Tag: improv

Posted on

Two gigs this week (watched) and two days at LGS.

LGS being the London Guitar Show. I was there Friday to meet up with the nice peoples at Bass Guitar Magazine to chat about me writing a column for them, which I now need to sketch out a plan for, and then get writing. Caught up with a few other friends. Went back Saturday to see more friends, and was hoping to check out the Celinder basses which are amazing (Lowell brought one to my workshop in Cupertino , California back in January, and I wanted to see more), but the noise was so loud it was pointless.

However through the din I did get to listen to Laurence Cottle, jamming with guitarist Paul Stacey, and despite the noise and Paul having to play through a bass amp, they made a glorious noise. Fab musicians. Caught up with more friends. It wasn’t a bad show for bass stuff – the Bass Centre had a stand with all manner of bargains on it, EBS, GB Guitars, MarkBass, Celinder, the re-born Trace Elliot, Ashdown, Peavey and a few others were there with plenty of bass toys. It’d be unfair to compare it to NAMM as a) it’s open to the public, and all about selling stuff not launching new products and getting dealers and b) it’s in England.

The two gigs were Nitin Sawhney on Wednesday, and The Bays on Friday.

Nitin’s gig was a bit of a disappointment – the tunes he did with the Asian singers, Nina Bhardwaj and some guy whose name I can’t find online, were amazing. Great vocalists. The other stuff came over like a load of Urban Species mid 90s mellow hip-hop grooves with some OK tunes. Nothing special. Maybe it’s just that I had high expectations. It was enjoyable, just not the mind blowing experience I’d expected. Still, Orphy Robinson came with me, and an evening out with Orphy was enough to make it all worthwhile (and I didn’t pay for the ticket – ’twas a present from Dweez, who couldn’t go due to work commitments – thanks John!)

The other gig.. actually, there were two other gigs, as I went to see Roger Beaujolais play with his sextet in the Foyer of the Festival Hall before going to see The Bays in the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Roger’s band were very fine – London really does have some fantastic jazz players!

The idea behind The Bays is that they play completely improvised club-tastic dance grooves. The feel can change from night to night – sometimes its more house-y, sometimes more Drum ‘n’ Bass-ish. Friday night sounded like Gong remixed by Daft Punk. Top notch. The addition of a third keyboard player and a guy playing synth stuff on guitar was fine, but hardly necessary, as they make enough noise as a quartet. Still, the gig was fab, and I’d recommend the Bays to anyone who can cope with the volume (it was loud!).

Soundtrack – Eric Roche, ‘With These Hands’ (Eric’s had to cancel a few gigs again recently due to being ill, so if you’ve been playing to buy this fantastic record, now would probably be a good time! Head over to Eric’s site to have a listen – he’s one of the finest solo acoustic guitarists I’ve heard, one of the nicest people I know, and an indie artist that you really ought to support by buying his marvellous CDs!)

Posted on

Calling all Brit musicians

OK, so it could just be another phoney exercise in pretending to talk to the people concerned before ploughing ahead with whatever crap policy they came up with in the first place, but the government are at least pretending to want to hear from people in the music industry about how to improve things for live musicians in Britain.

Here’s the page about it on the culture secretary’s page – all looks good. The email address to contact them is LiveMusicForum@culture.gsi.gov.uk – so let them know your thoughts.

For my part, I’ll be emailing about classifications of music and venue – the licencing laws for venues that require them to have thousands of pounds worth of restructuring work for safety reasons seem ludicrous when the act is a solo acoustic guitarist, or bassist, or a piano/sax duo or whatever – in fact, the audience is likely to be far more static and orderly for that kind of event than they would in an ordinary pub! Lumping together all music as a job lot for licencing is nuts – I think there’s still some sort of ‘two in a bar’ ruling that means you can have solo acts and duos, but I think the ruling changed… need to look that one up. Anyone with any insight, feel free to post over in the forum.

Soundtrack – Steve Lukather and Larry Carlton, ‘Live’; Gillian Welch, ‘Time (The Revelator)’.

Posted on

The wisdom of Mo

England hasn’t produced that many solo bassists, or bassists who front their own instrumental bands under their own name. One of the few – one one of the finest in the world – is . Better known as a session player (Jeff Beck/Phil Collins/etc.), Mo has released a string of really really beautiful solo records, with his fretless bass as the primary melodic voice. He’s great. His last album, Time To Think is one of my all-time favourite bass-feature records.

Anyway, the reason for discussing Mo is that I found a cutting from an old copy of the sadly now defunct Making Music magazine. The cutting is a column that Mo wrote for them about session playing. Here’s an excerpt –

“There’s a certain mythology currently surrounding session work:

1 – It still exists as a career option
I’m afraid it doesn’t. The thrusting, vibrant scene of some years ago has, regrettably, gone. There’s still a fair amount of work around, but it’s almost entirely for artists and producers who happen to be friends – ie it’s very much ‘who you know’. Breaking in is harder than ever.

2 – You must be able to read music
It helps to read and is, on occasion, vital, but for many gigs you don’t necessarily need that particular skil. You must, though, be able to create a bassline from a chord chart and , in some cases, no chart at all – ie your musical ‘ear’ is everything.

3 – You mustn’t contribute ideas to a song but just play the written part
This is nonsense: it’s quite possible both the producer and the artist haven’t a clue what bass does or how it does it and are desperate for your expert input. Een a written line should be scrutinised in case you can improv on it.”

Wise words indeed. Certainly true in my case – all the session work I’ve had has been through friends and chance encounters, not some marvellous mythological network of agencies and management.

Soundtrack – , ‘Music Has The Right To Children’.

Posted on

Two gigs – one played one watched

A two gig day, but I only played at the first one.

It was the lunchtime gig at the RFH Foyer, with the mighty , and it went very well. Well, I wasn’t in the PA for the first couple of tunes, due to me plugging the DIs into the wrong outputs on my mixer (doh!), but with my rig, it didn’t really matter… :o) After that, we sounded marvellous! This duo just keeps getting better and better, and one of the improv/goo things we did today will no doubt end up as a new Travis/Lawson tune. Good stuff.

Here’s a piccie, taken by Jude on her phone cam thingie –

Then tonights gig, which began with a lovely surprise – I was going to see and anyway, but I walked down the stairs at the Borderline to the unmistakeable sound of ‘s pedal steel guitar! He was playing in a duo with a singer/songwriter called Laura Stark, and doing a mighty fine job of it too!

After that was Duke Special – Pete’s a great performer, and a truly delightful person. If you ever the chance to go and see him, please take it.

And Juliet, she just keeps getting better and better. Her voice was on top form tonight, the new songs she was playing sounded fantastic, Brian and the-keyboardist-whose-name-I-didn’t-catch were both playing and singing marvellously, and Brian Kennedy made a guest appearance. A truly wonderful night out. They are coming to the end of the tour, but if you’re in Gloucester tomorrow night, or Swindon on Saturday, please go and see Duke and Julie do their respective thangs – gig dates here.

Posted on

Half way through the tour…

So, we’re at the half way point of our lil’ Manring/Lawson tour, and having a great time – So far we’ve had gigs in Brighton and London, and a day at the ACM in Guildford yesterday.

Brighton was at the Joogleberry Playhouse – a very cool new venue, which we managed to fill on Tuesday night (no mean feat for a solo bass gig!). Great to see some familiar faces there – our good friend Rich Ravenhill who has organised all my solo gigs in Brighton worked his magic again, flyering, postering, getting the word out and generally being fab. The venue people were great too.

the day at the ACM is a fabulous college, and just keeps growing – new buildings, more students, more teachers… a very cool place. Stefan Redtenbacher, the head of bass, has booked us there before, and it’s always a pleasure to go and give some esoteric inspiration to the students.

And then Darbucka last night – it was my second gig there, and I love it (though they could do with some stage lighting… 🙂 ) – another great turn out, and lots of friendly faces. Good stuff!

My favourite part of these gigs with Michael is the duo improv stuff, not knowing where it could go. The duo set in Brighton was probably the best improv stuff we’ve ever done – loads of lovely ideas, and it all seemed to flow really well. London wasn’t quite so stellar, though there was still some magic at points, which i’m glad we got recorded…

So, onwards and upwards. This afternoon, we’re at the access to music british academy, and then back at Traders in Petersfield! See you there!

Posted on

Another fine gig with Theo

This afternoon, Theo and I had a gig in the Royal Festival Hall Foyer – which, dispite being in ‘a foyer’ is actually a really really nice gig – big audience, lovely atmosphere, perfect for big spacious loveliness.

The setlist included a handful of tunes from For The Love Of Open Spaces – Flutter, Uncle Bernie, In A Place Like This and Lovely – one each of our solo tunes (I did Grace And Gratitude) one arrangement each of a tune we’ve written (Amo Amatis Amare with Theo on soprano sax, and then All I Know from Theo’s Heart Of The Sun album), and a couple of big spacey improvs.

All in all a top gig – the sound was great and we played very well indeed. Very positive reaction from the audience, and we’ve already been booked to play there again. Good stuff.

Theo’s one of the easiest musicians in the world to play with – an expert looper, and an amazing listener, he slots in around what I’m doing and directs the music in very subtle ways. It’s great being on stage with someone who is such a fine melodic improvisor and does textural ambient stuff as well. A real treat.

I’ve been listening to Theo’s new album, Earth To Ether, a lot over the last few days – it’s a hugely diverse representation of most of the things Theo’s been up to of late. There’s stuff with his quartet, a solo flute-loop thingie and a couple of songs with Richard Sinclair (70s prog-pop stalwart, out of Caravan/Hatfield And The North etc.) Richard’s voice is a little disarming at first – mainly because it’s so rare to hear jazz sung with an english accent. Richard avoids the trap of brit singer trying to sound like they grew up in New York, but he’s SOOO english that it takes a bit of getting used to it. But I’m used to it now, and really enjoy it.

There’s a strong pastoral, rural feel to the album – Theo seems to be inspired by open space a lot (hence the title of our CD), and it gives everything he does a very warm feeling. The other brit saxophonist I’ve been listening to a lot recently is Ben Castle – another superb musician, and every bit as eclectic as Theo. His is an urban eclecticism that provides a fantastic compliment to Theo’s broad sonic vista. Ben’s stuff also sounds like he’s playing whilst smirking a lot of the time – lots of very comedic stuff, but he always makes you feel like you’re in on the joke. Very clever stuff, hugely enjoyable. I strongly recommend both CDs – Ben’s is called ‘Blah Street’.

Soundtrack – Matthew Garrison, ‘Matthew Garrison’; Theo Travis, ‘Earth To Ether’; Ben Castle, ‘Blah Street’; Jackson Browne, ‘Looking East’; Sheila Chandra, ‘Moonsung’.

Posted on

a gigful week

so that’s two down, one to go of this week’s gigs… actually three down if you count the Masterclass on Tuesday afternoon as a gig. Anyway, Tuesday, yes – set off early to pick up Rob Jackson from Cambridge, nice lunch, drive to Leicester. The masterclass was at Leicester College, arranged by access to music – marvellous organisation who put on clinics, tours, resource music colleges and run courses of their own. Great people to be working with.

So Rob and I did a clinic for a bunch of bassists and guitarists, talking about technique and looping and the industry and running your own business as a musician and all that stuff. Seemed to be very well received.

Off to the venue – The Looking Glass – in Leicester. Unloaded into a really groovy little cellar venue room. Out for a bite to eat with Jono from Access To Music, back to set up for gig. sometime around now, a piano player started playing in the bar upstairs, clearly audible in the venue downstairs… uh-oh.

Rob went on, played beautifully, did valiant job of ignoring piano-monkey upstairs (who, to be fair, was only doing his job…) A request to the barman to ask him to turn down didn’t appear to make any difference to the sound level, and it proved to be a big distraction during my whole set. At least for me, if not for the audience, especially when play-me-the-song-I’m-the-piano-man started banging his foot out of time with me and himself… not ideal conditions for a gig, and as a result, I didn’t play particularly well. Still, very warm response from the audience (which was not a bad size considering the gig was booked at the weekend…)

Very nice to see a friendly face or two there (thanks Phil)

Wednesday – Rob dashed home to tend to Rob-things, Kerry Getz arrived back, nice lunch, then learn Kerry’s tunes for gig that night. Kerry’s tunes, it has to be said, involve more key changes than this bassist is used to – I do all that repetitive looping nonsense, I’m not used to four or five key-changes in a tune! Still, I’m a pro, so it’s not hard, just a novelty, like combining the mindset of a jazz gig with music of a top-class singersongwriter gig. Anyway, Kerry’s songs are marvellous, so the songs weren’t hard to pick up – they make sense, which helps.

Drive down to The Bedford, in Balham, meet The Small Person and a rather drunk The Cheat there. Also on the bill are Cathy Burton and Dan Wheeler – good chums of long-standing – and it turns out the Johnny Berliner (his real name, not some obtuse JFK/donut reference) was on in the same venue as me at Edinburgh, in a children’s show, and gigging in the late night cabaret venue too! It’s always nice when someone wanders up back-stage and says ‘I was listening to your CD yesterday!’ – don’t happen all that often, mind you, but when it does, it improves that particular day by about 7 or 8 happiness/smugness points on the Saint and Grievesy happiness/smugness scale.

Acoustix at The Bedford is run by one Tony Moore – Tony used to run the Kashmir Klub, near Baker Street, which was in its time one of the most important and influential venues in London, due in no small part to Tony’s passion and enthusiasm for making top quality acoustic music available in nice venues to appreciative audiences. He’s tireless in his support for such things, and one of the friendliest people you’ll ever meet. A good man, for sure.

Kerry and I are on first (after Tony’s own song opens the show), we play Ocean In A Bottle, and Suspended in December (as an insight into the way my brain works, I wondered quite how the theme of the song would change if the title were suspenders in December, imagining that to be a rather cold and impractical clothing choice for such a time of year…) All goes well.

After us, Cathy and Dan, play, followed by Johnny Donut, Sarah Slean (fab canadian piano playing singer/songwriter person – at the Borderline tomorrow night), and a couple of others (sorry, didn’t write down names…). All good stuff.

Second set, order changes, we’re on second last, first song is duo – Julianne – another fine song. Second one Kerry does on her own, and half way through a recurring problem with the battery compartment on her guitar kicks in and the guitar cuts out. Cue me getting back on stage to hold the battery in place for the rest of the song… very odd, but funny nonetheless.

Tonight Rob and I are in Colchester at The Headgate Theatre. I’m looking forward to this one, as it’s a lovely venue – I’ve no idea how many people are going to be there, but whatever, it should be fun.

Before that, I’m trying to sort out final details for a couple of gigs in the US at the end of October (I’m heading over for a wedding, and taking a bass with me), and also the last couple of gigs with Michael Manring.

Soundtrack – Juliet Turner, ‘Burn The Black Suit’; Nick Harper, ‘Blood Songs’; Andy Thornton, ‘Victims And Criminals’; Micheal Manring, ‘Thonk’; Joni Mitchell, ‘Both Sides Now’.

Posted on

Recent new CD roundup.

Got a few new fab CDs lately, so here’s a quick summary –

The Low Country – The Dark Road. The Low Country is Rob Jackson‘s band with singer/songwriter Emily Barker. Coupled with a sensitive understated rhythm section, that make downbeat miserable alt.country as though they’d been born and bred in rural Tennessee, not Newcastle and Australia respectively. Rob’s one of my favourite guitarists around, and the marriage of his gorgeous tone and open tuning with Emily’s moving songs and emotive voice is magical.

Julie Lee – Stillhouse Road – more country stylings. I played a load of gigs with Julie a few years ago, and have seen her play loads of times, and enjoyed her self-produced Cds for ages. Now she’s released her debut big-budget album, with a bunch of friends from Nashville… friends that include Alison Krauss, Vince Gill, Colin Linden, Dave Pomeroy… Nashville A-listers one and all. It’s beautiful as you’d expect. Perfectly played, though I do miss Julie’s fantastic srawling rambling guitar playing – if you’ve ever seen her live, you’ll know what an original sounding guitarist she is and sadly there’s not much of her playing on here, but if you’re going to replace her with anyone, it might as well be Colin Linden! A gorgeous CD.

Pierce Pettis – Great Big World. Another long term fave chez Stevie, and someone else I’ve played with in the past. One of Nashville’s finest and most respected songwriters, and a stunning singer and virtuoso guitarist to boot. Pierce was on Windham Hill back in the 80s, and has more recently released a string of fabulous CDs on Compass. This one’s as good as the others, with the added bonus for bass-heads of Danny Thompson appearing on a few tracks on upright. Particularly on the song ‘Leonardo’, the pairing of Pettis and Thompson is inspired.

A Marble Calm – Surfacing. A Marble Calm is a project assemled and revolving around Peter Chilvers, gentlemanly bassist and piano/keyboards whiz from Norwich, and part of the Burning Shed family of artists. Peter and I have duetted a Norwich looping/improv gig and he opened for Rob Jackson and I in Cambridge recently with a lovely ambient piano ‘n’ sampled strings looped improv thingie. This album is in a similar vein, only with some fantastic special guests adding to Pete’s own ambient wash – Rob Jackson, Theo Travis, Tim Bowness and Sandra O’Neil all make fabulous contributions to this haunting and engaging ambient singer/songwriter CD.

Todd Johnson/Kristin Korb Trio – Get Happy. Todd’s been one of my favourite bassists ever since I first saw him playing with Jimmy Haslip in a two basses + drums trio at NAMM a few years ago. Gifted with a remarkable chordal vocabulary and a technical facility that allows him to simultaneously comp chords and play swinging bass lines on his six string bass, he’s worth at least two players to any band he’s in. And this is him in a trio with double bassist/vocalist Kristin Korb, and drummer Kendal Kaye. How Kristin manages to sing and swing at the same time, I’ll never know – her vocal phrasing is amazing, and she plays walking lines like Ray Brown. The CD is a collection of a great vocal standards, with a couple of originals thrown in. Lovely lovely stuff.

So there you go, get shopping!

Soundtrack – all of the above.

Posted on

General Update

…please salute the general…

Anyway, what’s been going on? On the 16th (the day of my last blog post) was my gig at the Troubadour with Andy Thornton. Andy’s very very good indeed, singer/songwriter bloke, and all-round top man. That was lots of fun except for one thing – one of my MPX-G2s decided to stop working before the show – the Lithium battery that keeps the sounds in the memory had run out. Badly Drawn Boyo dropped into Sound Control to pick up a MIDI cable so I could copy all my sounds across from the other machine, but there’s some weird machine ID thing that I couldn’t work out on the gig, so I had to do the gig with one G2.. bugger.

Further investigation reveals that the battery is SOLDERED to the circuit board inside – WHAT ON EARTH IS THE REASONING BEHIND THAT??? That makes no sense at all – why on earth not spend the extra 2p that it would cost to fit a little housing for it (like you get on Computer motherboards) so that it was changable. No, instead, they solder it there. So much for pro-level gear. What balls. Grrrrrr. For that matter, why on earth isn’t it rechargeable anyway??? what’s with having batteries running out in stuff that spends most of its life plugged in???

Alright, calm down, deep breath – I know you’re just as irate as I am about all this…

Day after Troubadour gig was the Greenbelt workers party – that’s not like the Polish Workers Party, not political, it was an actual party – lots of drink and nibbles etc. Except that I got lost on my way there and missed the nibbles. ah well. Much fun was had, and the curry afterwards made of for the lack of nibbles.

Day after that (saturday) was Paul and Angus’ birthday party – Paul was thirty-something, Angus was one. So clearly what they wanted to get out of a party was very similar… :o) Angus being my God-son, I provided the music for the evening, by playing an extended duo improv set with Harry the Cellist – I’d not played properly with Harry for a long long time, so that was a real treat.

On Monday Kerry Getz arrived – Kerry’s a fab singer/songwriter from California that I met at the Kashmir Klub a couple of years ago, and who has helped arrange gigs for me in the US before now. She’s over here for a few days doing some gigs, so she came to stay chez Steve/Small Person. Tuesday was sightseeing with Kerry, followed by a trip to see Ross Noble… again! The Small Person and I went the previous week to see him, and despite tickets being £25, it was worth the return visit – yes, he’s that good. Possibly the funniest 2.5 hours of my life.

Yesterday, BJ Cole came round for more jamming/recording/musical exploration – BJ, as has been said here many times, is an incredible musician, and a very nice bloke indeed, so lunch and noodling with Mr Cole is a very fine way to spend a day. We got some top stuff recorded, so hopefully I’ll stick some up in the Street Team Stash before too long…

And last night The Small Person and I went over to Rickmansworth to see Jenny Eclair’s one woman show, ‘The Andy Warhol Syndrome’ At The WatersMeet Theatre. We saw this at Edinburgh, and it was very very good, so went to see it again. Was very nice to see Jenny again, after meeting up a couple of times at Edinburgh. I’ll not say too much about the trip to the pub after, other than to say that a copy of a certain ex-mrs Peter Powell’s ill-fated autobiography, which was previously on the shelf of said pub, is no longer there, and may or may not be on the shelf of a considerably more successful writer… A book that flops that badly is a rare prize indeed… ;o)

Onto the weekend, and tomorrow I’m up to Edinburgh for the day to record the music from the Greenbelt Festival communion service – the music that we played live was all just bass and drums, but I’m expecting they’ll be adding a little more for the recording… I could be wrong though.

soundtrack – Kerry Getz, ‘Little Victories’; Pierce Pettis, ‘Great Big World’; Joni Mitchell, ‘Both Sides Now’; Todd Johnson/Kristen Korb, ‘Get Happy’.

Posted on

…and Last night's gig

Forgot to mention last night’s gig in previous blog entry.

‘Twas back at Traders in Petersfield, another marvellous Stiff Promotions evening. This time, it was me opening, then Jez Carr doing his thang, with some duo strangeness at the end. It was the first gig Jez and I have done like this in a v. long time – we do a lot of normal ‘standards’ gigs for weddings and parties etc. but don’t get to improv or play originals nearly as often as we’d like. My solo set went well – I’m playing pretty well at the moment, due largely to the large number of gigs I’ve done since the album came out at the beginning of August. I’ve played Traders three times this year before tonight, so it was really nice to have some new material to play, from Grace And Gratitude.

Jez’s solo set was on next, and he played fantastically – a mixture of originals and choice jazz tunes (Waltz For Debby, Search For Peace and Blame It On My Youth), he had the audience in wrapt attention. Hugely compelling stuff.

The for the duo set, we started as we always do – just start playing and see where it goes – the magic was still there, and the first duo improv went all over the map, pretty seamlessly blending styles, keys, swapping chordal and melodic roles between us. Top stuff, very exhilarating. We then played a couple of standards to finish – Breakfast Wine, a tune we’ve been doing for a while out of the Real Book, which was OK, but I made the mistake of not switching back to fretless, and the melody didn’t really come across the way it does on the fretless. And then Autumn Leaves – a bit of an old chestnut but we played it really well. We were already half an hour over time, and still got called back for an encore (a v. good sign, methinks), and Jez suggested in a moment of inspiration that we play ‘Bittersweet’, from And Nothing But The Bass Fortunately he remembered it even better than I did, and we played a lovely version, a very fitting end to a top night.

If you were there, feel free to post a review in the Reviews section on the forum. And thanks for coming!

© 2008 Steve Lawson and developed by Pretentia. | login

Top