New York Jazz Holiday

To the Village Vanguard to see Kurt Rosenwinkel

Me: ‘Hi, I’ve bought three tickets online for tonight – here they are. Thank You’

Door Guy: ‘Certainly, let me see.......(consults list), yes, here we are and there you go – enjoy the show’

Now that’s what MIGHT have happened if it had been any other jazz club in any other city in the world, but this being the Vanguard, in New York City what actually happened was that I delivered my part of the script and the tickets, and was met with a blank stare and disinterested shuffling of the list by the troglodyte on the door, whose studied boredom and lack of any verbal response made be feel like giving him a richly-deserved clump across the side of his head for his rudeness and stupidity.

Of course there are rude people everywhere, and other places where rudeness is the norm (Hong Kong!), but only in New York do some people pride themselves on being jerks. They imagine it’s cool somehow, and wear it as a badge of honour, and of all the possible things one could be proud of, this has to be the stupidest – being a jerk is easy! Anyone can do it! Being polite takes a little (and only a little) more effort. The rudeness itself I don’t mind, (and after about 15 visits to NYC I expect it), but the pride that some New Yorker’s take in it I find really irritating, stupid and a bit pathetic actually. Rudeness as hipness? Ha!

Rant over.

I went to New York with my son Chris, who’s a guitarist, for a ‘jazz holiday’, packing in as much music as possible in 6 days, picking up my new bass, catching the Winterjazz Fest, and seeing as many friends as possible. There’s no better place to undertake a musical orgy of this nature – there is no question that New York IS the jazz capital of the world. There are more great (and some not so great) jazz musicians living there and more jazz activity going on there, than in any other one single place in the world. This has both advantages and disadvantages for the musicians who live there (more on that anon), but for the casual visitor such as myself, it’s nothing short of an embarrassment of riches and I try to get over there at fairly regular intervals to see friends, play sometimes, and see as much music as I can.

Back to the Vanguard and Kurt. He was playing with a quartet (Aaron Parks, Ben Street and Ted Poor), and I was kind of disappointed with it – I felt it was underpowered in terms of energy and commitment from the group and I couldn’t make up my mind whether it was because the band didn’t feel like getting it going or whether they were just having an off night. It seemed a bit careless and casual at times, and really, considering its history, carelessness and casualness are not qualities you should be bringing to the Vanguard if you’re lucky enough to get a week there. Kurt really did get it going on a Byard blues in the second set and then you could see what all the fuss is about, but overall I felt a bit short-changed.

My son disagreed with me, he thought it was great – but then again, he’s a guitarist! The deification of Kurt by pretty much all guitarists under the age of thirty continues apace, and I can appreciate why – he really is unique and has his own thing. But he’s reaching that point where (like other icons before him) he’s in a winning situation with the audience as soon as he takes the guitar out of the case and so the motivation to grow and challenge himself has to come from him and him alone all the time. I’m not sure he really was up for that particular challenge on this particular evening.


(Dafnis Prieto)

Winter Jazzfest

The following night it was on to the Winter Jazzfest. I had deliberately made sure our visit coincided with the festival having read great reports of it the year before. And it was great – musically. But organisationally, to use a technical term, it sucks. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to listen to music under more uncomfortable conditions, where the audience is treated more shabbily and where the admission and ticketing procedures are more shambolic and audience-unfriendly. To buy a two-night ticket in advance and then to have to queue in the freezing cold two nights in a row to pick up tickets for the individual nights (why!?) and then not to be guaranteed entry to anything (more freezing queue-ing), and to have to endure hours of standing at the concerts themselves while not being able to actually see what you were hearing, is an indictment of the festival organisers.

Anecdotally too I’ve heard the musicians are paid very little if anything at all. If this is true then it’s a disgrace, since the much touted musical riches of which the festival boasts is based on these same musicians not getting paid. Which would be cool if nobody else got paid either. If ever I’m asked to play for nothing I always say that I’ll be happy to do it as long as the promoter, the bar staff, sound engineers, ticket sellers, doormen, and anyone else involved with the event (including the venues) are not getting any money either. But that’s never the case – it’s pretty much always the musicians who are the saps in these situations. It really leaves a bad taste in my mouth when everybody wins except the guys around whose work and dedication the whole event revolves.

But musically, and hardly surprisingly given where we were, there was some incredible music to be heard (if not seen). We attended some great performances by bands working in a wide variety of stylistic/musical approaches and the 40-minute set format of the festival really does aid multiple consumption of music, especially given the diversity of the acts. Not everything was great, but most was at least very good and often much more than very good.

I managed to catch Nguyen Le with Rudresh Mahanthappa (great!), Dafnis Prieto with Jason Lindner and Kokayi (very interesting and the improvised ‘auction’ was outstanding), Jamie Baum’s Octet (great writing), Dana Leong, (terrible, risible), Tineke Postma (very well played, but maybe a bit naively programmed considering the wham-bam-thank you ma’am nature of the festival set), Miles Okazaki with Guillaume Perret and Damion Reed (fantastic set, some very original music played by a real band), and Steve Coleman and Five Elements (a real return to form, killer set and the new band sounds great – the addition of piano and guitar really adds something).

Musically it was great for the most part and I know I inevitably missed a lot of great music too, you can’t be everywhere. But really the organisers need to get their act together – a festival boasting of its greatness while treating both audiences and musicians badly, and depending on their goodwill and willingness to put up with poor conditions is doing some pretty hollow boasting................

(with Lindsey Horner)
Socially the festival was very nice too of course and I ran into so many musician friends – Jim Black, Ben Perowsky, Rudresh Mahanthappa, Curtis Hasselbring, Nguyen Le and and many others just in the two nights we were there. And I hung out with several other musicians over the course of our visit – Arthur Kell (our very generous and gracious host while we were in NY), Jonathan Mele (whom I knew from his time in Dublin), David O Rourke (another Dublin connection – we knew each other when we were both jazz tyros, going to every gig we could in the late 70s), and especially Lindsey Horner the great bassist who is one of my oldest friends in music. Lindsey studied music in Dublin in the late 70s/eartly 80s and was on the scene, and we became good friends and have been ever since. In recession-ridden Ireland of the 80s (though we have now renewed our acquaintance with recession in recent times) about 30,000 people a year were leaving Ireland to work abroad – we used to say that Lindsey was the only person of that era to travel in the opposite direction.


(Manifestation of the iPhone Plague at Kenny's Castaways)

One thing I noticed at the gigs in NY, which is now pretty common everywhere, is the iPhone Plague....... At every gig, little beacons of light appear in all corners of the room as people obsessively check their messages, or send SMS messages. It’s impossible to look around the room and not see someone checking their phones. It’s become both a plague at gigs, and a worrying indicator that people find it more and more difficult just to concentrate on one thing at a time. Even something as great as live music can’t hold their attention anymore, everything takes second place to those damn phones. And these are adults who presumably have only had cell phones for about the past 10 years – what will it be like for kids who have been raised with them? Will they have any attention span at all or be capable of listening to music without doing something else at the same time? Brave New World..........


To the Jazz Standard on a Sunday morning to do a rhythmic clinic for young musicians. This was part of the programme they run there for talented kids called the Jazz Standard Discovery Programme, a terrific initiative directed by my old friend, guitarist arranger and composer David O Rourke, where the kids get a clinic or workshop or some kind of educational event first and then play – for real people, in a real jazz club! One of the biggest problems for young musicians (and many older ones too) these days is that it’s really hard just to be able to find places to play. For these kids the chance to play in the Jazz Standard on a Sunday morning to a full house in a jazz club atmosphere is invaluable and something that they’ll always remember.

And they were very talented kids too – very pleasant and engaged during my presentation and enthusiastic and disciplined in how they presented their music to the public. After all the ‘is jazz finished?’ talk that seems to excise the minds of everyone in the music these days it’s somehow very reassuring to see a bunch of 14-18 year olds who are interested enough in the music to take the time to learn something as challenging as ‘Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum’

Terence Blanchard

In the evening we went to see Terence Blanchard’s quintet at the Jazz Standard – something I thoroughly enjoyed. With guys like Blanchard, who because of his gifted youth has been around for so long already, it’s easy to take them for granted. At this point he has such a huge body of work behind him and is recording and writing all the time, it’s easy to underestimate just how exceptional this guy is. This was brought home to me during a blistering set with his quintet in which Blanchard demonstrated what a true improvising virtuoso is, and in which his group, propelled along by Kendrick Scott, explored three pieces in a set that harked back to traditional jazz values. Having just come from the Winter Jazzfest where the eclecticism of contemporary jazz was patently evident and where all kinds of grooves were utilised and influences flaunted, Blanchard’s gig was a nice reminder of how good more traditional jazz can be in the right hands. His band demonstrated again that in the end it’s not really about the material (he finished the set with ‘Autumn Leaves, the hoariest of all hoary old chestnuts), but the imagination and creativity that you bring to it. As a bassist I must say I was really impressed by Joe Sanders, a guy I’d not heard before but who operated in the creative space between the drums and the soloists in a way reminiscent of the way Ron Carter bossed Miles’ quintet in the 60s, but without aping any of his mannerisms. Real creativity in accompaniment and cracking the whip in the rhythm section.

Brazil!


(Cidinho Teixeira, Fabiana, Itaguara Brandao - Zinc Bar)

Whenever I’m in New York on a Sunday, I always go to the Zinc Bar to hear Cindinho Teixeira’s group playing outstanding Brazilian jazz (it’s almost a religious observance for me......). The spirit that’s on display here – and the almost careless virtuosity – is always uplifting, and they play music in the way that I believe it should be played. They always give you the vibe that there is nothing better a person could be doing than playing music. And that’s how it should be – it IS a privilege for us to be playing music, and especially creative music, yet you’d often not know that from our onstage demeanour - shuffling on stage, almost never speaking to the audience, no tune announcements. No wonder ‘civilians’ often feel that attending a jazz gig is like being at a meeting of a secret society........ But not with the Brazilians – they display a wonderful combination of incredible musicianship with an esprit de corps that’s just a pleasure to witness. And of course the music is great too! They’ve been doing this gig on Sunday nights for 15 years, and it shows. Piano, bass, drums and voice with occasional sitters in. Unfortunately the second set was blighted by one of these – the saxophonist Alex Foster who sat in on difficult tunes he patently didn’t know, played overlong solos littered with blues scale clichés, with the microphone rammed into the bell of his horn and generally managed to suck all the life out of every piece he played on. It’s the kind of thing that gives saxophone players a bad name...........


(My new bass)

The New Baby

Apart from the music and the hang, the other major reason for me to go to NYC on this trip was to pick up my beautiful new bass. This was custom built for me by the great luthier Harvey Citron who lives and works in Woodstock. Lindsey was kind enough to drive us up, so we set off in a blizzard and made our way to Harvey’s place and picked up my new baby. It’s a very exciting thing to get a new instrument, especially one as good as this. Once again it’s an acoustic bass guitar, but with a narrower body than my old bass and with more electronic control.

I’ve been exclusively playing my other bass since 1993, so to get a new one at this stage is really something – terra incognita. I was wondering if it would be too different to the one I have and maybe I’d not enjoy playing it as much as I’d hoped. But one quick run up and down the neck of the bass scotched all those fears – it’s a wonderful instrument to play with a great sound, and fits my hand beautifully. What’s interesting to me is how different it is to my other one – because of the narrower body it doesn’t have as loud an acoustic sound as my old bass, and it has more of a feel of a bass guitar than the old one too. The old bass has a lot of upright qualities to it, due to its large body size and lack of any volume or tone buttons on the body – it’s just the sound of the instrument and trying to reproduce that as closely as possible on the amp. With the Citron there’s far more control (bass geek alert!), since it has 2 Piezos and a magnetic pickup so you can move between the acoustic sound to a completely electric sound. I can see myself using both instruments in different settings – the older one for more out-and-out ‘jazz’ settings, and the Citron for other situations.


(Lindsey and I collecting the bass in the middle of a blizzard....)

New York - Beauty and The Beast

So, a week in New York and a good battery charge as always. Looking back on it, the Winter Jazzfest pointed to both the strengths and weaknesses of the NY jazz scene. On the one hand there’s an extraordinary concentration of great musicians in a very small area, making for a hothouse creative atmosphere and an abundance of players on every instrument who play on a very high level. If you’ve got a creative project that you want to do, you will definitely find the right musicians for it in NY. I think that’s especially true of drummers – the amount of great drummers in New York is just scary, I really envy New York musicians the access they have to these drummers.

Being a jazz musician in New York also means being exposed to an endless stream of great gigs too and opportunities to hear some of the best players in the world playing in intimate settings. As a player you can measure yourself against some of the best and this can drive your development and technical abilities (sink or swim!). You can also get opportunities to play with great musicians in informal settings that don’t really exist outside the NY ‘session’ scene. These are all serious plusses for the way things are in New York.

On the minus side it has to be said there are just far too many musicians in New York for it to make any sense on an economic level. The money paid for playing clubs in NY is laughable – there is no way you could make a living by solely performing creative music in New York. The abundance and availability of musicians and the lack of places to play drives the price musicians can charge for NY gigs down to below subsistence levels. It’s a buyers market for the clubs and the musicians suffer. For all the advantages of being cheek by jowl with so many great musicians, there is the reality of the economics of it. A lot of the New York musicians I know work in (often menial) day jobs that have nothing to do with music, and the reality for them is that they’re not going to get out of that situation anytime soon. As they get older and take on responsibilities the typical situation of doing two rehearsals of original music for a gig that pays $30 is revealed for the economic luxury that it is. All that work, all that practice, all that study, all of that creative energy, and in the end you get less than if you’d done a four-hour shift at Dunkin’ Donuts......... The New York jazz scene depends on the willingness of a large percentage of its musicians to put musical value before economic reality. But with performance opportunities shrinking even further, and ever more musicians arriving in New York like gunslingers riding into town to prove themselves, can this model survive?


(Rudresh and I survey the scene....)

And one other aspect of this that I’ve not seen discussed too much is the distortion and depletion of the national jazz scene created by the never ending influx of musicians into New York. The US jazz scene, as a national scene, is almost non-existent. Apart from NY there are some scenes of reasonable size in a few places – Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, San Francisco, and maybe a few others. But all of these pale into insignificance beside the bloated New York scene. And this just can’t be healthy for jazz in the US. What you have in the US is one huge scene with far too many musicians and no money, and a series of cities, often with over a million people in them, with virtually no scene at all. If you read any jazz history (and fairly recent history at that) you learn that there were scenes in many cities (Detroit, Philadelphia, Los Angeles etc.) and that each scene had a particular flavour in the way the music was played. There were in fact regional dialects of jazz and there was a touring circuit. There may be still regional ways of playing the music these days (I’m not in a position to say, but outside the New Orleans scene, I suspect not), but the touring circuit is certainly gone. To get an idea of how difficult it is economically to tour in the US, have a look at this.

There is a constant refrain of ‘man, you gotta go to New York’ that’s sung to any player of any ability in the US - it’s held up as the Nirvana for jazz musicians, and that’s perfectly understandable. But the reality is that if a really good player from a regional city leaves that scene, it will be impoverished by his or her leaving. If every major city in the US had a relatively healthy scene, the audience for jazz would be bigger since regional cities would not just depend on the occasional visits by heavy hitters from NY in order to hear some good improvised music, and audiences would grow. Good local players would grow the scenes in these towns and in turn create a touring circuit for other musicians (and themselves).

A good example of this can be seen in Europe – not by any design, but simply by geography and culture. In Europe you have a variety of different and relatively healthy scenes based around different cities. Paris, Berlin, Koln, Amsterdam, Brussels, Copenhagen, Oslo, London, Barcelona, Rome , Helsinki and Stockholm all have sizeable scenes – none on the scale of New York, but big enough to sustain local musicians and create a touring circuit both for them and for visiting Americans (Europe is still the financial El Dorado for a lot of NY musicians). If a city were to emerge in Europe in which all the activity of the European scene were focussed, in the way that exists in NY, the other city’s scenes would wither and die, just like the regional scenes in so many US cities have withered and died. And the regional dialects of French, Swedish, Italian and German jazz would probably die too along with it.

As a jazz scene New York reminds me of one of those huge edge of town malls that arrives in an area and sucks all the economic life out of the high streets of any town within 50 miles of it. Nearly the entire US scene is based there, and this ‘gotta go to New York’ mentality means that it’s almost impossible for a regional scene to hold on to its good players. They in turn all arrive in New York where they have to scuffle and jostle for financial crumbs.

Let’s imagine that say 30 players of every instrument were to leave NY tomorrow and go back to their home cities and expend their energy there and develop their own scenes there, how much healthier would both those regional scenes be and how much better economically would the New York scene be for giving the musicians there a little more economic room to breathe? I’m not suggesting forced repatriation of all bassists! Nor do I have any solution to the problem as I see it – it is what it is and it’s hard to see, for lots of reasons, how it will ever be any other way. I’m just making the point that the huge concentration of musicians in New York is definitely not an unreservedly healthy thing – yes it provides an incredible level of musicianship and creative music, but at what cost to the musicians and the national scene?

New York has always been great for jazz, and always will be. I just wonder how long more can the musicians pay the real-life price for that greatness?

Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics (and Happy New Year)

Another year, another blog. This is either the last one of 2010 or the first of 2011, depending on your point of view – or mine I suppose. It’s been an interesting year in terms of writing the blog – with the arrival of Google Stats I’ve been able to see which posts created the most interest and were the most read. And reading the stats taught me that I often completely misjudge which topics are of the most interest to readers. A quick look at the stats for the year give me the following top five:

1. The post about great jazz musicians playing on terrible ‘jazz’ recordings by classical musicians looking for a bit of street cred

2. A post about the possibility that Bill Evans influence has slid somewhat off the jazz radar of young musicians

3. Elvin Jones – the perfect drummer?

4. The recordings that Steve Coleman and Dave Holland made together

5. Child Prodigies in Jazz


The post about the jazz/classical thing was by far the most read post on the blog, which I guess makes sense since there is a whiff of a rant in it and it names names a bit – everyone loves controversy! The child prodigy post also provoked some interest. But the three of the top five most popular posts were about well known figures in the jazz world, which tells me that people still prefer to read about what, or whom, they know. For myself, although I’m interested in all my subjects, I often find the stuff about the actual music – structural, conceptual, philosophical, technical things – to be the most interesting things to discuss. But my readers seem to prefer to read about the musicians who play the music rather than read about the music itself.

One interesting aside came from someone commenting on the Bill Evans post, who said that it had come as a relief to him that this post was less ‘angry’ than my normal efforts. Angry!? Me!? Disputatious maybe, a malcontent quite possibly – but angry? Hmmmm....... interesting. I’m quite conscious of not trying to personalise things unless I feel I can’t make my point any other way, and though I do get angry about some aspects of the jazz world, I try and reign in my baser instincts and remain within the bounds of civilised discourse. The classical musician post was about as close as I get to a rant – I think! It’s definitely interesting to see yourself as others see you sometimes.

One thing I do recognise is my tendency to be a bit verbose sometimes – I fight against it but I tend not to be able to get out in under 5000 words. This will probably be the shortest post of 2011........... I’ve got an interview with Steve Coleman coming up that’s huge – but at least on this occasion the post is huge because Steve is being verbose rather than me.

Thanks as always to everyone who read the blog over the past year, and particularly to those who took the time to write and express their opinions – I really appreciate you taking the time and am flattered by your interest.

Next up for me – and no doubt some kind of report will feature on these pages – I’ll be heading off to New York for a week or so, to see some music, meet lots of friends and bring home my new custom-made bass – a pretty good way to start the year.

Happy 2011!

Under The Influence

I recently read a very interesting interview with Brad Mehldau, via Peter Hum, where Brad, in discussing his influences, makes the following very good point:

“In terms of influence, one discourse that's curiously non-existent over players of my generation is: how we are influenced by our musical peers -- the living breathing people we are actively playing with and listening to now, players of our own generation.”

This is absolutely true – the questions most often asked by jazz journalists and casual listeners, (probably because it’s a relatively easy question to ask and demands little research or proof to back-up), when discussing a young or young-ish, (anyone under 40 seems to be described as ‘young’ there days.......), musician is: ‘who does he/she sound like?’. And by extension who are they influenced by? What they (the journalist or listener) are listening for is some kind of surface idiomatic similarity between the person they’re discussing and the playing of some other musician whose playing they’re familiar with. ‘His playing bears the discernible influence of X’, or ‘she’s clearly been listening to Y’, or ‘the music sounds like the mid-period recordings of Z’. It’s an easy game to play and doesn’t require much effort on the part of the writer or listener – hear a phrase or two you’ve heard in the playing of somebody else and then make a blanket statement outlining the clear influence of same.

But the point Brad makes is an important one - you are not only influenced by the people you’ve listened to, you are also influenced by the people you play with. I would venture to suggest that the people you play with are far more influential on you than any player you’ve only heard on record or seen live but have never actually been with. Because being with other musicians goes beyond the actual playing time, it also includes the hours you spend with them not playing - the travelling, and hanging and the endless discussions about music and life that are an inseparable part of being a working jazz musician. All of these things can help to shape your outlook on music in a way that goes way beyond the mere playing of your instrument.

As a bassist, a saxophone player telling me what they listen for in bass playing, or suggesting something they think might work in the music we’re playing, might make a big difference to how I think about the piece and may have a big influence on how I play it. That can also be true for the music as a whole – sometimes somebody can say something to you, (not necessarily a player of the same instrument as you) which can change your entire approach to the kind of music under discussion, or even the totality of how you think about music. I’ve had several of those what I call ‘light bulb moments’, where another musician has said something to me – often casually – that has completely changed how I think about something. These are huge influences, and go way beyond which bassist I was listening to when I was younger.



And there can be other influences too. Seeing Woody Shaw at the Village Vanguard and Elvin Jones in Ronnie Scott’s, both when I was in my early 20s, had a profound influence on me. I can honestly say that my approach to music completely changed after seeing them play, and my playing changed, but not in any way that could be discerned by a casual listener. These were fundamental core influences for me that went beyond the playing of the bass and into the music I wanted to play and how I wanted to play it.

And then there’s the influence of playing. This is the point that Brad makes – how we’re influenced by the people we’re playing with. This is by far the most important influence you can have in my opinion. Your first-hand experiences on the bandstand are far more influential on your playing than any second-hand experience you can have by listening to a CD or going to a gig – no matter how great those may be. For myself, I learned different things from different people – and most of it from playing situations rather than being taught formally.

In fact my formal jazz education is limited to two 3-week stints at the Banff Centre in Canada in the mid-80s, where I met many of my peers with whom I stayed in touch and later played with (Simon Nabatov, Andy Laster, Owen Howard, Tanya Kalmanovitch among others), which of itself was very valuable to me. But another reason Banff was hugely influential on me was because it put me in personal contact with Dave Holland, Dave Liebman, Kenny Wheeler and Steve Coleman

The opportunity to study with Dave Holland was invaluable to me – he’d always been a favourite of mine and to spend six weeks in all in his company, listening to him play, teach, and talk about playing was really game changing as far as my playing was concerned.

With Steve I was introduced to a whole new world of music – everything was new with him – rhythm, harmony, melody – it was simply the opening of a new universe in terms of conception and had a profound impact on me. I spent a lot of time hanging with him and talking and we’ve stayed in touch ever since either by email or in person and he remains a huge influence on me. I never played in his band, but we’ve played in several informal sessions, (and I did a recording with him in NY that was never released) – and all of these playing experiences were important ones for me too.

NB I will be posting an interview with Steve on the subject of rhythm very soon.

The contact I made with Dave Liebman in Banff went on to become one of the most important influences in my musical life – more on this below, and more on Kenny Wheeler.

So those ‘formal’ education experiences were important to me, but really I’ve been mostly shaped by playing, both with older musicians and with my peers. I’ve been lucky enough to play with a lot of older, more experienced musicians - in a way I did a kind of apprenticeship that would be familiar to musicians of an earlier era. I was lucky enough to come in on the tail end of that system and it really formed the basis of my education in music – on the job training. And I can look back and pinpoint particular aspects of music that I was exposed to by specific musicians, and that influenced me hugely.

My first, and a huge playing influence, was with the Irish guitarist Louis Stewart. I began playing with him in 1979 and I freely admit I hadn’t got a clue what I was doing at that point! My theory and harmony knowledge was pretty much nil, (though I’d been raised listening to jazz and so was familiar with the music and innately through that, with song form), and then suddenly there I was playing with a master of voice leading, of bebop, of swing – someone who was at the height of his powers. Louis was the first Irish jazz musician to have an international reputation and career and to be exposed to that level of playing and experience at that point in my development was a huge thing for me. I was forced to improve and try and keep up – this was a real bebop environment – almost no originals, no Real Book, no charts, just tunes – which you were supposed to know. I scrambled to keep up but in the process learned lots of tunes, began to understand harmony and learned how to play off instinct when all else failed. Some videos from that time have surfaced on Youtube recently – and here’s one of a very gauche 21 year old me at the Cork Jazz Festival, hanging onto Louis’ coat tails as he tears through Morning of the Carnival.

At that time I was also involved with a trio with the drummer from that clip, the late great John Wadham, and another great Irish guitar player (with whom I still often play), Tommy Halferty. That was a very adventurous group for its time, and we played original compositions and also played free (heresy on the Irish scene at the time!) and it was my first exposure to a milieu where pretty much anything went. We also played some of the fastest tempos I have ever played and this was great for getting my chops in shape!

After that I played a lot on the Irish scene and in subsequent years began playing with international musicians and I learned something from all of those situations, but there were a few that influenced me hugely for various reasons:

From playing with Sonny Fortune I learned about stamina! Sonny is a product of the 1960s NY jazz scene and musically he came up just at the end of that decade and he saw Coltrane many times (I remember him telling me about a conversation he had with Trane), played with McCoy and Elvin, as well as with Miles, (‘Agharta"), and many others. And he was definitely an energy player who emerged in the era of the long solo. I played with him quite a lot at the end of the 1980s and playing with Sonny you had to learn how to both pace yourself AND play with high energy and intensity. When Sonny called ‘Invitation’ you knew you were in for the long haul – Sonny loved to stretch on that tune (in fact on most tunes.....) and as a rhythm section you’d better be giving him the energy he wants!

From the drummer Steve Argüelles I learned about spontaneity and really being in the moment with no predetermined strategies for any particular piece. I played in a trio with Steve and the English altoist Martin Speake for about two years and Steve really opened me up to a lot of stuff, especially the idea of not necessarily playing anything the same way twice. It was in this group too that I first got to play Ornette’s music and where a lot of the repertoire was comprised of open form pieces, and I had to learn how to deal with that in a convincing way. Coming from a more conventional background this wasn't easy for me at first, and Steve really opened me up to new ways of thinking about playing improvised music. I learned a lot about all sorts of things from playing over a 20 year period with Steve’s brother Julian too – a great musician and a good friend

Simon Nabatov really influenced me in terms of thinking about music in a conceptual way. Simon is very strong on structure and the importance of being aware of the philosophy underpinning what you do as an improvising musician. Many hours on the bandstand with Simon (who is also of course an incredible pianist), and even more hours talking and hanging had a profound influence on how I think about certain aspects of music.

Another very important person for me was the Indian percussionist Ramesh Shotham. At a time when I was really trying to develop my rhythmic vocabulary Ramesh explained the technicalities of South Indian classical rhythmic techniques to me. He hooked me up with many Indian musicians, and we played together with the Karnataka College of Percussion and Charlie Mariano and many others, both in Europe and in India. Without Ramesh’s influence my rhythmic knowledge wouldn’t be anything like what it is now.

Playing with Kenny Wheeler really taught me how to negotiate complex harmonies while being lyrical at the same time. Kenny’s tunes are of course some of the most exquisite pieces in contemporary jazz, but are also extremely challenging to play. I had to work really hard in the practice room to learn how to navigate through the changes of some of those pieces, and to play his music with him was an education in itself.

Where to start on the influence playing with Dave Liebman has had on me.........? I’ve learned so much from him that it’s hard to narrow it down, but some of the most important things I’ve learned from him would include DRAMA! I remember him saying to the band before one of first gigs we did with him, in that classic Lieb straight-to-the-point way - ‘When we play I want drama – I don’t want any of that boring, in-the-middle-shit!’. I learned about the importance of programming a set effectively – how to best do that. How to balance discipline with spontaneity – the importance of keeping everything fresh. And, like with Sonny Fortune (whose musical background is similar in some ways – Miles, Elvin etc.) to be able to play with real intensity ALL the time! The countless musical discussions I’ve had with Lieb over the years - on the road, in restaurants, bars, clubs, planes, hanging out – has really helped shape me in terms of how I think about music.

This clip is taken from a gig with Lieb in the 55 Bar in NY with myself and Jim Black – the picture quality is not good, but the music gives an example of the importance that Lieb places on drama, energy and spontaneity.



But although I’ve learned so much from playing with these great international musicians, there’s something about playing with your contemporaries that feels different to any other playing situation, and since you do that more often than you do playing with visiting musicians, or being on the road with occasional projects, it has a far bigger effect on you than pretty much anything else.



By far the longest playing association I’ve had was with the Guilfoyle/Nielsen trio – with Mike Nielsen on guitar, and my brother Conor on drums. Over a fifteen year period we played together on innumerable occasions, either as a trio or as a rhythm section. In one particularly intense five-year period we developed a very forward thinking approach to expanding our rhythmic language which culminated in me writing my Rhythm Book which is still in print, and us recording our (hardly surprisingly) unreleased ‘Fucked-Up Classics’ album in 1993, featuring a whole album of standards played in Odd Metres. I’ve written about the trio elsewhere and you can download the album Here. But really the time spent with Mike and Conor either working as a trio or as a rhythm section accompanying a myriad of great players (Lieb, Sonny Fortune, Kenny Wheeler, Kenny Werner, Joe Lovano, Larry Coryell, Pat LaBarbera, Conrad Herwig etc.) had by far a bigger influence on my development as a musician than any other single thing, and far exceeds any influence I may have gleaned from listening to records or seeing gigs. The years of talking and experimenting, of developing ideas together and working on them had an incalculable influence on how I play and how I think as a creative musician.

So, influence is not (or definitely shouldn’t be!) just about who you listen to on your own instrument and who you most admire – it’s about ideas and experience, concepts and compositions, mentors and role models, exemplars and experiences. We are not just products of narrow instrumental concerns - loose clones of who we listen to on recordings - but are guided by the totality of our experience in music. Influence is not a simple thing, it, like the music, is a complex mixture of things - at any moment our music reflects not only who we've listened to, but also where we've been, who we've been with and who we are.

On the Road - Hong Kong and Japan - Addendum

To give a little musical context to my recent travel blog, Pekka Pylkkanen, the leader of the band that I went to Hong Kong and Japan with recently, has posted a Video from the Hong Kong concert. I really had fun playing and travelling with these guys!

Pekka Pylkkanen - alto
George Contrafouris - piano
RG - bass
Carlos Ezequiel

MSG's new CD out at last!

MSG - Rudresh Mahanthappa (alto), Chander Sardjoe(drums) and myself have just released our first CD on the Plus Loin label. We've been together for 4 years now and play whenever the Rubik's Cube of our three schedules can be reconciled! The CD is very representative of what we do and it's great to have it out at last!

I don't think it's been released in the US yet, but it's available in Europe and you can buy it Here

For a taste of what we do, here's a typical live performance by the band featuring one of the pieces we don't do on the CD - Rudresh's 'Enhanced Performance'

Music for Soprano Sax and String Quartet

It's a a pleasant surprise to accidentally stumble across a performance of your work that you didn't know had been done. In this case it was on Youtube and was a performance by a Polish group of the first movement of my 'Music for Soprano Sax and String Quartet', which I wrote for Dave Liebman in 1998. I think this piece is a good companion to the blog post I wrote about string writing in jazz, involving as it does a lot of the issues I discussed in that article.

The performers here are Andrzej Olejniczak & Apertus String Quartet. I knew Andrzej via email and I knew he'd performed the piece in Spain, but I didn't know about this performance or recording. They play the piece very well too and so it was a nice piece of Serendipity for a Sunday morning................

There's Something about Elvin.........

This is actually my second post on Elvin – I also interviewed Dave Liebman about his time with Elvin, if you’re interested, you can see it Here)

I recently had a Coltrane blow-out. Watched all of the great ‘Jazz Icons’ DVD from start to finish, listened to ‘Transition’ which for me, (at least the track ’Transition’ itself), is even greater than Love Supreme in terms of the depths it reaches) and a few other things. If ever there was such a thing as a ‘perfect’ band in jazz the Coltrane Quartet could be said to be it. They were like a monolith, once Garrison joined the band they were no longer in the act of becoming something, they just were. When I listen to the Miles Quintet of this period – the other incredibly influential band in the mid-60s – I get a sense of the band changing and evolving all the time. With Coltrane’s band there’s a feeling of everything being perfect as soon as the final personnel of the ‘classic’ quartet is in place. Of course the band did evolve and Coltrane in particular constantly explored every aspect of his playing, but nevertheless there is a sense of certainty, and a homogeneity about the group sound that’s different to the Miles band in the sense that the ensemble sound you hear on the recordings from 1963 is very similar to the one you hear in ‘65, just before the group broke up. It’s as if they found the ideal vehicle for their creativity early on and it didn’t need to change after that, it just got deeper and deeper

And as so often happens to me when I’m listening to that band I found myself listening as much to Elvin as I do Coltrane.................

As far as I’m concerned, and I know this is a ridiculous statement to make, but I’m going to do it anyway, Elvin is THE jazz drummer. Big words, as a friend of mine would say, but for me he represents the art of jazz drumming in its most complete form. The combination of innovation, tradition, mighty swing allied to incredible virtuosity and the sheer depth of his playing puts him on a level that few jazz musicians on any instrument have ever reached. He was a genius. That word is bandied about far too freely these days in all kinds of contexts, (I saw Lady GaGa referred to as a genius recently – sigh..............), but I think Elvin did represent that word perfectly. What he did was beyond even the exceptionally good – it was in a league of its own and to listen to him play at his best is to hear something that is ultimately beyond the explainable.

Yes, the details of the playing can be explained – the polyrhythmic juggling, the giant triplet that hovers over everything he does etc. - but how he came up with this concept in the first place, how he put these elements together, and then made them swing SO much, is unexplainable. And then there’s the conviction........... when he plays, what you’re hearing is certainty – his playing is of an intensity and power that brooks no argument. It says THIS is where it’s at, there can be no other option. It’s this combination of emotional and physical power, innovation, swing, and virtuosity that marks him out above all others for me, on an intellectual level at least. And on an emotional level (and I admit this is completely subjective) his feel just does more for me than anyone else’s.

And what a feel that is! His beat has this slightly behind feeling that seems at times to defy logic in terms of how he manages to propel the music forward while playing behind. I remember talking to Tom Rainey about this one time, and Tom made the additional point that when you see Elvin playing, what you see is often not what you hear – he seems to play, at least visually, almost in slow motion sometimes, yet what you’re hearing can be incredibly busy and active. Tom said Elvin seemed to have the ability to almost suspend the laws of physics and movement when he played, and I know exactly what he meant. Even on fast tempos, when Elvin hits that big ‘1’ at the beginning of a new section, it’s a split second behind where others would play it and this creates a spaciousness about the time feel that both allows the music to breathe while at the same time making it swing even more. Watch Elvin playing here with Coltrane on ‘Impressions’ and check out that almost imperceptible pause before the ‘1’ is struck – that tiny little micro-second gives the music so much space – it’s the art of ‘back-of-the-beat’, even at this tempo



Of course the other thing that’s noticeable on this piece is the polyrhythmic activity that churns underneath the music at all times (check out the snare drum triplet on the bridge of the 3rd chorus of Dolphy’s solo!). A lot of discussion of Elvin’s polyrhythmic style focuses on the stuff he plays on the drums, but in my opinion Elvin’s whole polyrhythmic thing starts with the cymbal. That cymbal beat just changes all the time – it’s no longer the traditional Spang-Spang-A-Lang beat, but an endlessly moving tattoo around which all the other drums revolve. It’s the power of this cymbal beat that gives Elvin’s playing the incredible swing feel that it has – somehow by varying the traditional swinging pattern he makes it swing even more. Of his contemporaries, Roy Haynes was the only other drummer who had this varying ride cymbal beat (it’s no surprise that when Elvin wasn’t available Coltrane used Haynes if he could get him), but he has a very different feel – more edgy and definitely lighter.

Haynes of course is a very interesting drummer since he not only was (and is!) a great drummer in his own right, he strongly influenced the other drummer who changed the way the instrument was played and conceived of in the 1960s – Tony Williams. Williams and Elvin completely changed the role and concept of how drums could or should be played in the core repertoire of the jazz tradition, but their playing couldn’t be more different. Williams' playing is front-of-the-beat edgy, with a tight cymbal beat, and with a crisp explosiveness about it. Elvin is back-of-the-beat and utilises a kind of relentless polyrhythmic approach rather than than Tony’s explosive thing.

But despite the fact that both changed the way drums are played in contemporary jazz, (and you can’t hope to even understand contemporary jazz drumming unless you’ve checked both these guys out), I think it’s true to say that Williams’ influence is more to the fore these days than Elvin’s is. And I think the reason for this is two-fold:

Firstly (and probably most importantly) Tony’s style is more suitable for straight-8s playing than Elvin’s is. Tony was after all one of the pioneers of bringing straight 8’s playing into the jazz mainstream (’Eighty One') and through ‘Lifetime’ was one of the most important figures in the integration of rock music energy into a creative jazz context. Post-Bitches Brew/Weather Report/Mahavishnu, straight 8’s were here to stay in jazz, and if as a drummer you were looking at how to use the drums in this new rhythmic landscape, Tony provided a great model. His influence permeated the drummers who came after him – Lenny White, Billy Cobham etc., and down through subsequent generations. Elvin, though his influence became greatest at around the same time that Tony made his first big impact, was an older player whose playing was rooted in the swing idiom. Although he did so much to open up that idiom, and in showing how a drummer could engage in an equal dialogue with a soloist, his style of playing, based as it was (in a structural sense at least) on the 3:2 polyrhythm, never really lent itself to straight 8’s playing.

Secondly, I think Tony’s thing is easier to codify into something comprehensible to the aspirant drummer. This is not to say that what he did was conceptually of a lower level than Elvin, but his approach lends itself more readily to the kind of intellectual analysis that people like to make. This is especially true in the later Tony style of the 4 in the bar swishing hi hat and endless flams. Put simply – and somewhat superficially, Tony is easier to cop than Elvin. Elvin’s thing is more mysterious in a way, it lends itself less easily to analysis. OK, one can identify the constant triple versus duple stuff going on, but the juggling act of keeping all those rhythmic balls in the air while playing behind the beat, not getting in the way of the music, AND swinging the whole band is beyond technical analysis. A comparison (simplistic but with some truth in it) of the two approaches could be that Tony’s playing is linear, while Elvin’s is multi-layered. The linear thing is easier to comprehend, but to figure out how to make that multi-layered thing work requires a conceptual intelligence, not just an ability to technically analyse patterns.

(Interestingly, I think Jack DeJohnette has shown a way to integrate the two approaches. He has a real affinity for straight 8s playing yet also espouses the all four limbs in perpetual motion approach of Elvin. His ride cymbal beat can have the edginess of Tony on fast tempos, yet maintain that perpetual motion thing of Elvin's. At slower tempos his beat can be broad like Elvin's, yet feature the explosiveness of Tony. He's figured it out somehow, but few have followed in his footsteps......)

So this combination of the difficulty of figuring out what exactly is going on in Elvin’s playing allied to the fact that his work was mostly in the swing idiom at a time when swing began to cede some of its dominance to the straight 8’s feel pushed the influence pendulum more in the direction of Tony rather than Elvin. Of course most good contemporary jazz drummers can approximate some of the Elvin thing when they feel it’s required, but the predominant influence I hear in most contemporary mainstream drummers would be coming more from Tony than Elvin.



But actually if you look at what Elvin did beyond the Coltrane group, he was pretty much game for anything. Back in the 60s, with Andrew Hill, he played in 7/4 (on Siete Ocho), and he also recorded with Earl Hines. He played with Ornette as well as Duke Ellington. In the 70s he was happy to play with synths and played on a little-known but particular Elvin favourite of mine 'On The Mountain’ with Jan Hammer and Gene Perla. Have a listen to him deal effortlessly with the quite complex vamp (at 4.07) on ’Destiny’, or play some savagely swinging brushes (he was a true master of brush playing) on Oleo with Tommy Flanagan.

And to hear him at the peak of his polyrhythmic virtuosity outside of the Coltrane Quartet, listen to him here with George Coleman and Wilbur Little from a live date in the Vanguard – the solo on this is just extraordinary, the way it goes from clearly metric to a kind of impressionistic outline of the beat and back again, and check out the way he sets up the re-entry of the melody. Nobody really played drums like this before or has since.

And it could be argued (and no doubt someone will argue with me!) that even leaving aside his landmark work with Coltrane, Elvin appeared on more truly classic albums than any other single drummer – with Wayne on ‘Ju Ju’, ‘Night Dreamer’ and ‘Speak No Evil’, with Joe Henderson on ‘In and Out’ and ‘Inner Urge’, with Rollins on ‘Live at the Village Vanguard’ and ‘East Broadway Rundown’, with Lee Konitz on ‘Motion’, with McCoy on ‘Inception’ and ‘The Real McCoy’, with Freddie Hubbard on ‘Ready for Freddie’, with Larry Young on ‘Unity’ etc. etc. - the list goes on and on. He played with Charlie Parker, with Monk, with Mingus, with Miles, Trane, Rollins, Ornette, Bud Powell, Ellington, he lead bands that included people like Dave Liebman, Sonny Fortune, Chick Corea, Jan Hammer, Steve Grossman, (Check out the classic ’Live at the Lighthouse'), and in later years he played with John McLaughlin, Michael Brecker, Bill Frisell and Bennie Wallace. He did it all.

And he did everything with a conviction that has always been an inspiration to me. I first saw him play at Ronnie Scott’s Club on a rainy Tuesday evening in 1979 – the club was half empty, the band comprised of unknown young players, and yet Elvin played as if that was the most important thing that anyone could be doing anywhere. For me it was, musically speaking, a life-changing experience to see that. Of course I was thrilled just to be in the same room as him, and to hear that extraordinary playing live – but what left the biggest impression on me was the intensity. This was the way music should always be played – with complete conviction and immersion on the moment. I’m still inspired by what I saw that evening over thirty years ago.

As an example of that conviction allied to the science of his playing, check out Elvin with Trane towards the end of the quartet’s life, in Belgium in 1965. It’s outdoors, it’s freezing cold and yet both Trane and Elvin play as if their lives depended on it (Elvin is playing so hard there’s steam rising from him!). For me, it just doesn’t get any better than this. Ever.

On the Road - Hong Kong and Japan

I’ve just returned from a tour to the Far East, mostly in Hong Kong and Japan. The band, put together by Pekka Pylkkanen (alto) from Finland, consisted of the Greek pianist George Contrafouris and the Brazilian Drummer Carlos Ezequiel – a truly international band, put together in the way these things often are in jazz these days, through mutual connections. I’d played with George with Dave Liebman and in various trio and quartet settings, I’d played with Carlos in Brazil, and with Carlos and Pekka in Denmark, George had played with Pekka in Finland. So we all knew each other in different ways, though I think I was the only one who knew everybody. We rehearsed by email in advance (as you do these days) and then put the music together in real time when we got there.

What follows is as much a travelogue as a blog, with some thoughts along the way on various subjects that were prompted by our experiences




Hong Kong

And so it begins - Asia. We had a typical Asian experience this morning - i.e. not knowing what's going on. We had a place booked for a rehearsal this morning only for it to be cancelled at the last minute. Efforts to find another place seemed to have borne fruit and so we waited for the confirmation phone call – and waited and waited......... So here we are, still in the hotel lobby three hours after we arranged to meet there to head off to rehearsal. Pekka has fought the good fight, multi-tasking on his iPhone and Macbook, but to no avail. So we’ve decided to give in and go out. You can’t fight the local ways, the best thing you can do is be glad you’re in as interesting a place as Hong Kong and get out and enjoy it – and that’s what we’re going to do............

...............And that’s what we did - took a bus to Kowloon, got lost after staying on the bus too long, walked part of the way back and eventually found the subway. I love figuring out subway systems in different cities in various parts of the world. Once you figure it out it the city just opens up to you and you get a great sense of liberation and independence – the city is your Oyster.

And Oysters seem to be the only type of seafood I haven’t seen in the vast amounts of it here – stalls, shops, restaurants, all selling fish and seafood. And it’s sold dried, fresh, salted, roasted, spiced, steamed........ The number of ways the Chinese do seafood (and many other kinds of food) is always dazzling. Even the vegetable dishes are dazzling. I’m a reluctant vegetarian myself, (as in only if I’ve no choice!), but here the vegetables are cooked so freshly that I didn’t think twice about ordering a vegetable dish for lunch instead of my usual carnivorous spread.

The following morning is the beginning of our first really musical day – a rehearsal followed by a workshop at the Hong Kong Academy for the Performing Arts. The rehearsal took place in an unusual setting – as these these kinds of rehearsals often do once you get off the beaten jazz track – in the nightclub section of a fancy hotel. How Pekka managed to get the use of the place is beyond me, but he did, so here we are amidst the chintzy glitz of a nightclub – all fake gold and sequins and thick carpet – playing contemporary jazz. Or trying to play it – we’re all a little jet lagged and nightclubs by day are always strange places. Stripped of whatever allure they have in the evenings, in broad daylight they reveal all their tackiness and their false promises of glamour. It’s hard to get it going in such a setting, but we work efficiently, have a brief lunch next door, a brief rest back at the hotel and then off to the workshop.

The Hong Kong Academy for the Performing Arts is a very impressive looking building with state of the art facilities. As far as music goes the two big subjects here are Classical Music and Chinese Music, but an American flautist and saxophonist called Tim Wilson has begun a part time jazz programme for interested students – 2 hours a week, playing standard tunes etc. I have real admiration for people like Tim who work really hard to get something going in a place like Hong Kong, so far removed from the geographical mainstream of jazz activity – Europe and America. Of course Japan, with its long history of jazz support, is pretty close by, but China and Japan do NOT get on, for all kinds of historical and political reasons, so don’t expect Japanese musicians and teachers becoming active in founding a scene in China anytime soon.......

The workshop consists of us playing a few tunes, taking questions and then having the students play while we listen and then make comments. The technical level is quite low, as is their knowledge of the jazz idiom, but they’re really enthusiastic and I must say I get a warmer feeling teaching in a place like this than I often do at some of the high level jazz schools in Europe where the students are sometimes so spoiled you can nearly drown from the combination of their sense of entitlement and their apathy.

What’s interesting musically is that the problems the students have, even at this quite low technical level, are the same problems I see with jazz students everywhere, they’re just a little more extreme. They don’t listen to each other, they play in a very literal way with a high element of role playing – press button A and play this, press button B and play that......... These kids don’t have much vocabulary, but otherwise there are similar issues that one sees in students everywhere. Of course being so far from the jazz mainstream it’s probably also very difficult for them to feel part of something larger – the jazz community and history – but that’s something I often wonder about anyway – how much are young jazz students learning this music as a kind of classical music, and how much are they learning it and seeing themselves as being part of a much larger thing? Questions for another day perhaps........... But first, dinner!



The following day we go to the Hong Kong Institute for Education and do a workshop and performance for the students there. These guys are studying pedagogy, and some have taken jazz studies as part of that. The students are of a higher technical level than in the previous institution, but the same problems are evident. Lack of listening is a big problem – not just to each other, but to the recorded history of the music. Out of 10 guys playing ‘Impressions’ only three had ever listened to the original recording, or heard Coltrane play it! An extreme example perhaps, but again lack of in-depth listening is another current issue among young musicians – the sheer availability of so much stuff does actually impact negatively on their listening habits I believe. They listen to lots of stuff – but often just once, and rarely in-depth. Again, a question for another day......... But the vibe is great, and everyone is so nice and enthusiastic, it made the 2 hours trek out there by subway worthwhile. Dinner in a great Thai Restaurant ends the day very satisfactorily


(Two Students from the Hong Kong Institute for Education try out my bass)

Hong Kong Jazz Festival

Today is the anchor gig of the tour, the Hong Kong Jazz Festival, but before the gig Carlos and I take a trek out to Mong Kok, the electronics Mecca of Kowloon. I want to by a DV Camcorder in order to have a second camera to give a different angle on things when I record music and gigs etc. (In recent years I’ve probably got too into this – spent far too much time on Final Cut Express and not enough on the simple 4 string bass!). We go the Mong Kok Computer Centre – three floors of electronics and a geek’s haven. I eventually settle on a Sanyo hand held device that functions as both a DV camcorder and a digital camera. I save myself an estimated 70 euro on the deal by buying it here, so I’m, pretty happy leaving the store. Out on the street there are even more electronics places – some really huge (see below) - it’s an extraordinary two blocks............



And so to the gig – at the Hong Kong City Hall Theatre – a big 800 seater theatre with very nice acoustics for jazz. Everything is very well organised and the soundcheck runs smoothly and there’s very good equipment and a decent dressing room. Add a free dinner courtesy of the festival to that and you can’t really ask for more. Over dinner we talk to two of the girls running the gig – Carol and Alison and it turns out they’re both piano teachers but also studied other things - business studies of some kind. So the Asian work ethic is very clear from these two young women – you can see why Japan forged ahead in the past, and why China and Korea are galloping up now.

The gig itself is great – the last 2 days of playing/workshops has got our individual and collective chops up and the band really clicks and plays a very high energy set that’s very well received. We’re playing opposite the Rusconi Trio, (whose sound engineer very generously helps us with our soundcheck), whose music is much different to ours, but the audience seems to like both. We have to wait till the end of the concert before we can go back to the hotel since the tradition here is that people get autographs. Since Pekka and Carlos are the only ones who brought CDs George and I let them do the meet and greet while George and I hang out and solve even more of the world’s musical and social problems..........


Back to the hotel – tomorrow, Japan!




Tokyo

Tokyo is so huge it took us two hours by train to get from the airport to the city. It’s SO different here from China – I’ve been in Japan before but it’s very interesting to come to Japan from another Asian country rather than from Europe – you get a different perspective. First of all it’s so clean and everything looks so modern and less traditional than in China. And the other thing that hit us the minute we got on the plane was the politeness! Of course I know about Japanese politeness, but when you come from China it’s thrown into even sharper relief. The Hong Kong Chinese (at least to strangers on the street or in shops etc.) are not really polite at all, they’re quite brusque and rude sometimes and never give you the impression they’ve the slightest interest in you. Which is fair enough – it’s their country and they can decide what attitude they want to take to visitors (though I think the waiter who gave me a sort of slap on the arm to remind me to take my bass with me was taking it a BIT far!).Here it’s so different, people are incredibly polite – and friendly! I had at least three exchanges with people by the time we got to the hotel, I don’t think a Chinese person outside of our business dealings, spoke to us even once.

So tonight we went out looking for a restaurant and ran into a girl giving out leaflets about a restaurant on the street – she had very little English, but Pekka has a little Japanese and so we decided to go to that restaurant. When we said we’d go she nearly had hysterics – laughing and doing the Japanese equivalent of ‘OH MY GOD!” - ringing ahead to say she was bringing four foreigners with her. And so we ended up in this tiny traditional restaurant, full of Japanese, and we sat on the floor on Tatamis around a table and had some really great food – sashimi, and Yakitori, rice and various other bits and pieces. There was great hilarity as we tried to figure out from the Japanese menu what to order and the same girl with the leaflets turned out to be the waitress there too – she was a really fun character, up for anything and laughing all the time. Then a man came in who spoke some English, and he helped us with the translation and promptly joined us at the dinner table and had dinner with us and became George’s smoking partner. So it was great fun, and it was very pleasant to be in a real authentic restaurant eating real Japanese food. Everyone in the restaurant waved goodbye to us as we left, and it was a very nice personaiised evening after the hustle and bustle of Hong Kong.


(The band with the two ladies who ran the very nice restaurant on our first night in Tokyo)

The next day we had a gig in the city, in a small venue converted for the evening into a concert space. We got there early, set up, soundchecked and having a few hours to kill we went back to the centre of town, the extraordinary Shinjuku district. Shinjuku epitomises the stereotype about Tokyo – thousands of people, flashing lights, constant movement, noise. It’s almost futuristic around there, ‘like a scene from Blade Runner’ as George described it. I’d imagine you either love it or you hate it – we loved it!

It was a real rush being there, especially being in Shinjuku station which is huge – a million people pass through it every day! - and SO easy to get lost in. Pekka did a very good job in figuring out the lines to take which, when you take a look at the Tokyo subway map (below), you can see is no easy task.



And if you do get lost it’s very hard to get information to help you with because hardly anybody speaks English. In the whole time we were in Tokyo and stopped people to ask for help, and asked them if they spoke English the answer was always no. And these were young people in one of the world’s best educated and richest nations on earth. I’m not saying they SHOULD speak English – we English speakers get away with far too much linguistic colonialism as it is – but there’s no denying that English is the travel and business language of the world, yet in Japan the level of English speaking was lower than almost any country I can remember travelling in. One of the Japanese guys I met, who does speak good English, said it was because the way English was taught - nearly all through written work - was very bad. Anyway, the fact that there's so little English spoken and a lot of the signs are unreadable to a westerner, forces you to really make an effort and to not mind the fact that it's hard to find out what's going on, or where to go, or what stuff is on a menu etc. - sometimes it's fun being lost!

We ended up at Disk Union – a famous Japanese record shop that specialises in jazz and – even more specialised – in jazz on vinyl. George is a collector of vinyl jazz LPs and there was no way he was going to visit Tokyo without visiting Disk Union as well. And it was extraordinary in there – the place was packed with people buying LPs! It reminded me of specialist record shops like Mole Jazz in London (long gone) 20 years ago. Actually it’s amazing how much jazz you hear walking around Tokyo – in shops, restaurants etc. They seem to have a real taste for it, though I notice it tends to be very much focussed around the 50s Hard Bop era. And they’re much more attached to American jazz than they are European (or Japanese for that matter), in fact European jazz musicians rarely play here in comparison to their American counterparts.


(Result! - George with a prized Clare Fischer LP at Disk Union)

George’s LP cravings having been sated for now, we head back to the gig and a play a 90 minute set, which is preceded by an interview with Pekka and George on the subject of ‘what is Finnish Jazz?’ Yutaka, the organiser of the gig, has a passion for Finnish jazz and is selling a bunch of Finnish jazz CDs at the gig. The gig itself is really good – again the band gels very well from the first bar, and it all feels great. Sometimes when you’re on the road and you’re dealing with lots of stuff – hotels, airports, food, money, etc. - you forget that the real reason you are there is to play music. And then if the band is good – which it is on this occasion – you are pleasantly reminded of it once you start playing, as in, “Now I remember - THIS is why we’re here!” After the very well received gig, we head back to Shinjuku and find a restaurant, which is packed with Saturday night diners and which is a bit of a squeeze for four large-ish westerners to get into. But all is achieved with good humour on everyone’s part and the food is delicious.



Then back out into Shinjuku subway station for the train back to the hotel. What was interesting was the fact that at night there are only young people in the subway - all the older people disappear - it was amazing! We were by far the oldest people on the subway that night. And of course everyone was dressed up - or what passes for dressed up among Japanese youth. For the girls it usually means short skirts or shorts, or even more popular, the mini skirt with the knee socks pulled to above the knee. It’s actually a very strange phenomenon in my opinion – this, (as a Japanese friend of mine described it) ‘Lolita Complex’ Almost none of them dress like women - they all dress like girls. There's a kind of childishness about their image - the kind of schoolgirly outfits (and I saw a couple of really weird ones - like Bo-Peep or something!), the Hello Kitty handbags, the miniature pink teddy bears hanging from their mobile phones - that's a little disturbing after a while. And the guys were in all kinds of weird and wonderful haircuts, sunglasses, outlandish clothes etc. It's really unique to walk through Shinjuku station on a Saturday night and see Japanese youth en-masse. An extraordinary sight. Yet, for all this apparent rebellion against the sober dress of the adult Japanese there’s no sense of anarchy about them, nor do you feel any threat, as I would in a Western city late on a Saturday night. They’re very well behaved and they form neat rows, side by side in twos, at the designated areas, to get on the subway trains. I got the feeling that the outfits constituted the beginning and the end of the rebelliousness, and that in other ways they were probably quite comfortably part of mainstream society.

The friendliness of everyone continues to be impressive. The following morning George and I were talking outside the hotel and three ladies came out - very well dressed - and invited us to come and have lunch with them - despite the fact that they had barely any English. But they were SO friendly, trying to find out where were were from (they were baffled by Greece, but were very excited by 'Irelando!') and being giggly and friendly. And in Starbucks in Shinjuku later on a man offered me his seat, said welcome and shook my hand, and then the girls came out from behind the counter and got chairs for all four of us - in a packed Starbucks on a Saturday afternoon! Never saw that anywhere else in the world.......


Having some free time before the gig, George, Carlos and I take a walk in the suburbs, and once you get off the main streets you enter a different world – quiet, narrow streets, very little traffic. It all makes for a very pleasant walk after the madness of Shinjuku and we buy some Yakatori chicken that is being grilled freshly on the side of the road, and finish the walk by having a cappucino in a café – everything was very pleasant except the price of the coffee.......... Japan is an EXPENSIVE country! I’d say it’s more expensive than even Switzerland, and that’s saying something. It’s hard to have a meal in a restaurant for less than €30 a head, and that’s just in a regular place – it’s very easy to spend much more than that. In this little café, we had 5 coffees between the three of us, I decided it was my turn to buy the coffees and was somewhat stunned to be handed a bill of €22!


The gig that night is in the ‘Finland Café’, in Shubiya (another incredibly busy area), in a café devoted to all things Finnish. It seems particularly Japanese to do this – this kind of obsessive attention being paid to one thing – though I’m hardly in a position to comment since the whole world is infected with the terrible ‘Irish Pub’ plague. The interior of the café is studded with fake birch trees and books on Finland are strewn around casually (though of course, being in Japan, there’s nothing casual about it at all). It’s a very swish looking place in the basement of an apartment block.



There are no drums in the place, so it’s to be trio, and George, being the trouper that he is, doesn’t balk at the electric keyboard he’s given to play. We play the first set - all standards, which we figure is more apposite for this audience, and which we like to play anyway - and then Yutaka approaches me, looking very embarrassed. It seems there’s been a complaint from a resident about the sound of the bass going up to his/her apartment, and would I mind not playing the second set. He assures me that it’s got nothing to do with my playing! Well, what can you do? So Pekka and George play the 2nd set, with George’s left-hand working overtime...... The audience are great, and interestingly (though it’s tragic that this is something worth mentioning), are mostly women. They pay rapt attention throughout, applaud all solos and insist on an encore at the end. If only all audiences were like this......... Another expensive dinner, an even more expensive taxi ride (having missed the last subway train) and the evening ends.

Kobe

We take the Shinkansen to Kobe – the famous Japanese Bullet Trains. Very comfortable and very fast, we cover the 600+ Km to Kobe in 3 hours. During the journey Carlos and I order a coffee from the girl pushing the coffee trolley through the carriages, and she pours the coffee and then carefully arranges the coffee, sugar, milk and napkin in a very symmetric design on the fold-down table on the couch. Having done that she then pushes her trolley out of the carriage, turns around and bows ceremoniously to the carriage before leaving. Only in Japan would the ordering of a coffee on a train involve such an elaborate display of manners complete with a little ceremony to go with it.



We arrive in Kobe and are picked up at the station by Tako, one of the main guys at the Koyo Conservatory – our hosts during our stay. We go straight from the station to the workshop/performance which will take place in a club called Maiden Voyage. It always feels strange to be in these club situations during daylight – as I mentioned earlier there’s something that doesn’t quite fit about a club shorn of its night-time allure - being exposed like an ageing stage performer who is dragged out into daylight so that their true flaws and imperfections can be seen all the more clearly. But this place is actually quite nice, even during the day and the audience is made up of about 40 Japanese students who are very polite and attentive throughout. We play several tunes first and then open it up to questions.

This workshop (like all the ones we did in Japan) is being translated for us – again the low level of English is pointed up by the necessity of having a translator, something that was never necessary in the Hong Kong workshops that we did. Translated workshops are always difficult since it’s impossible to have any real interaction with the students, the delay of having everything translated kills any spontaneity, and you can only speak in short sentences since the translator has to deal with all the points you’re making, and can’t be expected to remember more than a few sentences at a time. But we do our best (and the translator does a great job), and the students are responsive, if a little shy.



They do get up to play though, and that’s always interesting since you can engage more personally with them having heard them play, rather than just doing a lecture/demonstration kind of thing. Walking cold into a room full of students in a school and figuring out what the best approach for a workshop might be is a very difficult task since you’ve no idea of their experience or concerns or needs. It’s a bit easier in a typical 3rd level US or European jazz school since the curriculum tends to be similar throughout these institutions, but in more far flung places it’s often a bit tricky regarding what level to pitch your teaching to, and what information might be most useful in the short space of time you have. In an instrumental masterclass where you’re dealing with a specific instrument it gets a bit easier, but in these mixed classes it requires a bit of care in order to maximise the impact of whatever information, or help, or even philosophical thoughts you might be be able to give. The students play through Autumn Leaves and this gives us some good talking points and allows us to focus our comments more effectively for the short time we have

The evening ends with a group photo with those who haven’t already left to smoke or go about their business (why do all Japanese kids make the Peace Sign every time a camera is pointed at them!?) then it’s off to the hotel to drop the cases and out for dinner with our hosts Akihito (whom I’ve known for a long time through the IASJ) and Tako.



They take us to a great restaurant and miraculously convert me to Sushi! I’ve never been a fan, (a friend of mine used to say ‘that’s not food, that’s bait!), though I’ve always wished I was, but on this trip the joys of Sushi are fully revealed to me and I’m now a complete convert. But I think for it to work the fish has to be as incredibly fresh, and everything else as well cooked and presented as it was at this restaurant. The food was just amazing, and foodie that I am, I’m delighted to be able to share in a gastronomic miracle that was a closed book to me up to this point.



Back to Tokyo

On any tour there are days that prove trying, and the day after the Kobe workshop/performance proves to be one of those days. Carlos and George have offered to do some extra teaching at Koyo Conservatory before we leave for Tokyo and so we head off there first and, teaching finished, go to the station for the train to Tokyo. There, for reasons too dull too go into, there’s a delay in getting the tickets and we end up missing our train and hanging around for nearly an hour and a half before eventually getting a later train. This delay means we’re behind schedule when we get to to Tokyo, where we have a workshop to do at Tokyo College of Music in the late afternoon. Before doing the workshop we have to check into our hotel in Shinjuku, and Tokyo is so huge that by far the fastest (and cheapest) way to get around, is by subway. Which is fine when you’re travelling with just a shoulder bag or something, but when you’ve got all your luggage and your bass, and you’ve several subway line changes to make on a humid afternoon, the whole thing becomes a bit of an ordeal really. By the time we reach the hotel my shoulders are aching from carrying the gear and manipulating it up and down escalators, across platforms and onto trains. Then it’s into the hotel, drop the stuff and back on the subway for the trip to TCM.

When we arrive at the nearest subway station we’re met by our hosts and then it turns out to be a 15 minute walk to the college and our hosts (both Westerners BTW), are quite happy to walk along beside us for this long trek and it never once occurs to them to offer to help carry the gear – I’ve got my bass, Pekka his alto and backpack, and Carlos his cymbals and they know we’ve had a bit of a trying day, but still they walk along empty-handed, chattering away and never offering to take anything from anyone, and this causes me to add grumpiness to my already tired mood.

So when we arrive at the college (which is an amazing modern building ), late due to all the earlier problems, I’m not really in the mood to do the workshop at all. But once we enter the room the students cheer and applaud and this immediately lifts our mood – how can you resist such enthusiasm? So, on with the show – again we play, and although it’s a cliché, the healing power of music shows itself again in that once we start playing the tired grumpy mood disappears and it’s fun time again! We’ve been playing together for almost two weeks now, the band has really gelled, and we can hit a very high level almost from the first beat. Good humour restored, we answer questions and then have the students play. Again the workshop is translated which slows things down a bit, but these students are really charming and very sweet and enthusiastic and it’s a lot of fun working with them. There are a couple of really talented improvisers among them too – all they need is a bit more experience and access to good information and a wider playing environment.


I find it extraordinary that there is no undergraduate degree that can be taken in jazz alone in Japan. When you see the history of engagement with the music here, and the popularity of it, it’s amazing that there’s no way of studying full time to degree level through the state institutions. But from talking to teachers here who are trying to change things it seems the Japanese education system is very rigid and the same structural problems that prevent effective English language teaching, also stymie any attempt to bring jazz into mainstream music education here. The Koyo Conservatory has a 2-Year full time programme, but it’s a private school and as far as I know it can’t offer an undergraduate degree at the end of the course.

As always, the evening ends with food. This time the some of the students and one of the teachers comes with us and it’s a fine way to end the tour, chatting with these very nice people and eating, again, GREAT food that arrives one dish after another in that very nice communal eating style found in Asia. George gives one of the piano players an impromptu lesson in upper structure chord voicings while I expound the joys of the Ligeti Études to another group of pianists and Carlos and I explain the geographical position, and relative difference in size and population between Ireland (4.2 million people) and Brazil (200 million). The students talk about their lives and studies and the whole evening is a great way to end the working part of the tour – we have a day off the next day before heading home.



Which Carlos and I decide to spend in Akihabara, the famed electronics district of Tokyo. It’s a noisy crowded area, full of electronics shops blaring out music and sound effects from computer games, and Anime films and all kids of other things. I remark to Carlos that this area is definitely many people’s idea of hell – noise, commercialism, crowds – but it’s also fascinating, at least for a couple of hours. The sheer energy of the place is extraordinary and it’s a real luxury to have a couple of hours to wander around and observe the scene. Again this strange Lolita complex is in evidence as the area has girls of about 17 years old on every street corner, dressed in kind of French Maid outfits handing out leaflets for various shops. The whole thing is kind of weird – there would be outrage in the West if teenagers were asked to parade around in outfits like that for the purposes of selling electronics, but here, in modern industrialised Japan, it doesn’t seem to provoke even a raised eyebrow among the passers-by.........



I end up not buying anything – the prices are dearer than Hong Kong and nothing really catches my eye. In the evening Carlos, George and I meet up for a last meal and on impulse go to an Indian restaurant (Indian food is a passion of mine), where the food is very good and the portions more in keeping with the needs of someone of George’s size. George has been enjoying the Japanese food but has felt that the meals often feel more like a snack to him than a proper meal. We finish up having a coffee in Starbucks – not a chain I like particularly, but I have been missing the after dinner coffee while in Japan – they haven’t really embraced coffee culture and, uncultured addict that I am, I’ve been feeling that the one thing these great Japanese meals need to make them even greater is an espresso at the end.

So that was that – the next day we all undertook the long trip home, (Carlos’ journey was 44 hours via South Africa......) and brought to an end a really great trip involving music, crowds, culture shock, traffic, teachers, students, subways, soundchecks, festivals, sushi, sashimi, stir fry, yakitori, neon signs, unreadable signs, noise, politeness, impoliteness, efficiency, inefficiency, planes, trains, automobiles..................

After 2 weeks of man-made wonder, on the way home my plane flies over Siberia on a perfect day for viewing the beauty and wonder of nature...........