Braxton, OK

I just can't stop getting Anthony Braxton music. I just keep getting more and more into his structures and methods of improvisation. Luckily, I've been able to do so and still save a lot of money by checking out live shows posted on dimeadozen.org, and albums posted on jazzpourtous. Its been great to listen to all of this material and try to soak in whats actually happening. Also, it was great to see that someone on dimeadozen posted the very show that my brother and I went to at the Iridium. Good Times!

Also, I'm still getting material together for Standards & Practices, and I'm starting to make better friends with standard notation (I've kind of always had a love/hate relationship with it). We have a gig now at Commercial Taphouse that I will hopefully be able to get the River City String Quartet for. They played last night with The Ok Bird, and it was amazing. David Chamberlain (leader of the quartet) is the man! So all positive and forward moving developments.

These developments will be greatly aided by Google Calendar---all I can say is that this thing rules major ass.

Links:
Dime A Dozen
Jazz Pour Tous
The OK Bird
River City String Quartet

Improv Zones

So with the recording of the standards & practices album a little over a week away, I've decided to take a different approach with the music. Since we've been a duo, the tunes that we write and put together always sounds like part of something more. They sound as if they are not complete on their own a lit of the time, but the songs are very fun to play over. I've always been interested in getting away from soloing over changes, and this duo has helped me do that. But also I like the idea of playing one continuous set of music, one that would be made up of more songs and ideas than anything we'd played before. The solution is the idea of using songs as parameters for improvisation, and using imrov as a way to bridge the gap between all of these seperate ideas. This way, it should create new challenges in navigating the material, and will also hopefully allow great flexability in the order and makeup of the songs. For the CD, I'd like to play one set, but have track marks to break up the music, so listeners have an easy way to navigate it. Thats one thing I hate is when its just one long track. Like Orthrelm's "OV", its an amazing record---sometimes I wish there were track marks--just to make it more user-friendly. Maybe thats missing the point, but at the end of the day--it just increases the usability...or something like that!

Recording Soon

So just got back from Ones & Zeros practice, and I can't wait to record with those guys. This new song we have is coming along real nice, and its fucked up. I do a lot of 5 over 4 stuff, and Josh and Nick do a bunch of weird unison hits, and somehow it always ends up sounding cool and not too busy. Not sure what the title will be, but I will say that one of my students at the Y gave me the best potential title..."Red is the sound of Lava". Man, he's only 8 and he comes up with all the greatest word combinations ever! Also, getting stuff ready for Standards & Practices to record as well. Thats a whole different thing, where I'm interested in one long continuos set of music, and a lot of space for improvising within the parameters of the tune. There will be more reading than I'm used to on that one, but I think it adds a great aesthetic to have constant changes. So the future's looking good for these bands---now we just need to play out more!

Richmond Standards

One alarming trend that I've noticed in Richmond is the insistence of jazz musicians to play standards ALL the time. Its an interesting phenomenon, because it limits the musicians to Real Book tunes, but at the same time can help creative improvising in ways that are alien to many other areas (maybe even New York).

It all revolves around the local arts college VCU, and its jazz program. With its heavy emphasis on standards and limited historical perspective, students graduate ready to either teach, or play standards. The inferiority complex that can be used to talk about Richmond Arts can also be applied to music students, because they hardly ever view themselves as even capable of creating original music to improvise over. Its and interesting condition that seems to have led to some mixed results.

Even though the jazz gigs are always a mix of the same musicians, and even though they almost always play standards from the book, they almost always rip the shit out of these standards! So by only focusing on standards, they have pushed the level of improvising over these songs through the roof. I have talked to more than a few musicians that literally can't believe what we do here with standards...If only more Richmond musicians would develop original material. I seemed to be one of the few that was playing original music in a jazz setting, and part of the reason we started Patchwork Collective was to change this, and I'm glad to see that its slowly working. The tough part of this trend is that since people are only focusing on the language of Charlie Parker and early Trane, they are missing a whole world of possibilities for improvisation, thus limiting their choices severely.

This will change though, and I'm glad to say that the level of creativity in the scene has increased more in one year than I've seen in the past 7!

Lascaux and Recording

The Lascaux Trio gig went well last night. The group is Jason Arce on sax, Pinson Chanselle on drums and myself. Last night John D'earth came down and played trumpet with the group for pretty much the entire performance. It was great getting to play with John (who is pretty much a living legend), and I felt like he really made the whole group sound better. We didn't get to rehearse, so my version of Leonard Cohen's "Last Year's Man", and Pinson's Joanna Newsome arrangement went unplayed, but we did get to try some interesting things. Playing mostly standards, Pinson and I had this great idea that just didn't pan out. It comes from an Anthony Braxton show from 1975 that I've been listening to a lot, where the rhythm section of Dave Holland and Barry Altchul simple play one note hits every couple of measures behind the soloists. The idea sounds great, but when Pinson and I did this over Sonny Rollins' "The Bridge", it just didn't work out. We knew it was bad when D'earth simply stopped playing. He just didn't deal with this in the manner which we hoped, so we reluctantly just played a regular rhythm changes background behind the remander of the piece...oh well. Overall the gig went well, we'll see if D'earth calls in the future.

And I got recording dates for Ones and Zeros and Standards and Practices in April, so that will be cool, and I will be mastering my solo gerund project so stay tuned for that.