And so it begins........... It's been a while since we played together. This is the third tour by the band, and I'm confident it'll be as much fun as ever. This is a wonderful group to play with, very open and loose. I think Jim, Julian and I have quite different musical personalities, at least in the details of how we play - but we have a shared love of spontaneity and musical exploration. And I think it's this combination of a shared broad philosophy allied to a difference in approach that makes the trio so creative.
Usually we only have 4 or 5 actual tunes to play and we often don't even discuss what order to play them in, or even if we'll play any of them - walking on the stage knowing anything is possible is very liberating.
So Jim and Julian arrived today and we had a pre-tour dinner, a lot of catching up and a typical musician's discussion of what's going on, what we'd like to see going on and what we hate to see going on! I'm slightly older than the other two but we're broadly [...]
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I've been struck again by just how much contemporary jazz is played mostly in rhythms consisting of 8th notes. It seems that in the rush to find 'good' notes and hip harmonies many soloists have forgotten all about rhythmic variety. Hardly surprising given how much time is given over in jazz education (which most jazz players are products of these days) to harmony and how little to rhythm. The result of this is a rhythmic conformity that is incredibly widespread - 8th notes leavened with the occasional triplet.
Like so much else a certain model seems to have been used - the Mark Turner/Rosenwinkel bands - but only examined in a very perfunctory way, hearing the general 8th note milieu in which Mark and Kurt play, but missing the rhythmic variety used within that. Compare the typical 8th note brutalism of much soloing these days with the wonderful variety delivered by Joe Lovano on pretty much any solo - such as the one below. Let's have more of this please..................
Went to see a concert by what was advertised as a 'cutting edge' group from New York tonight - the Will Vinson/Lage Lund quartet. All great players - especially Lund whose command of the instrument is amazing - but as to the music......... I just found it very dull after only a few minutes. There's a new orthodoxy, a new mainstream that's appeared over the past five years or so, that involves a line-up of guitar, saxophone, bass and drums. This instrumentation seems to have overtaken the old trumpet/tenor/paini/bass/drums convention, and become the combo du jour of the younger generation. Hardly surprising i suppose since there are now so many guitarists.
But the problem with this genre isn't the instrumentation per se, it's the sameness of the music. These groups have taken the Mark Turner/Kurt Rosenwinkel quartet as their starting point - unfortunately it seems to be their finishing point too. Whereas Mark and Kurt created this sound - brooding, dark-tinged lyricism, [...]
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This has to be the maddest jazz related thing I've ever seen............