The Get Your Chops Back Jazz Combo needs bass players!  If you’re a novice bass player and want to participate, sign up now.  If you are an experienced bass player and have students who could benefit, pass this message on to them.

So far, we’re up to 28 people, so aside from the bass, we’re doing pretty good.

Cost is on a sliding scale, only $10-$25.  The deadline is Sunday, July 5.

Sign up now!

in partnership with

invite you to dust off your instruments and participate in the

Get Your Chops Back — Jazz Combo

In partnership with Active Arts® at the Music Center, the Los Angeles Jazz Collective invites you to recapture and rediscover the joy and exhilaration of playing jazz and improvising in a stress-free, mistakes-allowed environment.

Did you play jazz band in high school or college and want to get back into it?
Do you play an instrument but have always wanted to learn how to improvise?
Have you been taking jazz lessons but need to find a community of players to make music with?

Get Your Chops Back – Jazz Combo is for you!
Starting on July 18, members of the LAJC will lead an ongoing series of learning/music-making sessions at the Music Center every other Saturday through August and September, culminating in a final open rehearsal in Walt Disney Concert Hall on September 26.  Reconnect with the joy of playing in a group, learn customized arrangements of jazz standards, review and relearn techniques and concepts for creative soloing, create an original composition in collaboration with fellow players, and more.  Coaches will be provided for specific help on saxophone, trumpet, trombone, guitar, keyboard, or drum set.

Get Your Chops Back – Jazz Combo is for nonprofessional musicians, 18 years and older, with basic playing skills and ability to read sheet music.  Participants must provide/bring their own instruments.

Best of all, the workshop is very reasonably priced, on a sliding scale from $10-$25.

The registration deadline is on July 5, so sign up now!

For more information click on this link:

http://www.musiccenter.org/events/aa_gycb_combo.html

In addition to the jazz combo, the Music Center is also offering a snare drum choir workshop, led by notable composer and musician Ed Barguiarena.  So if you own a snare drum, you can take part.  Click here for more details.

It will be an intense amount of great music.  We hope you come out to be a part of it.

These guys have been getting some good press recently, with their latest crop of releases and this great article by Matthew Miller.  The Underground is the original model and continued source of inspiration for everything we’re trying to do with our collective.  These two paragraphs neatly sum up why this organization was needed:

Despite their distinct musical personalities, BJU members found common ground in their motivation to join forces. “Brooklyn Jazz Underground is [about] minimizing the workload of the individual,” bassist and BJU cofounder Anne Mette Iverson explained in a 2008 interview for Jazz Improv Magazine. “It is extremely difficult to be a single musician, a bandleader, having to do all the work. This includes writing the music, running the band, getting rehearsal times together, booking the studios when you record, paying for the recordings, publishing it afterwards, booking the tours, doing all the logistics. It’s like two, three, four full-time jobs.”

With record companies cutting back their jazz divisions and clubs closing, BJU has succeeded in allowing its members to create without being bogged down by costs and logistics. “I personally see it as the only option to move on,” remarked Cuadrado of the need for DIY initiative. “We’ve had to create an infrastructure and that has certainly been a lot of work, but at the same time, it just feels great to have all the artistic freedom and the chance to someday make some money with our own company. I own all my art and although it might take me a few years to make my investment back, I have full control and ownership of it forever.”

The quote says that the BJU’s members have found common ground “Despite their distinct musical personalities”.  I definitely feel that’s also the case with the LAJC. We all come from very different backgrounds, we have a wide range of personalities and musical tastes, yet we also have equal representation in a cause that is ultimately bigger than all of us.  And yet the members of the BJU have one important thing going for them that we do not, which is to exist in a very fertile and concentrated community of incredible musicians who are pushing the boundaries of jazz in every direction, and those musicians have the support of local establishments like Smalls and Cornelia Street and Fifty Five Bar.  As I mentioned to an interview recently, you could count on one hand the number of clubs that regularly program local creative jazz music in Los Angeles. It would seem that there’s a lot more going on underground in NYC than there is above ground in LA.

We’ve got a lot of work to do.

Here’s the latest offerings from the group that inspired the formation of the LAJC.  Recordings by Arthur Kell, Guilherme Monterio, and Daniel Kelly, with support from guys like Loren Stillman, Brad Shepik, and Ben Street.  Very good music, and a review worthy of their talents.

Interesting article from great jazz writer Andrew Gilbert at insidebayarea.com about how Yoshi’s-SF is going back to all jazz progamming:

The June lineup for
Yoshi’s-San Francisco, which features a series of unprecedented
encounters between jazz legends, shows the club is trying something new
after an ill-fated, five-month flirtation with eclectic non-jazz
programming.

The Fillmore District venue has again bet on the
tried and true, turning to Jason Olaine, who saved the club back in the
mid-1990s, when it was located on Oakland’s Claremont Avenue, with a
creative approach to booking acts that consistently brought together
veteran artists who flourished in each other’s company.

This hopefully will be some ammo against the myth that programming jazz will kill a live music establishment.

We have been invited to perform for this fine event.  There will be a total of four groups in a number of configurations.  Rosters and locales as posted below.  For more info about the festival click here.

Robby Marshall Group
Robby, saxophones; Christian Wunderlich, guitar; Dennis Hamm, keys; Zach Harmon, drums; JP Maramba, bass
Davis Bros. Tires - NW corner of La Cienega and Washington Blvd.
5931 Washington Blvd
Culver City, CA, 90232

Joe Bagg Trio
Joe, organ; Mike Scott, guitar; Ryan Doyle, drums
Life Well Institute
5835 Washington Blvd
Culver City, CA 90232

Jon Bremen Duo
Jon, guitar; Brandon Bernstein, guitar
Roberts and Tilton Gallery
5801 Washington Blvd.
Culver City, CA 90232

Matt Zebley Duo
Matt, alto sax; Bill Casale, bass
Billy Shire Gallery
5790 Washington Blvd.
Culver City, CA 90039

Today is the day.  If you want to celebrate, we’ll be at Cafe 322 tonight hanging out and playing music from Kind Of Blue and Birth Of The Cool.

At our last Miles gig at Spazio a few of us in the band got into a discussion on why Kind of Blue was such a big hit.  After all, it’s not the most burning recording out there, the tunes themselves are fairly straighforward and one might even describe the playing as a bit tentative, underscored by the fact they were all sight reading over tunes that didn’t lend themselves to automatic bebop change playing.  One of my students even admitted that he had heard the album once in high school and “it didn’t really do it” for him.  Even our Miles Tribute Band leader, Josh Welchez, has said to me there are quite a few other Miles albums he’d take to the island before KOB.  So what are we talking about here?  What is the phenomenon that makes this album so compelling for so many?

Musical attributes are many and discussed in my last post.  But on top of that, there is the sheer branding power of Miles Davis and his signature album.  Like Keith Jarrett’s solo piano recording The Koln Concert, or perhaps more recently an artist like Bjork or even Susan Boyle (yes, I went there), for whatever reason an artist or recording gets big enough to create a cultural sensation that transcends the initial critical appreciation of that artist or recording.  Or it can even bypass any critical consideration, as in the case of Ms. Boyle, no offense.

That’s not the case with Miles Davis, for he is loved alike by neophytes and aficionados.  Furthermore, in this wired age, we have the added culture phenomenon of going viral, which has only served to broaden Miles’ already immense appeal.  Here’s a great quote from Miles expert Jeffrey D. Hyatt, as posted in the blog St. Louis Jazz Notes:

“Cool” as Miles Davis might be (or has always been), how does a music legend long since passed exist in the media landscape today when the zeitgeist seems to shift with each new episode of American Idol?

It’s hard out here for a jazz legend. Of course nostalgia never hurts. Great music, just like movies and literature, never gets tired, and can receive more heaping praise every year.

That’s fine for entertainment preference, but let’s give praise to how well “Miles Davis,” the brand, the business, has converged with today’s frenetic digital culture; it’s a testament to everyone involved, from fans and writers to the musicians and businessmen, that Miles Davis continues to be a viable part of art, commerce and pop culture.

No denying the brand thrives – someone is buying all those CDs, books and posters. A new generation is discovering the music via the Web, the great conduit for stumbling upon an MP3 of “If I Were A Bell.”

It’s cliché to repeat the adage that Kind of Blue is the one jazz CD even non-jazz fans own, but it makes a strong point about pop culture and being part of something ‘special.’

Miles Davis fits that bill. He brings the mythology to the party, and we are compelled to take notice. People care and people are interested. Technology is our means to tap the source and engage Miles Davis from all angles.

His story and music are a click away. The web is packed with vintage images shot through the lenses of famous photographers, and admirers can peruse thousands of random and creative photos on Flickr. Blogs track every reference and detail, and Web sites are dedicated portals of fandom, built on the ideas and opinions of likeminded admirers.

There are books, waves of critical analysis, skateboard designs, theatre productions and gallery retrospectives. YouTube is invaluable (thanks to the content owners) in presenting classic footage. There’s even a
Miles Davis movie in the pipeline.

Consuming Miles. It can be quite…consuming, but oh-so enjoyable.

Click and enjoy.  Happy Miles Day!

No Kidding!  Check it out here at BigO.  I’m new to this website, but it looks like a pretty cool place to get ROID’s (Recordings Of Indeterminate Origin).

I remember driving home from high school one day, listening to the jazz station on the radio, when a track came on that sounded different from anything I had ever heard, much different from the big band jazz I had been playing since junior high, and a stark contrast to the immaculate yet blusey Oscar Peterson recordings my teacher had suggested I get.  I was new to listening to jazz, and while I didn’t know Kelly from Marsalis I somehow knew that what was coming out of my car speakers was something very special, there was something important about it, and I needed to hear the whole thing, so as I pulled into my parent’s driveway I sat in my car, turned the engine off and kept listening.  The track was “All Blues” and that was the first time I had heard Kind Of Blue.

Two decades later, I like many others am still captivated by this recording.  Granted, many of us have taken the album for granted as we have played and over played “So What” and “Freddie Freeloader” and “All Blues” and made our students listen to the record, but when we were asked recently to perform all the tracks from Kind Of Blue at the Pasadena Jazz Institute, I sat down and listened to the record all the way through, something I hadn’t done for years.  It transported me back to high school, when I so desperately wanted to understand how those guys could make those sounds on their instruments and sound so cool, in contrast to our frenetic blues scale playing that we did in jazz band over C Jam Blues.  Even now I still am amazed at how patient and spacious all of the songs are, like those guys were aware of every sound and every instance between the sound.  It’s a beautiful and serious record, and listening to it now with the understanding I’ve gained from my pursuit of becoming a better musician has only confirmed and increased that sentiment.

Playing that music that night at PJI was suprisingly emotional and anything but cliché or campy.  To the contrary, it felt like the music itself had its own energy that we could channel into our playing, seeming as if there was power in those melodies.  Perhaps it’s a little over the top to call it the sacred music of jazz, but is there anything else that even comes close?  We learn these tunes very early on in our development, so how can they not touch a nerve that strikes at the foundation of our first experiences with jazz?  In this music there seems to be something approaching ritual, part of the rites of passage as a developing jazz musician the purport of which transforms it so it no longer becomes just another set of tunes.

Sometime after listening to “All Blues” for the first time in my car, we formed a student combo at my high school and performed during a big band concert, and the tune we played was none other than “All Blues”.  I had no idea what I was doing, I tried to copy those Bill Evans voicings as best I could (most of it was on the white keys so it didn’t sound too bad), but do remember thinking how cool this tune was and how awesome it was that we could actually play it.

I felt the exact same way as we played Kind Of Blue at the Pasadena Jazz Institute back in February.

Well, this year is the 50th anniversary of Kind Of Blue, and trumpeter Josh Welchez has taken the initiative to put together a group to celebrate this historic landmark.  Over the next month, we’ll be doing a number of shows that feature the music from Kind Of Blue as well as some of the early Birth Of The Cool recordings.  Josh has worked very hard at transcribing and arranging those tunes, and anyone who is a fan of Miles Davis is encouraged to make it out to see one or more of these shows.

The dates and locales are as follows (click on links for more info):

Saturday 5/16 (THIS SATURDAY!!!) - Spazio (Sherman Oaks) 9-midnight

Tuesday 5/26 - Cafe 322 (Sierra Madre) 9-midnight

Wednesday 6/3 - Sangria (Hermosa Beach) 6:30-9:30pm

Even if you can’t make it out to the shows, I encourage you to listen to Kind Of Blue all the way through at some point this month.  You won’t be disappointed…