Recently, on the facebook machine, I have been linking to videos (usually youtube) of music (usually older or lesser known, but not always) with the precursor: “I would like to remind you all that this exists.”
On a suggestion from Alastair, I have done just that.
The content on that site will usually be a video link with possibly a few sentences after it. If/when I have longer or more in depth content, I’ll post it here (to you 4 people who read this blog). In the meantime, check out This Exists to know what I’m listening to and thinking about.
i’m excited to be joining alastair’s group to sing his music
Scant posting is my pattern, but I’ve been filling in the gaps of my musical listening.
On the classical side, I’ve listened to Beethoven’s Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, Holst’s Planets and Copland’s Rodeo. These pieces are about as well known as classical rep gets, and I had listened to portions of them, but not the whole things in their entireties.
On the jazz side, I’ve discovered the joys of Stan Kenton’s Portraits on Standards. We played it last week in the Three O’Clock Lab Band (more on that later). Also John Coltrane & Johnny Hartman is of course superb and essential. Lastly, I finally picked up Snarky Puppy’s latest album, Bring Us the Bright. It’s vastly different from their last record, which was vastly different than the one before that. It’s amoebic music, through and through. Snarky Puppy can exist as a quartet/quintet or have as many as a dozen or more people onstage, and the various styles mash and intermingle with each other. It’s pretty cool stuff.
I’m well into my final semester at UNT. I’m back in the Three O’Clock Lab Band, and excited to be there. The level of musicianship is very high in all sections and we can put stuff together quickly. I’m only taking Lab Band and doubling up on jazz composition lessons this semester, but I always feel like I could use more time. Deadlines are a good thing though, as they make you just cut the crap and do things.
Speaking of which, I should probably hop back on Finale now.
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 recently recieved Monday Night Live at the Village Vanguard, the newest recording from the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra. I’ve been listening to it a lot.
I’ve become increasingly interested in this band since the beginning of college, and even more so now that I’ve seen them live. I saw the band this past St. Patrick’s day, only a week after the passing of their longtime bassist and UNT Alum Dennis Irwin.
I’d like to make another trip to New York next year, and seeing the Vanguard Orchestra again will need to happen.
I went to Ben Folds’s Myspace page and heard some pretty awful songs that were supposed to be on the new record. I later found out that he recorded nine joke versions of songs to leak on the internet intentionally.
“Hiroshima” apparently isn’t a joke song though, and I am still crossing my fingers that the album won’t be disappointing. Ben Folds hasn’t let me down before. I don’t know why I’m so skeptical now. The clips on the Rolling Stone article give a decent idea of how the record is. It seems pretty produced/electronic, so far. I guess we’ll just see.
I heard this band a few weeks ago on 89.3 The Current in Minnesota, and just picked up their self titled album, Fleet Foxes. This was the song I heard. The album is fantastic and the freshest thing I’ve heard since I can remember.
“White Winter Hymnal” by Fleet Foxes.