The new Trevor Hart Quartet

I'm proud to announce a new addition to the new line up of the Trevor Hart Quartet. A new member, a girl, P'rly Shells, joined the band on Friday 2nd March. Weighing in at 8lbs 14 oz, P'rly joins her mother, Spotter, and her sister Fizzy D and of course her dad to complete the fabulous foursome. All are really overjoyed with the new band member though it is yet to be decided which instrument she'll play.


In breaking news, the other Trevor Hart Quartet will play their 1st gig for a while at Rics Bar on Tuesday 20th March at 9pm. Trevor, Toby, Andrew and Grant return to their old haunt in what is now their 10th year of Tuesdays. Must be some type of record for any band let alone a freeform jazz band!

John Zorn Masada Quartet - Karaim

Here's a great performance by John Zorn's Masada Quartet live at Warsaw Summer Jazz Days 1999, Poland. Someone has dropped a lot of Zorn's Polish performances on YouTube which is great for us all to see how this band works.
John Zorn - alto saxophone,
Dave Douglas - trumpet,
Greg Cohen - bass, Joey Baron - drums.

Animal vs Buddy Rich

Here's a fun little thing. Animal is the very favourite of my daughter, Fizzy D. I could just imagine Grant Collins doing a gig like this!

Animal's drumming was done by Ronnie Verrell....for those interested he was one of the greatest session drummers in Britain during his day (pre-rock). Buddy Rich is holding back a lot here...

Music and art

There has always been a significant between the visual arts and music.Examples abound. French composer Claude Debussy hung out with the impressionist artists and was influenced to become a master of instrumental color and texture. It is this attention to tone color -- his layering of sound upon sound so that they blend to form a greater, evocative whole -- that linked Debussy in the public mind to the Impressionist painters.



In New York in the 1940's the Abstract Expressionist movement produced work that exemplified the careful balance between accident and control that characterizes both art and the improvisational jazz of bop. Jackson Pollock was an avowed jazz fan, often attending live performance's at New York's Five Spot club. Critic Ellen Landau notes the influence of jazz on Pollock's painting:

"As early as 1945...one prescient critic compared the "flare, spatter and fury" of Pollock's paintings to modern music...Pollock loved jazz..."rocking and rolling" for days on end to Dizzy Gillespie, Bird, Dixieland, and bebop. What undoubtedly attracted him to this type of sound was not just its rhythm and tempo, but its naked presentation of honest and deeply felt emotion..."

Minimalism in art has been enthusiastically taken up by composers. Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass first explored these concepts in the classical field. The great Australian band The Necks have a synthesis of improvisation and minimalism.

The well know Australian artist Joe Furlonger says that the act of applying paint to canvas is similar to improvisation in jazz. By this he meant that, after drawings and drafts, one is left with the gesture, the act of creation which is by definition improvisatory. It is unsurprising to find a collection of artists at a gig. (Some have appallingly anachronistic tastes in music but the same could be said of musicians for art.)

Which all brings me to Florence Forrest's 1000 Cranes. Florence's cranes look like Kabuki characters. As she writes in her blog http://windbagandthunder.blogspot.com/ the crane is a symbol of longevity and grace. There is a beauty and a serenity in these objects that belies a rigor in thought and theory that is the hallmark of the best in music and art. The cranes need a musical landscape to exist upon: beautiful and serene; quiet and profound .

The influence of Roy Elridge

Occasionally I find myself surprised by the emergence of a memory of a long forgotten musical influence. Coming across the name of Roy Elridge, the fiery trumpet player, triggered this within me recently. I was reding Ian Rankin's latest Rebus novel, The Naming of the Dead. One of the victims is called Ben Webster and the associations flowed.

In the pantheon of American jazz trumpet players Roy stood as a bridge between Louis Armstrong and Dizzy. ie, he played swing. Perhaps it was because, like Lester Bowie, one of his seminal influences was carnival music that Roy played with a great sense of drama.

This is best illustrated in the 50's record Ben Webster and Associates. Apparently Ben ran into Roy on the way to the recording studio and invited him to the session. It's really a jam session that was so popular in those times... a couple of blues and standards. Now that's normally a formula to turn me right off but the playing is superb. Roy's solo starts with the 1st 12 bars of a blues repeating a triplet riff G# A B over and over. By the change in the second chorus he is screaming like a Baptist preacher (even though he was a Lutheran). ecstatic, exuberant, the glory that is a trumpet. He seems like he's pushing his instrument to the max. Jubilation is the object. Roy is just not doing the changes but has this preacher -in- the -pulpit quality that so suits the trumpet.

As a little aside, I'm including this little article I found that illustrates the racism endured by Afro Americans playing in white bands.

Aloha 2006

ALOHA 2006

It's time for our end of year bash. This is happening at Rics Bar on Tuesday 19 December. It features the Trevor Hart Quartet and my new band Bacalau.

Bacalau
Bacalau, the Spanish for a slated fish that makes some delicious dishes, is a venture into flamenco, tango and North African by myself, Andrew Veivers on Flamenco guitar and Simone Pope on percussion. Sometimes John Rodgers joins us on guitar and piano. Bacalau has a lightness in its sound and feel.

Amantes in some ways.
THQ is nearing its 10th anniversary at Rics Bar. It must be some type of record in long gig runs and I'm sure there'll be some type of celebratory event to mark the occasion early next year. THQ'll perform some new works that are counterpoint, ie each musical relates to the other and has the same importance. These new pieces are a new direction in our music and are a return to the earlier music of Amantes in some ways.

It was the best of Times...
2006 was the best of times and the worst of times. It has been such a joy and a challenge to witness the growth of our daughter, Fizzy D, from a baby to a little girl. Walking, talking, laughing and crying like all of us humans. Fizzy D represents the hopes for the future.

And truly we are living through the worst of times with ignorant US foreign policy laying countries to waste and civil war. Iraq slips into bloody civil war; a brutal US condoned invasion of Lebanon. Howard is ever the faithful Bush lackey, grotesque in his half truths (flour as a chemical agent) and lies (lest we forget:children overboard). Aloha 2006 is the title of our end of year bash for its humanitarian connotations. According to www.alternative-hawaii.com/ Aloha is more than a word of greeting or farewell or a salutation. It means mutual regard and affection and extends warmth in caring with no obligation in return. Now Howard and Bush could do with a bit of that!

The image for the poster comes from cheap 50's Mexican graphics. I particularily like its off register screen print. Mexico has a strong history of graphics. Jose Gaudalupe Posada in the 1910-20's did some amazing woodcuts for newspapers.