Humoresque

Some recordings from recent appearances in Taipei with pianist Andrew Page:

There is No Greater Love

I Mean You

Goodbye Pork Pie Hat

Nostalgia in Times Square

Now here’s a musician I really connect with! Playing with Andrew is both great fun and a real journey. He’s willing to take a deep plunge into familiar territory and work towards something new and fresh with each passing chorus. I can’t help but have a great time!

For two gents bred in the Midwestern U.S. (we’re both from St. Louis, as it turns out!) and who turned out to be musicians in the far East, it’s a healthy reminder of a tradition that began on our own stomping ground: that modernism in jazz is just as much about joy and enjoying life as anything that came before.

Everything that is freely improvised, serially-composed or otherwise atonal about modern music suffers from that awful Germanic myth of pain and struggle. While that’s certainly part of our musical tradition, something beautiful began in Chicago with Lester Bowie, Roscoe Mitchell, and others: use modernism’s devices to put humor at center instead of something abstract, nebulous and disconcerting. The same loss of meaning in life can simultaneously be expressed through struggle or sheer ridiculousness.

Gee, isn’t that nice?

Since the late 60′s this attention on humor has steadily developed; now you can find its practitioners on each coast and all over the globe, so our recordings here are only a small sample! Still, being abroad certainly has its way of reminding you where you’re from :)

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~ by gnarlybuttons on 30 July 2009.