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By admin, June 18, 2010 8:58 am

I’m back with another double post that I’ve been wanting to do for a while, a recount of and some thoughts about Memorial Day Weekend. 

I was very excited for this weekend for several reasons.  There would be great camping with some of my favorite people, a full day’s worth of music that was largely new to me, and then the IO Awards at Benaroya Hall to cap it all off.  First, Sasquatch.

When my sister Emily first suggested a bunch of us buy Saturday Sasquatch tickets, I probably was familiar with 3 or 4 of the bands out of the 12 hours of music that would be happening that day.  Part of the great birthday present my girlfriend Brittany got me was a package of burned cds of almost all the bands playing at Sasquatch when we would be there, a primer of sorts so I knew what to expect, and listening to these just got me more pumped.  As I’ve said here before, I pretty much come from a jazz background, and haven’t listened to very much of anything else, although my horizons have definitely expanded in recent years, and this was an opportunity to open my ears even more.

Saturday at the Gorge did not disappoint.  Artists like Mumford and Sons, Laura Marling, Miike Snow, Broken Social Scene, Vampire Weekend, the National, and Brother Ali all were top notch, and obviously seeing all of them at the Gorge in beautiful weather was an amazing experience (camping was incredible too, but I’ll stick to the music here).  From noon to midnight, I can’t remember a single act that I was honestly disappointed with, and they all had their own style and sound, not to mention incredible amounts of stage energy.  I was really impressed with all the bands’ ability to put on an awesome show and really get into it, often with little or no pageantry or flash.  Everyone seriously rocked their sets, but there was nothing lost in the execution of the music, and these are things I think I could think about more often when I play.

Monday night was the first ever Inside Out Awards.  All in all, it was an immensely impressive event that Lucid’s David Pierre-Louis pulled off, and it was fun, at least for a small part of the night, for Brittany and I to feel a little fancy walking around the Benaroya Hall lobby.  Hardcoretet didn’t win, but there was even some fun in that; after hanging out and joking around with our friends in Gravity, who beat us out for the mixed-genre album award, a tongue-in-cheek feud was born, and I hope it goes for a while.  You win this round, Gravity, but next time!

Most importantly, I hope that this first time around for the Inside Out Awards was an experience that can both be improved on as an event as well as a catalyst for increased musical activity in Seattle.  It definitely gave a snapshot of the incredible musical diversity here, and if listeners continue to seek out new venues, new bands, new artists, and new music, the scene will benefit.  I think it’s important to recognize that one of the possible negative side effects of emphasizing any particular community, whether it’s jazz, rock, sculpture, poetry, or anything else, is that the circle tightens, and even though the bonds inside that community get stronger, it begins to isolate itself.  That being said, the Inside Out Awards event was a fun celebration of what we have going on here in Seattle, and I for one was energized to look ahead to the future!

So that was Memorial Day Weekend.  Stay tuned for another post soon about the Polyrhythmics, the band I’m in that recently took an Oregon mini-tour of our own, and come celebrate Solstice this Saturday the 19th at 7:30 at Cafe Solstice(!) with Dead Zerious featuring Andrew Swanson, IO award winner and subject of this week’s Better Know a Badass on www.hardcoretetmusic.com.

Art

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By admin, May 10, 2010 8:42 am

Hardcoretet has received news that our album “Experiments in Vibe” is nominated for Best Mixed Genre Album in the Inside Out Awards!

Presented by Lucid Jazz Lounge, and taking place for the very first time on Monday, May 31st at the S. Mark Taper Foundation Auditorium at Benaroya Hall, The I/O Jazz Awards show will consist of honoring musicians for achievement in Seattle’s jazz community, and we are honored to be considered for an award. You can see all of the nominees and place your votes here.  We could not have been able to throw our hat in the ring without your support, so thank you for all of the positive reactions to the album!

Speaking of positive reactions, Hardcoretet was also able to head down once more to Oregon several weeks ago.  Our first stop was in Portland where we met up with Arick Gouwerok, a bass player and friend of mine and Tarik’s from the UW days.  Arick collaborated with me on my Senior recital, and I have missed his playing ever since he moved to Beaverton after graduation, so needless to say it was a joyous occasion to hang out with his wife Janie and him for a day.  We played that night at the White Eagle Saloon with Trio Subtonic, a really talented Portland-based band (check them out here).  Unfortunately, the mood was not ideal; the city seemed to take the Trailblazers’ NBA playoff loss pretty hard that night, but we did what we could to bring some energy.  Regardless, it was great to try a new venue, and Trio Subtonic had some awesome tunes, as well as a collection of Radiohead arrangements they were working on for an upcoming show (very cool), and they seemed to dig our sound too.  We’re excited to host them May 22nd here in Seattle at the Seamonster Lounge.

From there, it was down to Eugene to spend the day exploring the University of Oregon and the night performing at the Jazz Station, where we played on our CD release tour.  Several people who had seen us then returned to check out the show, so it was fun to reconnect and talk to them about the last couple of months, as well as see what they thought about new material, which went over well.  A guitarist playing a rock show across the street even came over to listen from outside!

All in all, it was good to tighten up our music for these shows, and the trip gave us time to talk about music, our sound, and what’s next for the band.  Roll through the Seamonster on May 22nd to see both Hardcoretet and Trio Subtonic and hear for yourself what we’ve been working on!

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By admin, March 31, 2010 4:57 pm

I’ve been a Robert Glasper fan since I first heard Canvas, his first Blue Note record, years ago, and since then I would say he’s gotten as close to “blowing up” as a jazz artist can get, releasing his third album, garnering a fair amount of press, touring with Maxwell, and continuing to play with his trio and his new quartet.  In all fairness, however, I’ve found that he was already a pretty busy guy before Canvas, playing with Terence Blanchard, Mos Def, D’Angelo, Common, J Dilla, Jaleel Shaw, and a bunch of other people.

Obviously, when Glasper came into town last week with Chris Dave on board to promote the new record Double Booked, I was excited to see the band, especially with Casey Benjamin on Alto and Vocorder as well.  In general, it was not what I expected, but, in hindsight, that’s not such a bad thing.

In all fairness, I hadn’t really checked out Double Booked like I should have before the show, and the band was performing material taken from the second half of that album.  After all, the band booked at Jazz Alley, as my dad and I observed, was not the Robert Glasper Trio, it was the Robert Glasper Experiment, a small but at the same time very important detail.  I think what threw me is that this band is not going for a conventional jazz aesthetic, and therefore the conventional roles as pianist, saxophonist, drummer, etc. do not apply.  What did this mean to me as a listener?  Well, the main difference is what Dave was doing on drums.  Throughout most of the tunes, he was moving between different divisions of the beat, displacing downbeats, and moving grooves as the rest of the group held things down.  To someone expecting a groove that would stay in one place and do the same thing repeatedly, this would be unnerving.

This shifting in the band hierarchy had implications for everyone in the band and for the music in general.  There definitely seemed to be more of a “holding it down” vibe between Glasper and bassist Derrick Hodge, at all times.  Granted, they were super tight, and the communication between Glasper, Hodge, and Dave was unreal, but I kept waiting for Glasper to take the lead and for Dave to back up musically.  I felt the same way for a lot of Benjamin’s alto work.  There was a disjointed nature to the music:  shorter phrasing and quick statements, darting in and out of Dave’s drumming  (I will say this about Benjamin on vocorder, though:  really beautiful, expressive, and musical; my favorite moment of the night was Benjamin really going to town on it at the end of a Hodge original).

I’ve asked some other people about the band’s two nights at Jazz Alley, and some folks had similar feelings.  Deandre Enrico, a great bassist around town, wrote to me that “it often sounded…like the drums weren’t playing ‘with’ the rest of the band…it ruined any chance for a ‘groove’”.  But others, like my friend and drummer Tarik Abouzied, made the case that the music needed to be listened to in a different way, that when it came down to it Dave was comping and adding to the music the same way other musicians do, but because he is a drummer it sounds different to me.  I disagreed at first, but the more I think about it, the more I think Tarik may be right.

I talk a lot about trying to erase the divide between soloist and rhythm section, improvisation and accompaniment, but when I see it in practice I still fall into my old biases.  It’s also important to point out that although Chris Dave is the most well known of the group of drummers playing in this sort of style, there are many out there, and it could also be that I just need to check more stuff out.

I kind of wish I had the chance to see the Experiment again now that I’ve gone back and forth in my mind, but I will have to wait until next time.

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By admin, February 26, 2010 11:48 am

Speak is a 5-piece band that plays creative instrumental music drawing on a wide variety of influences.  Some of the members, like Chris Icasiano and Luke Bergman, I’ve mentioned in this blog before from their work with other groups like Bad Luck and Motorist, and I work with Aaron Otheim in Hardcoretet.  I’ve known saxophonist Andrew Swanson for several years, the same amount of time as the rest of the guys mentioned above. 

I realized that it was quite difficult for me to talk about the music and the band in a satisfying way, so I went to Aaron for help.  After all, if I wanted to put out a truly accurate description of Speak, why not go to the source?

As Aaron tells it:  “I think it’d be good to mention that Speak began as a straight-ahead-sounding jazz group that was originally Andrew, Chris, Luke and me, but that our sound evolved to incorporate elements of classical music and rock – the music each of us grew up playing and listening to.  This shift in sound was definitely strengthened when Cuong Vu joined the band as his musical aesthetic and playing style reflect a similar trajectory.”

Before Cuong Vu began teaching at the University of Washington and playing with the group, he had already become fairly well known in creative music circles.  The Trio had come to Seattle a couple of times, including a show at the Tractor featuring Bill Frisell that saxophonist Stuart McDonald told me was one of the best shows he had seen in a long time, and Vu had begun touring with Pat Metheny.  So it was very exciting to hear that he would be teaching in town, and then even more exciting when he started playing with Speak.  The result of the year or so that the quartet had put in combined with this later collaboration that has now been going on for longer than that has resulted in the band’s self-titled debut CD, available here.  Aaron went on to talk a little bit more specifically about the music:

“Another important component: most of the “solos sections” actually consist of collective improvisation, meaning that everyone is improvising together… no real soloists. The heads of the tunes themselves all have very specific parts worked out, however, much more akin to a classical composition or the way a rock band might rehearse. This provides a very strong structure that frames each improvisation, giving us a clear focus on where the improvisation should go, but not necessarily how it should sound.”

The CD release show and the album itself put all of these concepts on display, moving from sections of pointillistic modern classical music to free improvisation to experimentation with electronic sounds and the layering of indie-rock. 

Speak will get a chance to showcase their sound outside of the Northwest soon, at performances in Colorado, the Stone in New York and the Saalfelden Jazz Festival in Salzburg, Austria.

Congratulations, guys!

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By admin, February 10, 2010 4:04 pm

I went to the Sunset Tavern in Ballard last night to watch Motorist, a rock band that includes musicians Jared Borkowski, Chris Icasiano, and Luke Bergman, who I met at the University of Washington, and Garrett Sand, who I met through the guys more recently, as well as frontman Robert Dale.  I really enjoyed the music and grabbed a free CD that I’m still listening to right now.

All of these people I met playing bebop-oriented jazz music, but that seems so long ago now, after watching them move on to play rock, as in last night, or more improvisatory music, as I’ve seen them recently do at the Racer Sessions.

It’s exciting and encouraging to know that there are cultural circles in this town that insist on taking in music from all sorts of different categories, no matter where it comes from, and I’m not just talking about musicians.  No matter what the style, no matter how popular it is or how far it is from the mainstream, people can recognize good music, and I think all of us, as performers, can take comfort in that.

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By admin, January 30, 2010 7:38 pm

Two venues doing positive things for the Seattle scene:

One of the great new additions to my list of places to be, the Seamonster Lounge is a great gathering spot for local heavies and for music that sometimes falls in those gaps between jazz, funk, and rock.  Featuring weekly appearances by the McTuff trio, Nathan Spicer, Woogie D, and others, the club has really cultivated a great jam band, groove-based vibe that doesn’t cut any corners when it comes to musicianship.  In short, a rocking venue.

Another inspiring spot that I hope to frequent more often is Cafe Racer in the Ravenna/U-District area.  You can go to Racer one night and check out a rock band, go the next night and see a blues duo, go the next night and watch free jazz.  I particularly was drawn to the new Sunday Racer Sessions, an open jam session curated by a different musician each week that usually revolves around open ended free improvisation.  I was there this last Sunday to see a solo performance by Neil Welch and was blown away.  Check his website here and check out the Racer Sessions site at http://racersessions.com

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By admin, December 18, 2009 5:08 pm

A couple of weeks ago I went to see Roy Hargrove at Jazz Alley.  I knew beforehand that this was going to be straightahead, post-bop type stuff, not his neo-soul band RH Factor, which I would love to see live someday, but I realized that it had been quite a while since I had seen a touring, non-local band tear into some really swinging stuff.  For that matter, I couldn’t remember the last time I had been to Jazz Alley.  Granted, the covers are always over $20, and I can never afford to get dinner, but when it comes down to it, there just aren’t very many venues for the jazz bands with the heavies that we read about in magazines or on websites, those guys that are labeled as the leaders of what’s going on in jazz in the world.  If you want to see them, you need to pay the money, and if you’re in Seattle, you pretty much have to go to Jazz Alley.

I would say Roy is one of those guys, and I had never seen him live before.  He definitely did not disappoint, moving from originals to tunes written by Horace Silver, John Hicks, and Johnny Griffin, burning tempos to quiet and slow swing tunes.  His sound was expressive throughout the set, and the rest of the group was just as impressive.  Justin Robinson had an awesome raw alto sound, and some of his ideas reminded me of Eric Dolphy, really pushing his tone, time, harmony, and range of the horn.  It almost felt like the thing was going to come apart.  Jonathan Baptiste’s piano playing was equally melodic and thematic, sometimes pounding out rhythms with both hands, sometimes letting his right hand take off, and, when locking in with Montez Coleman on drums, his comping was off the hook.  It was great to hear him on the Hicks tune “Naima’s Love Song”, a tune I’m really into right now, and Ameen Saleem got a chance to shine there on bass as well.

Another cool aspect of the night was that although most of the night was straightahead swing, you could tell from the way these guys were playing it that they were into other styles of music.  Maybe that perception is colored by my knowledge that Roy is all over the map with genres, playing with John Mayer, D’Angelo, etc., and, as you can see from the photo, his fashion sense is a fusion of different stuff too, but there’s something in the playing also.  Hard to explain, I guess, but I really felt like they were playing the material differently than a die-hard straightahead jazz fanatic would, and the material was not suffering in any way because of this, which I find equal parts impressive and encouraging for anyone who worries about the “jack of all trades, master of none” problem.

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By admin, November 24, 2009 10:15 am

The jam at Cafe Amore has been going on for a bit now, but until last night I had only been able to stop by quickly.  The band was D’vonne Lewis on drums, Mark Bullis on bass, a piano player who goes by Gus, John Terpin on trombone, and the always entertaining Ronnie Pierce on alto saxophone.

Ronnie is a pretty amazing guy.  He’s 81 years old, still plays and hangs out as much as I do, likes dirty jokes, and hams it up on the microphone like nobody else.  He’s also become somewhat of a mentor for John, who played with Ronnie at the Whiskey Bar when they had jazz on Wednesdays, and who will often drive Ronnie to hang since he can’t drive anymore.  Keep your eyes on the blog for a recorded interview with Ronnie by John, hopefully he’ll get some crazy stories on tape!

Cafe Amore is a great little italian spot, albeit a little expensive, with a nice bar, fair amount of tables, and a stage at the front of the room under a screen where they play old black and white movies.  The jam is early, from 7:30-10:30, which works well because Ev Stern, bass player and teacher, runs a jazz workshop that finishes around 7, and Amore is all ages, so a lot of the students from the workshop and kids in general get a chance to jam with local musicians.  It was a blast to see this 15-year old kid (who sounded ridiculous, by the way) just grinning ear to ear as he’s playing with D’vonne Lewis, one of the first-call drummers in town.

The other great thing about this session is that John keeps things moving.  There’s never really any lines of soloists because he keeps the groups small from tune to tune, and he’s really good at maneuvering people to getting the song called without a whole lot of discussion, which makes a huge difference at a session.

It’s also really fun to play standards with a trombone on the front line, just a different sound than the typical sax madness you get sometimes.  Thanks John!

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By admin, November 16, 2009 11:03 am

Bad Luck is a drums and saxophone duo with Chris Icasiano and Neil Welch, two classmates of mine from the University of Washington days, who have taken off on an amazing path of music-making since then.  Chris has gone on to work in a diverse range of settings, from free jazz to rock to West African music, and Neil has been leading a 7-piece group that fuses Indian music and jazz, releasing an album, as well as playing with Chris and squeezing in a road trip that spanned almost all 50 states! 

That being said, I was very excited to to see the Bad Luck CD release concert on Saturday night and hear what Chris and Neil were up to.  I had not heard the group since Hardcoretet played a show with them months ago at Lucid, which I still look back on regretfully and with some guilt, as the owner of the club asked us to cut Bad Luck short that night, and we did that rather than stand up for them and refuse to do so.

That unfortunate experience has done nothing to slow the duo’s momentum, however, and it was evident at the show on Saturday.  The Good Sheperd Center was packed, and it was definitely the place to be if you were a Seattle musician.  The compositions moved from wildly energetic and raw to achingly delicate and introspective, sometimes in a very short span of time, and Chris and Neil were on the same wavelength the entire night.  It was inspiring, interesting, and new, something any music scene needs as much of as possible.  Congratulations guys!

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By admin, November 1, 2009 7:56 pm

What a ride it’s been for the last month or so…

After sweating and working hard for our tour, we had a couple of days to great ready to present our hard work to Seattle at the official CD release at Tula’s as part of the Earshot Jazz Festival. 

The vibe there was definitely different than what I’m used to, in that there is more of an expectation that the audience sits and listens to the music somewhat intently.  To be honest, I feel more comfortable in a looser atmosphere, where I can talk to friends and family casually during the show, even step away to give a hug or high five or two.  I’m also usually more comfortable inviting people to those shows, because it feels like a more social thing to do than sitting down and keeping the conversations to a minimum. 

I was a little nervous as to what it was going to be like, but I was blown away by the support and how much everyone present enjoyed the show.  Unless you all were being nice, it sounded like people liked the music, the show, and the energy behind what we were doing, which is honestly the music that I feel is closest to what I really want to play. 

The sound of Hardcoretet is really personal to me because it incorporates elements of everything I’m into:  the jazz I listened to growing up, the funk, hip hop, and electronic music I got into later, and elements of pop and rock that I’m just starting to appreciate now.  Knowing that, combined with the reception we received at the sold-out Tula’s, made me feel incredibly humbled and happy to have a great group of people around me to hear me put something out there basically saying ”this music is me” and to have them dig it.  I talk about the importance of supportive listeners all the time, but I do that because it’s really important to remember.

Photos courtesy of Daniel Sheehan, www.eyeshotjazz.com