My name is Patrick and I am in a Blues Band looking for some brass. We are pretty new and our website is extremely new but we are off to a great start and we are getting some pretty sweet gigs. Let me know if you are interested in jamming some old school style blues with us. We are a 6 piece band: 2 guitars, bass,harmonica, drums, and piano. We would love to have you come by.

Patrick Dwyer

I’m afraid I’m not sure how the backlinks work! I’m still learning…

Along with Jason, I felt Benjamin might have overdone the vocoder/keytar effect throughout the night, although I recognize it’s uniqueness in the music, it’s not like I would have wanted to hear Robert play a different instrument. The vocoder had it’s thing in the music – I guess it just would have been nice to hear Benjamin’s real voice (I bet that cat could really sing for real) or even just a different sound patch to vary things up. It’s a taste thing here, however I really dug seeing him do it in performance – the way he was bending and getting the sounds was just blowing my mind. Funny enough I’ll be covering this song this coming Sunday, April 4th at the Triple Door with some tap & modern dancers with my group The Teaching. I’ll actually be having to play Robert and Benjamin’s part at the same time…we’ll see how that unfolds.

Regarding the rest of the show – I really felt the group began to shine when they let go near the end of Wednesday night’s show. They started quoting J. Dilla tunes and other more ‘Boom-Bap’ sounding progressions and I was just loosing myself in the grooves. I had to contain myself from not yelling after every bomb “WHOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAA!”. For me it was the icing on the cake that evening and I was so happy they just let go and started having fun.

I overheard Jason say he heard a woman say on his way back from the restroom “Bad Experiment” and I had this thought that this individual just wasn’t connecting with the music. That’s fine. I think a lot of folks who go to Jazz Alley were quite possibly stunned that this wasn’t the “Jazz” type show they were hoping to see. Indeed, it was very easy to be misled when Robert has played at Jazz Alley before and played more inline with a standard Jazz Trio (still pushing the boundaries of Jazz, but staying connected) – so to see his name still featured and the word Trio simply changed to Experiment – anyone could have assumed this would be much like his previous performances. Nevertheless – “Bad Experiment” – I think Robert is beyond it being an experiment and for me it was an “Incredible Experience!”

I’m definitely a fan of Robert’s (as I mentioned above) – so this performance was high on my list of top 10 best performances I’ve seen in my life. It was powerful for me and that evening I went home and stayed up to 6am writing new music. This, I think, is the key to doing something original – inspiring some cats to just go deep into a new musical vibe, while leaving others to scratch their heads or not enjoy it because it just doesn’t suit their tastes. I’m not saying it’s just black and white, but I’m saying that music has the power to sometimes go over peoples heads (which Robert’s music certainly has an element of – dare I say avant-guard jazz-hop?) and on the same hand directly impact cats who are needing that music so much during this time in their lives and development.

I’ll never forget the first time I heard Canvass on KEXP driving home one evening – I immediately went out and downloaded his CD because he played the sickest little quote of ‘Blue in Green’ with a drum-and-bass feel beneath it at the end of the title track. That did it for me – I was hooked. It was unlike anything I’d ever heard coming from a Trio before and it was the beginning of a new strain of creative song writing I hadn’t been willing to completely immerse myself in until that point. Isn’t it amazing how the world works? A song for one person could be a start of a whole new thing and that same song for another person could just be another song that doesn’t fit in their world at this point in time.

And man – did I mention – Chris Dave…seriously…seriously. Amazing.

Glad to share my thoughts here and thank you Art for creating an exciting conversation here.

-Josh