Tag: improv

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Gig last night…

Despite being exhausted, the promise of a chance to play a set with Orphy and a couple of friends from the States last night at the Red Rose was too tempting, so I headed off out again.

I took a much scaled down rig with me, as I knew I was only going to be playing for about 10 minutes, and really couldn’t be arsed to take the whole lot out again after setting it up and packing it down 12 days in a row at Edinburgh!

the Americans in question are Jeff Kaiser and Andrew Pask playing trumpet (jeff), sax and clarinet (andrew) through lots of delicious electronic processing (Andrew works for Cycling 74, so has written some glorious loop algorythms for Max/MSP).

They did about 25 minutes, and then Orphy and I joined them for a 10 minute improv thingie, which sounded lovely from where I was sat.

The rest of the evening was fun too – a solo trombone set from Alan Tomlinson was a mindblowing mixture of virtuosic free improv and clowning. Very funny indeed.

Then Evan Parker and John Coxon did a lovely guitar/sax duet, which ran the gamut from outnoisemadness to a bluesy mellow jazz bit in the middle and back to freakoutland. Very fine stuff.

And finally a quintet of Tony Bevan (bass sax), Mark Saunders (drums), John Edwards (bass), Ashley Wales (electronics) and Orphy (percussion etc.) finished off the night with more craziness.

And what’s more there was a huge crowd in – by far the biggest I’ve ever seen at the Red Rose, which was great especially for Jeff and Andrew, coming all this way. It was lovely to catch up with Jeff – he came to one of my gigs a couple of years ago in Ventura County, California, and loved it and we’ve been in touch ever since, so it was great to finally get to see him play live.

The London Improv scene is fascinating – it’s got a pretty unique sound to it, and a fairly broad spread of contributors. There are elements to it that come across as over-zealous in their rejection of all things tonal, and other players who seem to embrace just about anything and everything. It’s not a scene I could inhabit all year round – I’d start to feel guilty about playing so much inside music, and that’s insane – but it’s one that I feel enriched and inspired by whenever I get a chance to see those guys play. The time and energy and focus that players like John Edwards and Tony Bevan have put into exploring the outer reaches of what’s possible with their instruments is awe inspiring.

And now I’m exhausted. Today I’m going to have to tidy up the mess from Edinburgh – my office looks like the stock room at a badly organised high-end bass shop, so I need to whip it into shape before teaching tonight.

Soundtrack – Avishai Cohen, ‘Lyla’ (a pressie to educate me from JazzShark – and a fabulous album it is too!)

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Best gig yet, and my first two shows seen this year!

So yesterday started with seeing my first show of this year’s fringe – Dan Mayfield – ‘Live Looping’ Musical Experience is how it’s billed, which was at Sweet Ego, a tiny lil’ venue north east of Prince’s Street.

Dan’s loop set-up included an acoustic guitar, two electric violins (one of them seriously drop-tuned to what sounded like almost Cello register) and a glockenspeil. For looping, I think he was using SooperLooper – I forgot to ask.

The music was the perfect antedote to afternoon madness on the fringe, with the layered violin parts being especially effective – Dan’s intonation on the violin was spot on, which is absolutely vital if you’re layering loads of it. A few of the tracks had really heavily filtered vocal parts, the most effective of which was a reading of a poem written by the mother of a resident at the care home where Dan works – the weaving of the stuff that is going on in his life into the music worked beautifully.

All in all, a lovely gig, and a great way to escape the madness of the fringe for an hour.

After that it was back to flyering, before tea with my mum (that’s one of the best things about coming up to this bit of the UK – my mum is only an hour’s drive away and visits regularly, and helps out with flyering.

I then saw my second show of the fest – Subverse – a series of short sketches on a geopolitical theme; there’s a heck of a lot of anti-war-on-terror stuff here this year, and these sketches were a slightly leftfield take on it, with two of them being monologues in verse that were particularly effective. All in all, good quality brain fodder. Recommended stuff.

And then me – my best show of the run so far, the chat and the music both were on top form for me, with some fine improvised banter with the audience (all 31 of them – a very good sized crowd for a thursday, methinks), who were with me all the way through (got another nice 5-star audience review on my Edfringe.com page. The improv track was another pretty leftfield rhythm – the first two nights have been the most coherent thus far, after that we’ve been getting into some very odd time-signatures…! But I was really happy with the show, and so it seems were the audience.

And tonight I’ve got Guy Pratt on the show, so that’s going to be lots of fun. I think I’ll do a version of Highway One with him on – I can leave off the bass part and let him play around with that, and I’m sure he’d take a fantastic solo on it, so that’ll be it. Yes, I’ve decided, thanks for being such good listeners, bloglings.

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Still doing fine…

By this time into my run at last year’s festival, my average audience size was less than half what it is this year, and I’d had one fairly duff night when I was just exhausted and wasn’t sparkly at all.

this year audience figures are up (28 in last night), I’ve played well and talked vaguely funny bollocks each night, and things are looking good. I now have three special guests booked – Guy Pratt on Friday, Julie McKee on Saturday, and Ronnie Golden on Sunday – three very fine performers, all with their own excellent shows at the festival, coming to enhance my gig in an entertaining way.

Last night’s gig went well again – some press peoples were in, so we’ll see if they like it, but all in all, it was a fun gig with some laughs, and a particularly bizarre version of MMFSOG (which I’ve started explaining for some reason – just seemed like a funny story, I guess…. maybe I’ll post it here one day.)

The audience looping percussion bit of the show is working really well – the resulting track, which I tend to take down similar lines each night, is a fun little improv thing, and often very strange, but it’s great to hear something coherent emerge out of the random collection of squeaks and utterances from the various volunteers.

My other big acheivement yesterday is that I managed to avoid pissed people for the entire day whilst flyering. I’ve just taken to not even offering flyers to people who look like they might have been near alcohol in the last 12 hours, as a self preservation method… It worked.

However, I did see a rather slow moving chap who was inadvertantly covered in posters by some over zealous theatre company. The second direct marketing fatality of the festival – suffocation under layers of earnest Shakespeare and sellotape.

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Number of gigs set to halve??

from Today’s Guardian – the new government licensing rules for live music are set to halve the number of gigs taking place in Britain

“The Licensing Act 2003 was intended to make it easier and more economical for pubs and other small venues to apply for the necessary paperwork. But it also requires some small venues that did not previously need licences to apply for them for the first time.”

Come on, venue owners, get your finger out! For us gig-goers, and gig players, we need to be making sure that venues keep going with live music. The scene does seem to have been improving a little of late, so it’d be a real shame to see that tail off. Maybe they should make the forms downloadable, so we can carry them around and hand them to venue owners?

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fine gig in Berwick

Today was my gig at the Borders Green Festival, in Berwick on Tweed. Playing in Berwick is always odd (well, I say always – I’ve only played here twice since I left 14 years ago!!), obviously, as it’s coming back to where I grew up, and today was particularly odd as the soundman was the same guy that did sound for one of my earliest ever gigs, At one of the first ever local band nights at The Maltings In Berwick!

That was with my first gigging band, EARS. Today was a solo gig at a very cool little festival. The idea behind the fest was that it was a showcase for all things sustainable, renewable, local, therapeutic and generally marvellous, so there was a resources marquee with lots of info about local action groups anti-war stuff, environmental pressure groups etc. there were teepees with various things going on in them – a massage tent, a talks tent and a making cool stuff out of old crap tent. There were stalls from a lot of the local fair trade and organic traders, and lots of fun things for kids to do, as well as obivously the music stage.

The music was very varied indeed, ranging from some very fine local folk musicians to a rather good local rock band, to, er, me. A real spread from solo Bach piano to Balkan folk tunes.

In my set I leaned heavily on the floaty soundscape end of things – No More Us And Them, Kindness Of Strangers, Grace And Gratitude, Highway One – nice big long improv-enhanced versions of everything. The big problem I faced was that the sun was so bright, I couldn’t see the illuminated panels on the front of any of the processors, particularly the Lexicon, so was half guessing which sound to use next. There weren’t any train-wrecks, but it was close at times! Certainly a nice warm up for Edinburgh.

Anyway, as an event, the Borders Green Festival was a resounding success – loads more people there than they expected, no disasters at all, some great music, and a fantastic message. Roll on next year!

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Italy post no. 11 (last one!)

(written 25/7/05 17.07)

So, on the plane on the way home. It turns out there was wifi available in the airport once you’d gone through to the departure lounge, but I met up with a guy from Naples who was at the gig yesterday, so spent the time chatting to him instead of online. So none of this stuff will be uploaded til I get home.

The good news is that I’ve had no hassle at all getting my bass onto the planes on this trip – it remains to be seen if my rack makes it home safely; it’s currently in the hold, at the mercy of the gorillas that throw your stuff around in a way euphamistically refered to as ‘baggage handling’ – I think baggage mutilation or baggage stomping would be more accurate.

Anyway, it’s the home stretch, and I’m hugely looking forward to heading out for curry tonight with TSP and Jez. Can’t wait to be home.

It’s been a very successful trip – a lot of opportunities have presented themselves for further touring in Italy, and I’ll hopefully be back there in November. Which gives me about three months to learn how to explain the story behind Shizzle in Italian.

From this evening though, it’ll be full speed back into Edinburgh, as well as the gigs in Guildford and Berwick, and planning some more dates for September, writing an extended improv framework for a performance at Greenbelt and planning a couple of tours for early 2006 with Theo in the UK and Michael Manring in the US.

…And now I’ve just been fleeced to the tune of £4.60 for a particularly hideous cup of hot chocolate (I’m dying for a mint tea – I’ve had none for days!!) and a cheese and pickle sandwich… don’t you just love budget airlines?

Oh, things are looking up, I’ve just noticed that one of the flight attendants has taken that crap-mowhawk-boy-band hair thing one stage further and is teetering dangerously on the boy-band/flock of seagulls cusp. Somehow bad 80s hair makes the journey more palatable.

Soundtrack – Maurizio Rolli, ‘Archivi Sonori’; Jonatha Brooke, ’10 Cent Wings’; James Taylor, ‘Hourglass’.

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Italy post no. 8

(written 24/7/05 17.18)

Well, despite starting almost an hour late, my gig went very well, thankfully. Another fabulously receptive Italian crowd, some of whom spoke good enough english to laugh at some of the bollocks I was talking between songs (cut down from the usual 40% of the set to just a short intro to each song).

The challenge was doing an entire set of songs on the fretless, something I haven’t done for a while (not counting the film gig on Friday). So the set list went

Grace And Gratitude
MMFSOG
Amo Amatis Amare
Kindness Of Strangers segued into What A Wonderful World
No More Us And Them
Despite My Worst Intentions

Nice long versions of Kindness Of Strangers and No More Us And Them, and more succinct versions of the others. The Seque into What A Wonderful World fits better with the theme of Kindness… than the bastardised version of ‘What’s Going On’ did – will have to feed that back into the set as a stand-alone track, as I do like it, and the fact that very few people ever recognise it. :o)

So now I’m waiting to be involved in a larger ensemble improv, title ‘Jam For Klaus’ – Klaus is a local bassist who was killed in a car accident last year, so everyone is playing a piece together for him. It’s a really nice idea, and I hope it works and doesn’t descend into bass wankery.

Other than that, my work here is done – oh no, I’m lying, I’m doing a little AccuGrooveA/Modulus demo slot later on. The distributors of AccuGroove and Modulus here are lovely peoples, who hopefully I’ll get to work with again some time soon.

Anyway, time to get back to hawking my wares to the receptive CD buying Italian public. We like it here.

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Italy post no. 4 – first gig of the trip

(written 23/7/05 1.10)

Well, tonight was probably the hardest solo gig I’ve ever done, but was pretty rewarding for it.

The gig was providing an improvised soundtrack to a silent film from the 20’s called L’Inhumaine, directed by M. L’Herbier – a part surreal/part narrative film that was OVER TWO HOURS LONG!! This last bit I wasn’t told til about an hour before the gig.

The venue was beautiful – a cloistered court yard, with an art exhibition hanging in the cloisters, and chairs laid out in the courtyard facing a huge screen that was projected onto, with me sat in front of it, slightly off to the left, watching the film and reacting to what went on on screen.

There were two major problems that I hadn’t really forseen – the first was not having a light – the organisers had offered me one, but I thought there’d be enough ambient light to see what I was doing. i was wrong. And number two, the bits on the film where words come up on screen to help you follow the story, Harold Lloyd stylee, were in Italian. The film was French, and if the bits between had been french I’d have been fine, as I’d have been able to follow the story a lot more clearly. As it was, it took me quite a while to work out who was who in the story, and who was a good guy and who was a bad guy, and who was just some weirdness thrown in for Avant Garde effect.

As it is, it was a qualified success – the second half was a lot better than the first, as I had worked out what I was doing by then, and started to use the loops in much more sophisticated ways, keeping some loops and fading them in and out as leitmotifs for different bits of the story, I also had stopped trying to add to many literal ideas and near-sound-effects – I tried this a few times, and it was largely a bad idea (worked for a couple of driving scenes, but not so well for crowd noise etc.)

Thankfully, the audience loved it – it got loads of applause, for a v. long time, and lots of lovely compliments afterwards.

The other fun angle on the gig was that about a third of the way through, we started to see lightning in the sky, obviously from a fair way away, but there was always the possibility that it was heading our way. As the film went on, we had the occasional moment of gusty wind, which made the screen flap about, but cooled me down a little.

The actual rain held off until less than a minute after I’d finished – people were still clapping when the first drop of rain hit me, and within another minute from then, the rain was torrential – fortunately, we got my gear under cover before that bit happened. The rain then turned to hail – huge great mint imperial-sized hail stones, accompanied by lightning that lit up the sky like an apocalyptic hollywood special effects team who’d be asked to go really OTT on the lightning.

So all in, a fun, worthwhile evening that was very well appreciated by the lovely Italian crowd (are Italian crowds ever anything less than lovely? I think not.), and a great learning experience for me.

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The Solo Summit

So last night was The Solo Summit a mini festival-within-a-festival as part of Hackney’s Spice Festival.

The idea was to have lots of performers on different instruments and across myriad styles all playing solo. As it was, it was that and a whole lot more – the solo performances spawned some really interesting collaborations as the mini-sets overlapped.

Due to the current mess of bomb-scares and transport disasters in England, a few of the performers were either late or didn’t appear at all, so the set was being re-jigged all evening, and as a result even more time was freed up for new combinations of players. The initial three long sets became four slightly shorter sets, and each set seemed to take on a character of its own.

The first set began with Tunde Jegede on Kora, who was then joined by Cleveland Watkiss, who was using my loop set-up to great effect, layering vocals on top of Tunde’s gorgeous Kora.

The rest of the set was three of Orphy’s students, Renel, Yao and Michael, two spoken word artists and guitar/bazouki, respectively, who played some marvellous music. My set dove-tailed into the end of Michael’s, as I took a short solo over the end of his last piece. I then played Grace And Gratitude, and went into The Kindness Of Strangers, which Orphy joined me on, with my loop gradually fading after I’d left the stage and Orphy took over for his solo spot. End of set 1.

Set 2 was very different – mainly guys from the London Improvisors Orchestra, it started with harpist Rhodri Davis (playing music a fair bit removed from his work with Charlotte Church!), Bass Saxist, Tony Bevan, flugal horn from Claude Deppa and electronic bleeps ‘n’ squawks loveliness from Steve Beresford. An interesting set with moments of magic, a very long way from the opening set! This stuff is really a stretch for the audience – they seemed to stay with it though, which was great.

Set 3 was back to many of the performers from set 1, with the addition of Pat Thomas on piano (an insanely gifted musician) and Steve Williamson on Sax. I played another duet with Cleveland, and a trio with Cleveland and Tunde on a track that they’d be playing as a duo, which worked beautifully. I had it set up that I was able to loop Cleveland in the usual way, so that gave us a lot of scope to loop ‘n’ layer and have some fun, and it came out superbly well.

By Set 4, we were about an hour ahead of schedule (whoever heard of a gig running ahead of time???), but my ears were getting a little fatigued after such a long time of intense listening. I listened to BJ’s set from just outside the main auditorium, where the processed ambient pedal steel wafted beautifully around. The set grew with the addition of more and more musicians, til most of the LIO guys were back on stage making a glorious racket. Cleveland then joined them, and once I’d turned up his mic, was able to add a vocal percussion loop to it, and start to inject a key centre into the melee. I joined in on bass, and the whole thing gradually mutated from free soundscape to twisted funk/swing groove thang, providing a space for the rappers/spoken word guys to rejoin the party. As the musicians peeled off one by one, the loop faded, and it ended with just bass, acoustic guitar and the two voices. One heck of a journey from the free to the funky. I look forward to hearing the recording of that one too!

All in, a fine evening’s music. A smallish crowd (hey, that’s brit-jazz for you), but an enthusiastic one with a fair amount of stamina!

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More Fudge than a trolley-dash round Cadburys World…

So here it is, The G8’s paper on Climate Change, Clean Energy and Sustainable Development – a few things are noteable from it.

Firstly, they admit there’s a problem. Well done, old rich white men, you’re catching up with the scientists who’ve been saying it for decades. Particularly well done for getting the bell-end in The White House to finally acknowledge that it might be a problem.

Thence follows a list of vague stuff they intend to do. An example –

6. We will, therefore take further action to:

(a) promote innovation, energy efficiency, conservation, improve policy, regulatory and financing frameworks; and accelerate deployment of cleaner technologies, particularly lower-emitting technologies

(b) work with developing countries to enhance private investment and transfer of technologies, taking into account their own energy needs and priorities.

(c) raise awareness of climate change and our other multiple challenges, and the means of dealing with them; and make available the information which business and consumers need to make better use of energy and reduce emissions.

Notice – no figures, no firm commitments, no deadlines, no admission of culpability. Just fudge, fudge glorious fudge.

And let me quote section (b) again –


(b) work with developing countries to enhance private investment and transfer of technologies, taking into account their own energy needs and priorities.

So, hang on, getting third world countries to privatise their currently publically owned energy services is part of the fight against global warming?????? I’ve heard it all now. Not only are they tagging it on as an IMF-sanctioned condition of debt relief, they are commencing bullying impoverished countries into selling off those public services to western energy giants under the guise of it being the greener option. IT’S BOLLOCKS! We have been had – the G8 are once again acting purely in the interests of big business in the west. Bush’s best friends, the guys he called ‘the haves and the have mores’, as though that’s a good thing. Evil, twisted, uncaring, disgusting parasites. How dare they. God, I’m angry.

Make Poverty History my arse.

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