Hyde Park Jazz Festival 2009 MP3s

I had the great pleasure of performing with Ernie Adams at the Hyde Park Jazz Festival 2009, 3rd annual. It's a really great festival worth attending. Great location, great music, really well organized.

Here are a few MP3s of our set. Musicians are Tom Gullion (saxophone), Tim Whalen (piano), Larry Gray (bass), Ernie Adams (drums) and Juan Picorelli (percussion).

Carswell (Tom Gullion)

For Chick (Tim Whalen)

One Look (Larry Gray)

Asiatic Raes (Kenny Dorham)

Carswell video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LmHqcMNDWY

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Hyde Park Jazz Festival - Sat, Feb 26th, 3:30pm

This Saturday, Sep 26th, is the Hyde Park Jazz Festival. I'll be performing with drummer Ernie Adams, pianist Tim Whalen and bassist Larry Gray at Experimental Station at 3:30pm. Please join us.

Experimental Station is here (map).

The rest of the festival is worth checking out. A great collection of Chicago musicians and it's free. :-)

More details are available at http://www.hydeparkjazzfestival.org/

While you're there, be sure to tweet using #jazzlives and announce your support for live music!

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Unschooling

My evolving approach to improvisation and composition has been a process of "unschooling." I don't know what else to call it. Here I'll try to explain...

I spent so much of my time studying harmony and worked diligently to understand it from multiple perspectives. Indeed, there remains a lot more to study. No one could possibly finish that task.

However, the music that speaks to me deeply is not harmonically complex. It is more earthy, more soulful, more spontaneous than we usually associate with complex music.

I also noticed that when confronted with complex chords in music musicians tend to bury their noses in the printed music and play less emotionally.

Then comes trumpeter Woody Shaw with the answer.

His music almost always sounds organic and soulful. Yet his tunes have harmonic complexity and an incredibly natural emotional curve. I really admire his work.

Crafting tunes that have all these attributes has been my goal of late. My latest recording, Carswell, comes close but there's a lot more work to do. Meanwhile, you'll find me working on unschooling my craft and getting to it.

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