Check this out…

SUNDAY JUNE 13th
An unprecedented concert of new jazz works with renowned composers and performers for the telematic music medium. Telematic music is real-time performance via the internet by musicians in different geographic locations. Performers will be located in New York and San Diego, playing together as one trans-continental ensemble in real-time and “real-space”. There will be local audiences as well as a world-wide webcast. The music explores elements of jazz fused with artistic properties of telematic technology including multiplicity, heterophony, swing, polyphony, synchronicity, and nodality. The transparent densities and intensities are manifested to create this new music reality of telematic jazz.

Composers – Mark Dresser, Gerry Hemingway, Oliver Lake, Sarah Weaver
San Diego Performers – Hafez Modirzadeh saxophone,Michael Dessen trombone, Alex Cline, percussion, Mark Dresser, contrabass
New York Performers – Amir ElSaffar, Oliver Lake, saxophone, Min Xiao-Fen , pipa, Gerry Hemingway, percussion, Sarah Weaver, conductor

Steinhardt School, New York University
35 W. 4th Street, 6th Floor – New York NY, 10012
7:00pmEDT

Center for Research and Computing in the Arts (CRCA), University of California San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive – La Jolla, CA 92093-0436
4:00pmEDT

Tune into the video webcast here on Sunday.

Darcy gives me a significant promotion in his Banffblogging.

Mary Halvorson improvising with super-participants Angela Morris and John Lake.

Mary gave a great class on practicing improvising with intervals — limiting yourself to one interval or set of intervals, and working on coming up with ideas you like using them. Then practicing using only those ideas, with or without the metronome. Also, using those ideas in a group setting in which each player is given a set of musical parameters. These parameters eventually came to include interactive instructions (for example, shadowing, or ignoring, other players) and rhythmic ideas. The crux of her workshop was, for me, the value in working with small bits of information you come up with yourself. That is a unique perspective and not often talked about. Those of you who know Mary’s playing know how well she applies the lessons.

Drew Gress and E.J. Strickland gave a subtle and powerful workshop on rhythm section playing. It’s a hard area to talk about, and it was inspiring to see the honesty they each bring to the interactions within a group. Lots of played examples, including exercises they made up on the spot (seemed like a theme for yesterday), like inserting random subdivisions and odd metered bars into forms in order to practice awareness and interaction.

Over the long weekend, we posted some new Subscribercasts recorded up at the Banff Workshop. Special thanks to those engineers who’ve helped out.

The first is a two-part conversation with Dave Douglas and Donny McCaslin discussing Donny’s albums Recommended Tools and Declaration with selected audio tracks from both, composing, practicing, the Banff Workshop, and much more.

The second Subscribercast update is titled Travelogue: Birth, Growth, and Maintenance. This one has Dave detailing various versions of the tune Travelogue from the Spark of Being release. Five versions of the piece are showcased, from the earliest trio recording with Dave, Adam Benjamin, and DJ Olive, to the fully-realized Soundtrack mix with commentary on each.

These Subscribercasts are exclusively available for Subscribers to stream. If you’re already a Subscriber, simply login at the store with your email/password, and head over to the Subscribercast page and click on a ‘cast. Also, check the Subscriber Downloads blog for a preview of Spark Of Being: Expand (out August 2010). The track Tree Ring Circus is available in MP3 and FLAC formats.

For non-subscribers, we’ve recently given the Subscriber system a make-over, including a new economically-friendly level for those who want to access these Subscribercasts. Remember also, with any Subscription, you get unlimited access to full-album streams for all our frontline titles.

Happy listening.

Set List from Saturday Night:

In the first half:
Banff Big Band 2010 directed by Darcy James Argue
Segment from COIN COIN directed by Matana Roberts

In the second half:
Bow River Falls (Douglas)
22 Minutes (Cleaver)
Lighthousekeeping (Bates)
Wichita Lineman (Webb, arr. Monder)
Be Melting Snow (Melford)
Awake Nu (Don Cherry)

Dave Douglas, tpt; Matana Roberts, alto sax and clarinet; Myra Melford, piano; Ben Monder, guitar; Michael Bates, bass; Gerald Cleaver, drums.

Darcy with the big band at The Club on Friday night. A heroic effort by all to quickly learn his music, their own music, and just for kicks one of my pieces.

[It's tough to get good quality photos of these events, first off because things move so fast up here. But I've been taking them with a Flip Video recorder, which is super handy and makes great videos with sound. BUT because the videos are in HD, the files are HUGE. So I've been clipping snapshots out of the videos of classes and rehearsals. Anyone have any tips for a fairly, but not totally, tech-savvy musician / documentarian?]

On the documentary side of things, I’ve been recording some conversations with visiting artists that will appear soon on the Subscriber page here. The Centre is also assisting me in making a podcast about the genesis of the music on Spark of Being. Those will also begin appearing soon.

Yesterday Mary Halvorson and Giorgio Magnanensi arrived in the program. The three of us played an improvised set–none of us had ever played together before. Sometimes that makes for the best discoveries, and this one was really a blast. Mary has a really old guitar. Giorgio plays Max MSP and sounds he generated from rewired 1970s toys. Nice blend.

Also this week, Ravi Coltrane is here with his Quartet. They played a powerful set, and talked about instant arranging, cues, beginnings and endings. Here are a couple shots from the master class:

David Gilmore, Drew Gress, Ravi Coltrane. (Note the 2009 photo of Don Byron in the background.)

E.J. Strickland. Just amazing.

In other news, this guy has been nosing around outside my hut:

Pine Martin.

It’s actually snowing hard up here this morning. And this guy wandered into town a few days ago.

h/t Rocky Mountain Outlook.

Darcy has given a few wonderful classes on composition: one in which he dissected one of his pieces, as he has done at his site, and another which discussed pre-compositional work: how to lay out the palate for your ideas and massage the basic elements to generate the full range of possibilities. He is also rehearsing a big band which will perform tonight and tomorrow. He and the band have graciously agreed to play my piece The Presidents.

Michael Bates talked about his own work with composition which, while coinciding with Darcy as far as motivation and practice, resulted in some very different music. Two small groups had rehearsed pieces of his and they performed them in the workshop. Michael demonstrated some remarkably simple and clear ideas for how the groups could improve the impact of their performance. The changes were immediate and visceral.

Composers Workshops have met every Tuesday and Thursday at not very jazzy hour of 8:00 am. Darcy and Michael both committed to being there and brought so much to the exploration of new work. Matana Roberts also began giving remarkable additional workshops in graphic score notation. Perhaps the gold star goes to Myra Melford, who has been leading Cobra sessions going well past midnight.

A cool new podcast just posted over at jazzonline.com with Nels Cline talking about his introduction to Miles, the electric years with John McLaughlin, and it’s lasting influence on his own playing. Always great to hear artists talking about artists. Especially when it’s one of my favorite guitar players talking about my favorite Miles period.

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And that reminded me of a post from awhile back that Dave wrote on the Complete Cellar Door recordings — one of my favorite of the Artist Thoughts posts. The archives of this blog have 5 years worth of these great posts. It’s been on my list of things to do to go through and repost some of these. Here’s a start anyway.

Illuminations on the Cellar Door
April 25th, 2006 | Author: Dave Douglas

I was listening to Miles Davis’ 1970 recordings from the Cellar Door, a space in Washington, DC. These recordings went into making the album Live Evil in 1970. It is an absolute classic of an album, and yet it falls in that controversial zone that separates lovers of early Miles from those entranced by the second half of his recorded tenure, the electric years.

Much has been said about Miles Davis and his music. Sometimes too much, and for that reason I have hesitated to jump in. But in the words of trombonist George Lewis, music doesn’t speak for itself. We have to talk about it because it doesn’t talk. I imagine Miles having the last laugh because like it or not everyone is still talking about his music. I’ll at least try to be concise.

Read more >>>

Matana Roberts describes COIN COIN and talks about origins and practices. Behind her is a long list of mentors and inspirations.

Earlier in the day, Myra Melford gave a workshop on large ensemble improvising and conducting strategies, describing the work of Butch Morris and Fred Frith. She also led the group through the cueing system of John Zorn’s Cobra, and performed several versions of that piece.

We also had a “faculty” rehearsal with Myra, Matana, Michael Bates, Ben Monder and Gerald Cleaver which was a real joy.

Sorry to steal your title, Donny.

C’est arrive´ — Banffblogging begins chez Darcy James Argue.

The only thing I would add to Darcy’s post is that Ben Monder returned to a perennial theme here: practicing extremely slow tempos. He recommends Ron Fleckner’s metronome app, (link is to developer’s site, contribute if you can) which I immediately downloaded and it is fantastic. It goes as low as 0.1 beats per minute. That’s one click every ten minutes, perhaps not so practical… and you have to turn off the “traditional tempos only” button. But at tempos below 40, like 20, 10, even 5, there’s a lot of fecund subdivision going on. And it seems infinitely flexible for other uses.

Ben was also talking about working on ear training in groups, playing notes back and forth, trying to reproduce and identify. I was reminded of a tool found at Rick’s Atlanta-basediwasdoingallright. It’s an iPhone app called Play by Ear that, among other things, produces random sets of pitches which you must play back for Guitar Hero style feedback on accuracy.

Other than that, lots of composing going on, composition workshopping, mountain air, birds.