrow Night!
Posted on | November 29, 2009 | No Comments
In preparation for our big show at the Columbia City Theater on Thursday night, the Kora Band will be appearing tomorrow on KEXP’s “The Best Ambiance”, a great and very comprehensive radio show about the music of Africa hosted by Jon Kertzer. We’ll be talking and performing around the 7:00 hour, so if you’re in Seattle, tune in to 90.7, or check it out streaming everywhere at http://www.kexp.org
If you can’t tell, we’re really excited about the show this coming Thursday, so you should be too! If you’re in Seattle, be sure to get your tickets in advance here, and we hope to see a lot of folks down there!
Red Poppy in San Francisco Friday!
Posted on | November 24, 2009 | 1 Comment
I’m in California for Thanksigiving, and took the opportunity while here to book a gig in San Francisco at one of my favorite venues, the Red Poppy Art House. I first played at this venue a few years ago with Devin Phillips, and really enjoyed the vibe, so I’m excited to be back! I’ll be playing with Geoff Brennan on bass and Smith Dobson on drums. I’m excited to introduce some new trio tunes, both originals and arrangements of others’ tunes, on this gig, as well as to play with a Bay Area rhythm section – it’s always nice to expand a bit and I’m certainly a fan of the I-5 corridor and of working with new and varied musicians up and down the west coast. Hope to see some people out on Friday, tell your Bay Area friends!
Post-Colonial African Groove of the Week #9 – Badiene
Posted on | November 20, 2009 | No Comments
The post-colonial groove returns from its hiatus to feature one of the greatest stars in modern African music, Youssou N’Dour, from Senegal. Youssou has been an immensely popular force on the world music scene internationally for many years, having gotten his start in the ’70s with Super Etoile de Dakar. He has been instrumental in the development of mbalax, a rhythmically hyperactive style of Senegalese music blending traditional elements, especially percussion, with very contemporary electric guitars and keyboards. This track comes from a recording of a concert in Bercy, France, called “Le Grand Bal a Bercy,” which he holds every year and which attracts hundreds of thousands of fans. I don’t have many specifics about the other musicians or the lyrics, but here it is (click to listen):
The mbalax style is always very exciting, and Youssou’s band is truly one of the tightest bands on any musical scene, as far as I can tell. Their arrangements are simultaneously fluid and extremely specific, and the precision of their group hits, especially at the intense tempos, is very admirable. Many of the rhythms used here comes from traditional and contemporary sabar drumming, a uniquely Senegalese type of drumming using one hand and one stick. There are several sabar drummers in the group, as well as Youssou’s griot, who accompanies him on talking drum with great virtuosity. The keyboard parts are also of note. They are quite complex rhythmically and recall much of the traditional material that would be played on kora.
Youssou has many great albums which are worth checking out, and some of his Bercy concerts have also been released on DVD, allowing you to check out the rock star lighting and choreography accompanying these performances. Enjoy the weekend!
[Image credit: Henryk Kotowski, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported]