stevelawson.net

…That’s what my brain is asking when I’m improvising.

A couple of weeks ago, I had the great pleasure and good fortune to spend a day recording with Mike Outram – guitarist extraordinaire. I’ve been a fan of Mike’s for a long time, having heard him in a couple of different settings with Singer/Songwriter Rebecca Hollweg, and more recently with Theo Travis’ Doubletalk quartet.

We were able to snag a day recording in the rather lovely studios at Leicester College, giving the students there something to record, and a very different type of project to work on. [Read more →]

I’ve got loads of End of year/start of a new decade type blogging to do over the next week, but for now, here’s the Lawson/Dodds/Wood album, freshly uploaded to Bandcamp.com, for download sale, pay-what-you-like.

If you weren’t around here when it came out, feel free to watch the documentary on the making of the album that’s on Youtube – I’ll embed part 1 below, then click through the links. (the sound on the first one’s a bit rough, but it gets much better as they go on!)

Since Saturday’s upload, I’ve put 2 more videos on Vimeo for your delectation and delight, which contrast the different ways that the Looperlative can be used to either simply provide a loop for a piece of music, or be integral to the way it’s created, and the sound that emerges.

I’m fascinated by the relationship between technology and end result, and by the methods that we as musicians can use to keep our own technical thoughts and experiments subservient to the greater artistic and communicative aims… [Read more →]

At the end of Pt IV, I said that band leaders could consider not hiring musicians who don’t blog to help promote the music. A few of you didn’t like that idea, suggesting that it’s all about the music, and why should someone have to be a writer in order to play music?

To which my answer is twofold:

• Firstly, I did say ‘it’s not a hard and fast rule’ – you don’t want to, you don’t have to. But…
• Secondly, you don’t have to be a writer to have a blog. You just have to want to tell people about cool stuff that’s going on around you. Some of the best blogs are a collection of really short posts – they’re a little bit of information, and some kind of embedded media. If you feel inspired to elaborate, or to write in the kind of long form article-based way that I do, that’s great, but that’s not why musicians should be blogging.

[Read more →]

Another thing I touched on in part II was the issue of ‘sidemen’ who have no sense of ownership of a project. This is a big problem when a large part of the cost of any particular gig is paying the musicians. If only one of you is doing the work to get an audience, but four of you are getting paid for playing the gig, something’s wrong.

So, my suggestion is that band leaders need to stop thinking in terms of ‘sidemen’ when booking players – stop hiring people just to play on the gig. This works well all round – when we start thinking like this, we end up having the opportunity to bring a whole lot more to a gig than just playing – we bring with us an audience, some marketing ideas and a whole load of enthusiasm. [Read more →]

One of the weird ways that a lot of the UK jazz players have been corrupted in their thinking by the pop world is the infrequency of their recorded output. As I said in my last post, cost has a fair bit to do with that. But the reason that cost has become a factor is that we’ve lost much of the spontaneity that made jazz so interesting, and instead have tried to match the production values of the pop world, where the life of a performance is wrung out of it, and then dropped back in by the ProTools surgeons… [Read more →]

So, as I said in Part 1, the UK jazz scene is producing some outstanding music, but

• Doesn’t seem to appreciate itself and
• Doesn’t seem to have done much thinking about its future or even its place in the ‘present of music’.

I suppose I ought to define what I mean by ‘the UK jazz scene’ (should’ve done this in the first post, but still) – my thoughts here are based on conversations with a wide range of musicians, interactions with venue bookers, reading the jazz press here and talking to the people who run the labels. It’s all anecdotal, in that I’ve done no quantitative research, but the trends within my observations are pretty conclusive – the exceptions to them are there, but very rare…
[Read more →]

I’ve been meaning to write this for ages, but the inspiration today came from trying to find a link to send out to Asaf Sirkis And The Inner Noise’s album ‘The Song Within’. I couldn’t find anything but 30 sec clips, and lots of links to buy it.
[Read more →]

As I mentioned in my previous post about LDW photos, as well as Helena, Richard Kaby was taking pictures at the gig. They usually work as a team, and between them provide such an amazing document of the gigs they photograph.

Here’s the slide show of Richard’s photos:

Click here to view in full screen mode

You may also have noticed that the pic on the front page of this site is from Richard’s gig pics. Previously, it was one that Helena took at a Sunday Supplement gig a couple of years ago. They’re fab.

I don’t think it’s too much of an overstatement to say that one of the really lovely things about playing jazz gigs in London is that more often that not, Helena Dornellas and Richard Kaby turn up and take amazing photos. Their flickr pages (click on their names) are about as good a visual document of what’s happening in Jazz in London as you’ll find.

So I’m extra chuffed that they came to the LDW launch gig and took yet more amazing pics. Here are Helena’s:

And if you want to come and see us we’re at The Monk Club in Richmond on Thursday (probably today as you read this!)