Archive for the ‘Brass Ecstasy’ Category

A nice review of the Brass Ecstasy performance last night by the Oregon Music News blog hit this morning. Click here to read.

UPDATE: Check out another review from Mainly Music Meanderings here with accompanying photos. Note: one tune was missing from Posty McPosterton’s setlist — “The Brass Ring” (with the drum solo Posty mentions) should appear between “Awake Nu” and “Mr. Pitiful.” That update came straight from the horse’s mouth. Thanks for posting Posty!

Early Warning: Brass Ecstasy’s next scheduled performance this year will be at the Red Sea Jazz Festival this coming August. More info on that festival coming soon. As always, keep your eye on Dave’s tour page for the most recent tour news.

Special 1/2 price Student/Senior Tickets

Half-price tickets are available to students and seniors via walk-up only at the Crystal Ballroom. Limited availability.

For non-seniors and non-students, buy your tickets in advance here.

Upcoming interviews with artists coming to the Portland Jazz Festival were just announced. Check out Dave’s interview on Sunday (day of the Brass Ecstasy performance) at noon. Full list of interviews below.

Jazz Conversations (all at the Art Bar [map] and all free) include:

* Friday, 2/26 at 4pm: Tom D’Antoni with Craig Handy of the Mingus Big Band
* Friday, 2/26 at 5pm: Tim DuRoche with Trygve Seim & Frode Haltli
* Friday 2/26 at 6pm: Matt Fleeger with Christian Wallumrod
* Saturday 2/27 at 12pm: Steven Cantor with Dave Holland
* Saturday 2/27 at 6:30pm: Barry Jonson with Pharoah Sanders
* Sunday 2/28 at 12pm: Lloyd Peterson with Dave Douglas

Left-coasters can hear Dave Douglas & Brass Ecstasy this coming Sunday the 28th at the Crystal Ballroom [map] as part of the Portland Jazz Festival. Get your tickets here.

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To celebrate, this week at the Greenleaf store we have a sale going for all the Brass Ecstasy music.

Spirit Moves: Buy the CD and receive a free upgrade to the Deluxe CD+DVD package. Saves you 40%.
On Stage: Part of our download-only series, pick up these live sets for $5 MP3 or $7 FLAC saving you 30%.
Sheet Music: Five bucks off the digital PDFs of the extended Spirit Moves book of music. Saves you 25%.

Sale ends Monday the 29th.

Happy friday, everyone. If you read our site regularly, you probably received an email blast this morning. If not, we announced our Holiday Bundles earlier today. There are some pretty sweet deals on every album in our catalog over at the store. Also, a pretty killer Subscriber package for new people wanting to overload their hard drive with tunage and support what we do.

More specials coming next week. Happy post-Turkey day.

A reminder that Dave’s Brass Ecstasy band will be out for two shows this week. The first at the Settlement Music School in Philadelphia on Thursday; the second at Washington and Lee University on Saturday. For more details, click over to Dave’s tour page.

We’re also getting close to the Quintet’s European tour which starts next week. Check that link above to see if DDQ is coming to your town.

Hope we see you out there.

This week I heard a recording of the music Nadje Noordhuis wrote for FONT this past June. What a beautiful sound and thoughtful composer. She says she’s recording it soon and I recommend checking that out if you can.

Ambrose Akinmusire shared the stage with Avishai Cohen — truly inspiring to see trumpeters playing TOGETHER. No competition, just music. Clearly pushing each other to new creative heights, playing original music and a few re-arrangements of music by Bobby Bradford. They say there’s nothing new under the sun, but when you see two creatively and technically gifted trumpeters side by side playing in two widely divergent styles it just drives home how many personal developments have taken place on this instrument in the past decade or so. Those developments are shot through all the music of our time, on all instruments, but hearing these two trumpeters it couldn’t be any clearer. Both of these guys are pushing new frontiers in terms of phrasing, intervallic leaps, and rhythmic interplay with the rhythm section. Most of all — leaps of imagination. Let it be said that the rhythm section was exemplary and constantly inventive – Vijay Iyer, Chris Tordini, and Marcus Gilmore.

On Friday Jeremy Pelt invited Eddie Henderson and David Weiss with the rhythm section of Marc Cary, Vicente Archer, and Gerald Cleaver. I’m not being sarcastic or ironic when I say it made me want to go home and practice. I love Jeremy’s sound and fluid facility. He has also been important to FONT as a board member, and every time he has a chance he highlights his hero Dr. Eddie Henderson, who played just as beautifully and lucidly as ever. They played some engagingly rearranged Bobby Bradford pieces and originals. It’s such a pleasure to hear a three trumpet gig that isn’t a high note fest, a rehash of old classics, or a battle of one-up-manship. Just pure music made now in our time.

Peter Evans and Nate Wooley joined me yesterday for a short performance and discussion of “extended techniques” for the trumpet. I’m putting that in quotes because we all had the same point to make that these kinds of things have been around a long time. Peter made a good point about Round Midnight being the first major bestselling example of extended trumpet techniques. Breathy, close-miked harmon mute with a lot of reverb and microtonal pitch bending? How bizarre!

That aside, there really are things these two guys are doing that have only developed in the last decade or so. Trumpeters like Peter and Nate, Greg Kelley, Axel Doerner, Ed Harkins, Franz Hautzinger, Jaimie Branch, and others (if you know of others I’m leaving out, please reply in the comments or send me an email) have started using split tones, circular breathing, slap tonguing and many other techniques as the basis for their music. Nate said a lot of the impetus for the work he’s doing comes from listening to electronic music and sound/noise music. That kind of makes sense when you hear his uninterrupted tones affected by sheets of aluminum flashing covering the bell–with your eyes closed you would be hard pressed to identify it as trumpet music. When asked why he started developing these sonic resources on the trumpet, Peter said he does it because it’s fun. It was fun playing with Peter and Nate, I hope we get a chance to do it again some time. The session was recorded and FONT will produce a transcript of the conversation and possibly some sound samples.

Bobby Bradford played a beautiful gig with David Murray, Marty Ehrlich, Mark Dresser and Andrew Cyrille last night. I’m going to hear the Octet tonight. Bradford is being given the FONT Award of Recognition (the recipient is chosen democratically by the membership each year) this evening, and it is hard not to get emotional in seeing this cornetist and composer celebrating with a great band in NYC. Sold out houses were there to cheer him on and the music was rich and powerful.

From Point of Departure and James Newton:

How can one begin to assess the numerous contributions of a great cornetist/trumpeter/composer/bandleader/educator? How can one also adequately offer a testament for an artist who is such a high quality human being and who profoundly touches so many lives?

Those of us who have been blessed to know Bobby Bradford for a number of years can attest to a probing, powerful intellect that assimilates the history of Jazz in a highly unique manner, drawing conclusions that are as innovative and provocative as one of his solos. His understanding of the history, coupled with his embracing of Jazz’s mandate for innovation, reveals itself in his teaching, playing and composing. I have profoundly admired his brilliant mind, up-tempo wit and his usual location of being two or three steps ahead of everyone else. Like Lester Bowie, he has achieved an individualistic incorporation of Louis Armstrong’s musical language and has placed that influence within the context of modern Jazz’s avant-garde movements. Like Sonny Rollins, J.S. Bach and Ornette Coleman, Bradford has a strong penchant for using musical sequences in both his compositional and improvisational languages. Also like Sonny Rollins, Bradford has a remarkable gift of musical memory. These gifts along with a boundless imagination have consistently enabled Bradford to deftly organize his improvisations. I am consistently stunned by the exquisite musical architecture instantaneously created in his solos. These improvisational edifices give room for his listening audiences to roam within them – exploring and discovering something new about him and themselves. Bradford’s rhythmical language is extremely diverse and his lyrical leanings give many of his solos an emotional depth that only the best practitioners in the music achieve. Bradford is Bradford – coming out of Louis Armstrong, Thelonious Monk, Fats Navarro, Charles Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Lester Young – yet still Bradford.

One crucial aspect of Los Angeles’ musical scene, from Bop to Free Jazz, was that one had to find his or her individual sound. It is impossible to confuse one note of Bobby Bradford with that of any other trumpeter or cornetist. His sound uses a smidgen of air, sometimes in a fashion similar to Ben Webster or Paul Gonsalves’ use of air, as an expressive part of the sub-tone sound. Bradford’s timbral specificity within his language (not the one sound fits all ideas approach) adds a vocal quality to his playing that exudes emotional sensitivity not often found within the context of new music.

See Point of Departure link to read the rest.

Thanks to everyone who came out to the BE show at Yoshi’s last night. You can read a review via the Jazz Observer here.

Tonight, Brass Ecstasy hits the Arcata Theatre. Tickets available here. This is one of the final Brass Ecstasy performances of the year and one not to be missed. Check out the Times-Standard concert preview here.

A special thanks to our friends (and Greenleaf subscribers) at the Redwood Jazz Alliance for their help bringing this music to Arcata.

The band hits the Angel City Festival on Sunday. As we mentioned in our email blast earlier this week, we’ll be hanging with our Crypto-friends at our booth in Edison Plaza. Stop by and say hi before or after the show.

We were lucky enough to have Geoff Countryman on tour with Brass Ecstasy in Europe this summer. Upon return, we were sent a boatload of clips from each of the bands performances as well as some candid shots of classic on-the-road happenings captured by Mr. Countryman. So we assembled a little montage for your viewing pleasure. As you watch, you will be hearing a track from the On Stage download series we put up last month called “Spirit Moves.”

Also, at the GreenleafMusicHQ YouTube page, we’ve made a new playlist compiling all the Brass Ecstasy videos — the live Tiny Desk Concert, this montage, as well as the in-studio videos from the DVD part of Spirit Moves.

Enjoy.