The Tugboat Brewery is a small venue in Portland which has for years been one of the primary places hosting consistently adventuresome music locally. The reason for this is strictly financial- basically, they didn’t want […]
Category: jazz
Branford Marsalis on the problem with jazz
In the Seattle Weekly, Branford talks about what’s going on with jazz- here are a few excerpts: You put on old records and they always sound better. Why are they better? I started listening […]
Simple variations on Syncopation, Lesson 4
That’s pages 10-11 for those of you with the old edition– as you can see I’ve given up completely and started referring to the parts by their new edition names. I’ve been working with this […]
Putting some things in
This is me at my most masochistic. I’m back in updating my events band’s book again- it’s a long, tedious process- and thought I would continue to share the gory “thought” process with you. Previously […]
Quick takes
– Jon McCaslin @ Four on the Floor shares this video of Marvin “Bugalu” Smith, who I had actually not heard of before. He was in Sun Ra’s and Archie Shepp’s bands in the 80’s. […]
Different values
I usually keep just one CD in my car for days or occasionally weeks at a time- recently for me it’s been Don Cherry’s Art Deco, an old favorite that had been languishing in the […]
Daily best music in the world
Twice in a row makes this a feature, I guess. Because I don’t have time for much else, here’s Weather Report from 1971, with Alphonse Mouzon on drums and Dom um Romao on percussion. Plus […]
Favorite albums: Billy Higgins
I guess I could’ve called this Higgins and Haden. These are four records from what is for me the classic phase of Higgins’ career in terms of his sound- he’s got that heavy-ish rivet cymbal […]
Podcast – Episode 4: Charlie Parker heads
Today’s podcast is a selection of practice loops made from the heads of well-known Charlie Parker tunes: Billie’s Bounce Yardbird Suite Donna Lee Cheryl Quasimodo Scrapple from the Apple Au Privave Crazeology (actually by Bud […]
Billie’s Bounce deconstructed
That sounds a little sexier than it actually is- I was working on this tune with a student recently, and we ended up breaking it down phrase by phrase. I’ve written the lesson up for […]