So, I’ve been in New York exactly 3 weeks and I’ve already done so much. I’ve been hanging out and playing some jam sessions in Brooklyn. Everyone there sounds good. I haven’t heard a single person that sounds bad. It’s an inspiring thing. I’ve done a couple live sound assisting gigs for a HUGE (14 piece) party/wedding band. They sound awesome, and the gigs make me miss playing and singing with Groove Academy.

I’m off to see Jonathan Kreisberg tonight. There is so much good music to hear all the time here.

I just spent a week in New York City. I’m moving there in August and I spent some time scoping out potential neighborhoods to live in. I also saw some more shows including the Vanguard Orchestra on Monday night and the N Result last night. There is a LOT of good music happening here constantly. It’s exciting.

I have the uncompressed .aiff files of my graduate recital. As soon as I convert them to a smaller size (mp3), I’ll post them to this site. It was a great night and there was music made that I’m really proud of. Videos on youtube will also be put up, once I do all the technical stuff.

I’m in New York right now for a week. Hanging out and seeing shows. I saw the Le Boeuf Brothers at the Jazz Gallery last night.

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.

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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.

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.

Brian Stark, Sean P Jones and I went to see Steely Dan at the Nokia Theater last night. The experience was excellent. There was an opening set of jazz tunes by some of Steely Dan sidemen, with the addition of (as Philly pointed out) organist Sam Yahel, who didn’t play with Steely Dan. I’m just assuming that he’s along for the tour as the opening act in most cities.

Steely Dan played for about two hours. A lot of the songs were noticably slower than their originally recorded tempos. On some tunes, like “Pretzel Logic,” the effect was awesome, just increasing the greasy goodness of the minor bluesy feel. On other tunes, such as “Aja,” the reduced tempo seemed to make the song a bit sluggish. A few of the tunes were played in lower-than-original keys, but with aging rock stars, this is pretty commonplace.

Musical standouts were trombonist Jim Pugh, saxophonist Walt Weiskopf, drummer Keith Carlock and especially guitarist Jon Herington, who managed to be elegant and precise without losing energy or my interest. I recall Jim Pugh, who visited UNT last fall for the inaugural performance of the UNT U-Tubes Jazz Trombone Ensemble. Their first publicly played piece was my original composition, “Blue Lobster.”

Donald Fagen was sort of a white Ray Charles type character and was very lively throughout the performance. Walter Becker sang on “Gaucho,” and also had a humorous monoglogue during the breakdown section of “Hey Nineteen.”

The tickets cost $55 each, but including driving, parking, and semi-ridiculous Ticketmaster fees, the real cost of the concert was about $80. I still think it was worth it, and may even consider paying as much to see them again, should the opportunity arise.

So the Freddie Hubbard show I was supposed to see at the Scat Jazz Lounge tonight has been “postponed due to illness.” This is disappointing, but probably not as disappointing as seeing sick Freddie Hubbard play.

Oso Closo, a band filled mostly with friends of mine, is scheduled to be the rock band for several productions of the Who’s Tommy this September.

Lately, I’ve been listening to a lot of the first Pat Metheny Group album. In response to this, I just purchased the album Fictionary, by Lyle Mays, Marc Johnson and Jack DeJohnette.

Also, I’m still listening to tons of Steely Dan, in anticipation of their Grand Prairie show next month.

Steely Dan is coming to the Nokia Theater in Grand Prairie on August 21, and (assuming the ticket price isn’t outrageous), I will be going. I took a look at who the band is for this tour, and it’s (of course) filled with heavy, heavy players.

A name I immediately recognized was Keith Carlock’s, whose band Rudder I’ve seen a few times. He’s incredibly energetic and is pretty influential among the young drumming crowd, even though he is still young himself.

I also recognized the names of trombonist Jim Pugh and saxophonist Walt Weiskopf. Jim visited UNT last fall for some master classes and the inaugural performance of the U-Tubes. Steve Wiest and I listened to some of Walt’s nonet music during composition lessons this past spring.

Steely Dan is one of those groups that I start appreciating way too late. Only in the past couple years have I really gotten into them, and I still haven’t seriously listened to either of the Donald Fagen albums, the Walter Becker album, or Steely Dan past Gaucho. Almost everything on the Citizen Steely Dan Boxset I’m at least slightly familiar with (if not deeply love). I need to step up my listening and get those albums on rotation.