International Guitar Night; Strathclyde Youth Jazz Orchestra September 24, 2009
Posted by byased in Local Musicians, Music but not jazz, Musicians from elsewhere, U.S. Musicians.add a comment
International Guitar Night
Those of you who aren’t going to one of this weekend’s British Jazz Showcases might be interested in the International Guitar Nights which are on at the City Hall this Saturday and Sunday. There are three guitarists playing, American Brian Gore (who came up with the guitar night idea), Lulo Reinhardt (Django’s grandson), and Itamar Erez from Israel. Not strictly jazz, but close enough to possibly be of some interest to jazzers. The concerts start at 8pm, and tickets are £14. International Guitar Night web site.
Strathclyde Youth Jazz Orchestra
There’s an article about the Strathclyde Youth Jazz Orchestra in today’s Herald:
The band’s alumni include Ryan Quigley, Laura MacDonald and Alyn Cosker. And it’s good to see a couple of stalwarts of the older generation of Scottish jazzers, Bobby Wishart and Stewart Forbes, get mentions. Maybe not major figures, but the type of good solid professionals who’ve helped keep the music alive and have done solid work in jazz education.
Makoto Ozone’s No Name Horses August 10, 2009
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The Hub, Edinburgh. 1st August 2009
A day trip through to Edinburgh to catch a couple of gigs at the Edinburgh Jazz (and Blues) Festival. My original plan was to go to Enrico Pieranunzi’s tea-time concert, then catch the Tommy Smith / Makoto Ozone Quartet in the evening. However, I wasn’t convinced I could see all of the evening show and still catch the train back, so I decided to go to see Ozone’s Big Band, No Name Horses, instead.
Makoto Ozone’s No Name Horses.
I don’t know why Japanese Latin jazz intrinsically seems a more bizarre idea than Japanese non-Latin jazz: maybe it’s because jazz has developed into a worldwide language whereas I still think of Latin jazz as firmly rooted in the Spanish and Portuguese speaking communities of the Americas. And Latin Jazz is not my favourite style of the music anyway. So I went along to this out of curiousity as much as anything. But it was excellent.
The concert started with a small piece of theatre: a quartet of Ozone on piano, bass, drums and percussion started playing on stage and then, after a minute or so, the horn players came processing down the aisles, playing as they went.
The set in general was excellent, with crisp ensemble playing and good soloing. Ozone himself came across as the most distinctive soloist, although that might just be because he took took most of the solos and hence had more time to impose his personality. The material, all originals by band members, used a lot of different rhythms and voicings and wasn’t as monotonous as I’d feared it might be. Overall, a very fine afternoon’s music.
And no, I don’t know why the band is called “No Name Horses”.
What I did on my holidays (2) July 3, 2008
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It looks daft having a “what I did on my holidays (1) post without at least one further part, so here it is, even if it’s slightly out of sequence:
I saw the Z Syndicate (Joe Zawinul’s last band, with a replacement keyboard player) at the Treibhaus in Innsbruck. I’d initially thought it was just going to be a tribute band, but it turned out to be (almost) the real thing. I’m not sure how much I’d like their Bitches Brew meets Nana Vasconcelos mix of electric jazz and world music on record, but they were superb live. It was a good venue – a general purpose Arts Centre – and they’d negotiated a deal with the local bus and tram company which meant that if you’d bought a ticket in advance, it was also valid as a day ticket for local public transport.
Lockerbie Jazz Festival October 20, 2007
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Various venues in and around Lockerbie, October 25th to 28th
The Lockerbie Jazz Festival has only been going a few years, but has quickly developed into one of Scotland’s most interesting festivals. It generally features a wide mix of fairly well known mainstream to modern names, one bigger name with potential to attract people from beyond the core jazz audience, and some interesting young local musicians.
This year is no exception. The big name is Acker Bilk; the local talent is Ben Bryden and Leah Gough Cooper; and there’s a wheen of interesting looking visitors.
One of the most intriguing looking concerts is on Saturday the 27th October, and features a sextet made up of sax players Jesse Davis and Tommy Smith, Oscar Peterson’s regular guitarist Ulf Wakenius, and Brian Kellock’s current international trio, the trendily-monickered BK3. It might work, it might not: the line-up is all the more intriguing because the player’s styles aren’t so distant from each other to suggest it is going to be an obvious mismatch, yet not so similar for there not to be the slight element of risk that they might not gel as a unit. Mind you, some of them are playing together elsewhere at the festival: the same line-up minus the horns will be playing as the Ulf Wakenius Quartet on Saturday lunchtime, and Brian Kellock’s BK3 are go on to play a lunchtime gig of their own on Sunday 28th.
On the Friday night, there’s a choice between Acker Bilk (if that’s your sort of thing), a Jesse Davis quartet gig with Paul Harrison on piano, and the highly entertaining singer Liane Carroll.
The local contribution comes from the Dumfries Youth Jazz Group on Thursday evening, the Ben Bryden Quintet at Saturday teatime, and Leah Gough Cooper’s Quartet on Sunday afternoon.
Full details of the concerts, including those I haven’t mentioned here, are available on the Lockerbie Jazz Festival web site.
Bill Kyle’s World Premiere Quintet September 4, 2007
Posted by byased in British Musicians, Live reviews, Musicians from elsewhere.1 comment so far
The Jazz Bar, Edinburgh, September 1st, 2007
I paid my first visit to The Jazz Bar in Edinburgh on Saturday, and very
nice it was too. It’s a small basement venue in Chambers Street, run by
drummer Bill Kyle, which puts on live jazz most evenings, and either a
second live set or a DJ late at night.
On Saturday’s the band is Bill Kyle’s World Premiere Quintet: Kyle, plus
an ad hoc selection of young musicians who don’t normally play together.
It’s one stage up from a jam session, I suppose, and restricts them to
playing (jazz) standards rather than originals. This version of the band
played a lot of Monk tunes, which seemed to particularly suit alto player
Lachlan McLean – an Australian musician who had come over for the
Edinburgh Fringe. I thought he was a particularly fine player, with a
style of his own: he played a lot of shortish, at times almost hesitant
phrases, rather than long flowing lines, but everything he did made
perfect musical sense. If he was a pianist, he’d be Thelonious Monk rather
than Bud Powell. The rest of the band were fine too – Philip Cardwell on
trumpet, Tom Gibb on piano, and Andy Robb on bass – but it was McLean who
made the biggest impression on me.
Oh, and the Jazz Bar serves the most appropriate beer you can have in a
Scottish jazz venue: Deuchar’s.
