Jazz

Aside from TAPFS, the gig i've been is now well up there competeing for best gig ive been to in the last year. I went to see Courtney Pine, a saxophone player, as part of the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival. So i arrived at 8 at the big marquee right in front of St Anne's, and chilled about for an hour til they eventually came on at 9. Now, i was expecting a sax player, piano, bass & drums, but no...we got a sax player, a drummer, a pianist playing keyboards and a grand, a guitarist, an electric acoustic upright double bass player (playing one of those basses with just the spine), and an electric violin player. And so we were basked in over 2 hours of awesome experimental jazz music.

By experimental i mean rhythms from every part of the world, violins and basses with flangers and wah wah, weird saxophone playing, insanely high notes, and insane drums. The cool thing was it was all really listenable to. The way they did it was, they did a song, then Courtney Pine (sax player) introduced a certain member of the band, who then ripped into a 5 minute crazyass solo. For every single member of the band, including such a drum solo. It's hard to remember everything that happened, but i'm trying....

And then there were the high notes. This guy was hitting notes well over 3 1/2 octaves above middle C on a tenor sax. That's insane if you didn't know. Courtney Pine is such a class guy too, he was telling us all to get into the groove. Eventually he said "Some people may know what i'm talkin about - jazz is not just from the head, but from the entire body, so i want everybody in here on their feet!" And so the entire marquee packed with 500 people got up and were loving it. It was brillaint, and so laid back, as there were no bouncers to stop people getting near the stage, so by near the end i was pretty much almost sitting on the stage.

So then they finished, went off, and came back on to play a further 45 minutes of awesomeness. Courtney Pine got the audience involved, split them into 3 sections, and got us fully into 3 part harmony. Oh yea, and all 6 of them were insanely good at their instruments. It was like this, CP would play a totally improvised passage to the bass player, and he would play it back, note by note, every time. So eventually they finished off by stating that all this does one thing: "Music brings people from all backgrounds together", and this is what they were trying to put out through their music. Amen to that guys.

In others things, i've been swimming and doing well. Only 6 days til the big one, then til i'm free from competition for ages....