http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/news/jazz-trumpeter-freddie-hubbard-dies-1003925464.story
This is sad news. I was supposed to see Freddie a few months ago in Dallas, but he cancelled due to health reasons. Freddie along with Lee Morgan really embraced the concept of strength in trumpet playing. Trumpet has the potential to be very loud and in your face. I’m sad that I never got to see him perform before he died.
Ethan Iverson has already put up a collection of important albums and links up at his blog, Do The Math. I saw the Bad Plus last night. Siri, my sister and I were fortuitously moved from the mezzanine to a table on the floor for some unknown reason. They played a couple tunes that they played last year, such as Ornette Coleman’s “Song X.” Being on the floor was great. Though we were off to the left side a bit, it was good to be able to see Iverson’s hands, which were matter and antimatter, operating in simultaneous and seemingly disparate meters and tempos.
I’ve only been back in Minnesota for a few days, and it has already been a most musical experience. I sat in on a rehearsal with the Nova Contemporary Jazz Orchestra. I’ll be seeing them at O’Gara’s in St. Paul tonight (Tuesday) and quite possibly sitting in a few tunes. They’ll be playing quite a few Dan Cavanagh tunes. I rehearsed a couple of them with the band and thought they were pretty cool!
I also brought in three of my own charts. They were read to positive responses, which made me happy. The group has 4 trumpets and 4 trombones as well as no guitar player. I may revise my charts someday to better suit that instrumentation instead of the 19-piece Kenton style monstrosities we have at UNT. I moved some guitar solos to other instruments and had the bones play parts 1, 2, 3 and 5.
After that rehearsal, I went back to St. Paul to see Happy Apple play at the Artist’s Quarter. Both sets were great and the Dave King banter was in top form. Comical highlights include King calling the soprano sax “the money stick” and the band playing about 15 seconds of “The Cult of Personality” by Living Colour (which would be a bitchin’ tune to play in any circumstance). I also ran into some musician friends who I hadn’t seen for years. This jazz is a small world.
After the Christmas festivities at home, I’ll be seeing the Bad Plus at 9:30 next Sunday. I always forget to buy tickets early, so the seats are mezzanine level and quasi centered. Next year I’ll hop on the tickets early and get a table down by the stage. The Bad Plus brought it last Christmas and they’ll bring it this one too for sure.
My personal experience in listening to jazz has been particularly scatterbrained. I owned very few actual jazz albums before going to college. It sort of makes me wonder how I decided to major in something I knew so little about in comparison with my peers.
Once I got to UNT, I was suddenly surrounded with people who had been listening to this music all their lives, with influences and suggestions from well-listened teachers. There were kids my age who had truly intricate knowledge of many important jazz albums. A lot of the most famous players in jazz were little more than names to me. Some particularly poor scores on Jay Saunders’s Intro to Jazz Records tests made it abundantly clear that I needed to do a HELL OF A LOT MORE LISTENING to jazz if I really wanted to understand and play it well. Since then, my knowledge and understanding has grown a lot, but still, as I said earlier, scatterbrained. In the same way that a puzzle is not completed from the top left to the bottom right, the gaps in my knowledge get filled in a seeminly random fashion. I’ve written about this before.
Today, Ethan Iverson, the pianist for The Bad Plus dropped a motherlode of blog posts on various topics in jazz. My understanding of these topics ranges from paltry to moderate. It’s obvious from his writing that the dude has listened to more than a few metric assloads of jazz in his time. I’ve given a couple of these articles a skimming and will continue to dive into them and listen to the albums and players he’s referenced. I’ll do this especially in the Marsalis/Young Lions-centered pieces. I probably have fewer jazz records from the 1980s than any other decade.
Iverson is only 11 years older than me, but he has been in New York for about 15 years, which means he’s experienced a lot of the major changes in the scene firsthand. To me and people my age, it’s all history. It’s very distant. If I want to know about Wynton Marsalis’s influence in New York, I have to read or hear about it. I didn’t live it. It’s the same thing with when even relatively newer groups/artists like the Bad Plus, Kurt Rosenwinkel and Joshua Redman. By the time I was aware of these people, they had already made their splashes and had grown from their initial albums.
This sort of sounds like complaining, I guess, but I’m OK with my situation. I’ll bet a lot of people my age have a similar experience. I’ll continue filling in gaps, however haphazardly. The way I write and play music is constantly being influenced by things I hear from all different periods. Quincy Jones’s old Basie charts show me things I want to learn and incorporate as much as Maria Schneider’s, Darcy James Argue’s and VOID’s (Tom O’Halloran and Troy Roberts).
I’m planning on seeing Iverson wih the rest of the Bad Plus at the Dakota around Christmas time. They always have a run of shows there this time of year. I went last year and thoroughly enjoyed myself. I’ll also be able to catch Happy Apple during my time back home. It’s been a couple years since I’ve seen them. They have seemed to always have a show the weekend before I get back to Minnesota for a break from school.
I sure have lots of thoughts in my head.
I’ve long been enamored with this progression. It involves “bVI” going to “V7″ to “i,” usually with a turnaround or walkdown back to “bVII.” It was most prevalent in late 70s and early 80s soul recordings. You’ve definitely heard it before. Some examples:
“What You Won’t Do For Love” by Bobby Caldwell
“Got to be Real” by Cheryl Lynn
“Between the Sheets” by the Isley Brothers
“I Like It” by DeBarge
“Just the Two of Us” by Bill Withers and Grover Washington Jr.
“Do Me Baby” by Prince
I’ve been looking for more recent examples of this most powerful progression. I’ll post them as I come across them.
“I Don’t Wanna Die Anymore” by the New Radicals
This is a video of the Australian Jazz/Funk band VOID performing their tune “London” at the 2006 IAJE Conference in New York. I might be somewhere in the back of this video, as I wandered into the hotel during their set. It’s hard to tell. They write and play great tunes, which have inspired me to write some of my own.
I just got back from spending Thanksgiving in Seattle, Washington. I stayed with my girlfriend Siri and her brother and sister-in-law. Portions of my visit were also spent with Dave Dolengewicz and Lauren Hendrix. Last Tuesday, we went to the Owl ‘N Thistle Irish Pub for a jam session. All the players there sounded great. Dave and I sat in on the last three tunes of the night. This is the kind of stuff you go to when you’re breaking into a new scene (or even after you have broken).
This is one of my more recent big band charts, “Rifts.” This is the recording from the Spring 2008 One O’Clock Lab Band at Lab Band Madness.
This is a clip from a few weeks ago of the UNT U-Tubes performing my arrangement of “I Thought About You” at the Greenhouse in Denton. After having written quite a few non-swinging charts, I decided to get back to basics and something straight ahead.
Last night, I saw the senior recital of Kelyn Crapp (guitar) and Jeff Randall (drums). After their recital, they played two funk sets at the Greenhouse. The whole night was fantastic. I think I saw Kelyn burst into flames at one point. His original tunes were excellent and had everyone in the room nodding their heads. Jeff is very good at restraint and economy when it comes to a groove. Lots of drummers will throw too much extra junk into a groove, which diminishes its power. Jeff doesn’t do that.
Both these guys are in the 3 O’Clock Lab Band with me this semester. Bassist Scott Mulvahill is also a part of that rhythm section and their combined pocket is one of the tightest I’ve experienced or heard.
I just completed a two hour course to be certified to drive UNT’s 15-passenger vans. I’ll be driving alumni from Dallas’s airports into Denton. They’re going to be in town for this event, which will be an extravaganza, I’m sure. I don’t know who I’m driving. Who knows, I could be picking up Blue Lou Marini from the airport! We’ll just see.