Current musical happenings 3.333333

As I'm currently sitting around doing nothing, I thought this is a great chance to write another blog to catch up on what I've been doing in the past few months.

In the past few months I've been playing with a great North-Wales based poet Martin Daws, we've been doing gigs as a duo, where he recites the words and plays kalimba. We've been working on some new music with piano trio recently, hopefully get to record in the first half of 2012. Here's a video of us playing with a larger group in Edinburgh fringe festival in August 2011,

On December the 1st I had my ass kicked in dempseys. I was lucky enough to get a chance to play with straight ahead jazz guitar legend Dave Cliff in a quartet with Stuart Power also on guitar and Mark O'Connor on drums. We played some standards, some Wes Montgomery tunes along with other post bop classics. Dave's in his mid 60s, but sound absolutely immense, he also has a lot of funny stories from the years of being a travelling musician. It was Stuart Power who got the gig happening, a great guitar player who's based in Cardiff. If you ever get a chance to see him play, do it, he's spent a lot of time studying a lot of Lennie Tristano school and bebop language, so he sounds great over that music.

I've been really busy on some of the pit band side of stuff as well. I did the college musical and my first panto last week. The college musical was 'Merrily we roll along', old school Sondheim thing, I only did a few shows, but good experience for playing with a conductor. The panto I've been doing is Aladdin in the Swansea Grand Theatre on bass guitar, also good experience at the conductor stuff, but a lot more stressful than the musical, had to be on stand by at all times due to all the sound effects we were doing. From both these shows I've realised a few things; conductor don't like to beat on the 2 and 4 when it comes to jazz, that I'm not the greatest at following a conductor and that i should practice following conductors.

I also had my own band play a few gigs over South Wales in October, as you can see from a previous post. I hope to be writing more for this band over the holidays and try hustling for some more gigs over the new year. I've got a soundcloud page with some of the tunes we played at dempseys, it'd be great if you had a listen here. 

Let's hope 2012 brings a lot of cool musical happenings!

The Listener.

I've just been wondering about this tonight and thought it'd be a good idea to write it down. The listener these days in my opinion is so easily influenced by 3 mains things, they either check out what people they respect tell them to look into, listen to something that's familiar from when they were younger or associated with a certain memory, or even to go against both these and try and avoid what they've heard before and ignore their friends' recommendations.

I would categorise myself as the avant garde listener, as I usually avoid what people are checking during a musical phase, but also with a lot of the qualities of the nostalgic listener. In many circles of friends I have seen people getting into different movements of music. Very often some get very heavily into styles of music which contradict their backgrounds, of course there's nothing wrong with this, but a very interesting thing. The thing I usually find with music that people check out, name has a lot to do with it. Is it because the listener feels secure with names and usually get so involved with feeling safe listening to the same artist.

With these assumptions in mind I often wonder why I got into jazz and improvised music and what I would make of a completely unknown artist that's exactly to my taste who makes this music and listen to it with a completely unbiased view. 

Just a thought.

Huw Vs Williams 4tet @ Dempseys.

These are photos from my quartet's gig in Dempseys from 18th Oct. There are recordings which I'll put up here as soon as they're finished mixing.

"This is a Joe Webb presentation!"

Greg Sterland

Teddy Smith

Lloyd Haines

Action shot

Huw V Williams.

I'd like to thank Roger Warbuton for taking these photos. Roger also does a guide of all the local gigs and sends it around via email. If you want to get in touch with him about the goings on, his address  is rjw54rjw@hotmail.com

Roots in Tradition.

Something I've been thinking a lot about recently is how some great players have their own voice in improvised music, but still have that connection to some sort of musical tradition while others don't. While listening to some of my favourite musicians (e.i Larry Grenadier, Ethan Iverson, Drew Gress and so on) a lot of them seem to have the jazz tradition in their playing whilst keeping their own voice. On the other hand a lot of the NY down town scene musicians seem to take musical traditions from other genres, such as Jamie Saft, Trevor Dunn and others who arguably take a lot of their sound from rock music before the millennium and bring that energy to their brand of jazz/improvised music.
From reading further into this, Craig Taborn (pianist) talks about how he feels improvising freely with William Parker and Gerald Cleaver and how rooted they are to the tradition of jazz and makes the music their playing some what deeper with out making direct references to any stylistic genre within jazz. On the other hand I watched an interview with Mary Halvorson who discusses not taking direct influence from music and making it your own. She talks about when she studied guitar with Joe Morris and how he'd never touch a guitar in those lessons, so that she would sound only like herself and couldn't take any of his vocabulary. Wayne Krantz also takes this idea, but to a more extreme example. He doesn't listen to any music at all so he can't take any influence from it, therefore anything that he plays is completely unique.
I've also wondered wether there was a similar argument in the 1940s when the bebop movement was starting or in the 1970s when a lot of the ECM guys were trying to break away from more old school jazz approach. If some one were to try and strengthen their connection to the jazz tradition (musically and spiritually), how would some one go about that, or is it a natural thing someone is born with? A lot of people see it's essential that you could hear your connection to the jazz tradition, but can one turn their back on everything and try and create something completely original? As conclusion to this, I think different things work for different musicians; after all you gotta be really good to make a mark in this music anyway!

Current musical happenings 2.0

This is a clip of Hugh Laurie playing Turkish Mambo by Lennie Tristano. I guess the Tristano school way of learning music is getting more popular by the day.

Wilbur Ware

From listening to a lot of different types of music, Wilbur Ware is one of these musicians I keep coming back to. To put it simply, he is fucked up (in a good way that is). I've always tried looking him up, but never really found much out, only that he never owned a bass due to his heroin addiction and lost his place in monk's quartet with coltrane because he left the soundcheck to get a sandwich but never returned.
He only recorded one album as a leader, Chicago Sound featuring Johnny Griffin which was released in late 1957. There are some incredible bass solos on this record, not flash at all, just simple melodies, amazing feel and great musicality. This record was a great feature for him as a soloist, where he'd have solo bass spots on a few tracks, definitely one for bass players to check out, not all about good technique, just incredible feel.

His bass lines are crazy. From transcribing different bits of his walking lines, I've realised he didn't follow the harmony too closely, where a lot of the time he threw in a lot of substitutions, but in a way that would lead the music forward. 

Check him out if you have a chance, he's on the Sonny Rollins Live at Vanguard record, Grant Green Standards and Johnny Griffin Sextet, all amazing listening.

Food and vibe

As I was sorting out the Photos on my laptop, I realised that i have a load of pictures of food that I had uploaded since last summer, so I thought I'd put them up here to share my culinary tastes.

This was an odd hotpot I cooked with my housemate last summer, a sort of chilli con carne thing, we ran out of food in the house so scrapped this together with what we were able to find.

This is something cooked this with my girlfriend around January, scallops cooked with chilli and garlic, fried leek, sweet pepper, couchette and egg fried rice........ a lot of frying

This was also cooked by the same personnel, around february, I grabbed inspiration for this from Jamie Oliver's fish fight, curried coley, chickpea saag and a lot of cous cous.

This is a breakfast with home made hash brown, garlic mushrooms, cabbage and onion slop, beans, poached egg and some posh bread to make it look nice.

Gig food from the Open Hearth in Torfaen when i did a gig there, big ass fish.

Doesn't look that nice, but I though because it looked so green it needed a mention.

Home made coley fish fingers with tomato salsa and home made chips, made at home.

Pepper board.

Prawn and tomato linguine, with water cress leaves kicking around.

As concludes, i love food, maybe a bit too much.