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House Concerts, and More New Youtube Video.

photo of Steve Lawson and Lobelia playing at a house concert in EdinburghLast Friday (April 17th) Lobelia and I played our first house concert in a couple of months in Leith, Edinburgh.

It was a great demonstration of everything that’s cool about house concerts:

  • It was organised very much at the last minute (wasn’t even advertised at all until 2 weeks before the gig),
  • It was booked by someone who’d seen me give a masterclass a few years ago and couldn’t be bothered to wait for a ‘proper’ venue to get round to booking Lo and I, so got on and did it himself.
  • It was populated by friends and family of Paddy who booked it, most of whom had little idea who we were beyond Paddy raving about it.
  • It was marvellous. Continue reading “House Concerts, and More New Youtube Video.”
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A Foray into Dark Ambient Improv (More New Music)

photo of a painting from the Urban Scrawl exhibitionI spent a lovely few hours today with David Stevens, a wonderful musician working mainly with abstract drones and soundscapes, often using bowed strips of metal to create the most amazing textures.

We met through Tuttle, and have been talking for a while about recording together, and today it finally happened, though not without an hour or so of technical faffing thanks to some problematic gear… Continue reading “A Foray into Dark Ambient Improv (More New Music)”

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Open Letter to the UK Jazz Community Pt IV – No More Sidemen!

photo of Steve Lawson and Michael Manring on stage together at the Brookdale LodgeAnother 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. Continue reading “Open Letter to the UK Jazz Community Pt IV – No More Sidemen!”

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Open Letter to the UK Jazz Community Pt III – recordings continued…

picture of Beth Rowley live at the Troubadour in LondonOne 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… Continue reading “Open Letter to the UK Jazz Community Pt III – recordings continued…”

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Open Letter To the UK Jazz Community, Pt II – do more recordings!

photo of John Lester and Theo Travis live at the 606 jazz clubSo, 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…
Continue reading “Open Letter To the UK Jazz Community, Pt II – do more recordings!”

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A Week in Academia pt 2 – Innovative Media For A Digital Economy

picture of an old school photographer on More LondonSo part II of my academic week wasn’t even planned at the beginning of the week. After my panel contribution at Wealth Of Networks II, I was having a conversation with Marina Jirotka of Oxford Univerisity, who said they had another conference on Thursday entitled ‘Innovative Media For the Digital Economy‘ and wished she’d known about me earlier so I could’ve been involved… so I did what any conference loving solo bassist would do – moved my teaching around, and cleared space in my diary to be there!
Continue reading “A Week in Academia pt 2 – Innovative Media For A Digital Economy”

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