Dallas, Austin, Houston, San Antonio, Etc. Jazz & Other Concerts

[kh1958]

Bradford's Quartet will feature Ingebrigt Haker Flaten, Frode Gjerstad & Frank Rosaly.

Same group that will be in Austin on Sunday, correct?

For that matter, where is the Austin gig? Is it still on?

Yes, it's the same group, but I don't know any details about the Austin gig. So I guess they're playing Austin, coming up to Dallas, and then coming all the way back down to Houston in 3 days!

I found this reference on the internet: March 23: Bobby Bradford, Historic Victory Grill

[JSngry]

Bradford's Quartet will feature Ingebrigt Haker Flaten, Frode Gjerstad & Frank Rosaly.

Same group that will be in Austin on Sunday, correct?

For that matter, where is the Austin gig? Is it still on?

Yes, it's the same group, but I don't know any details about the Austin gig. So I guess they're playing Austin, coming up to Dallas, and then coming all the way back down to Houston in 3 days!

They'll be in Buffalo on 3/27 http://www.hallwalls.org/music/5453.html

& Philly on 3/29 http://www.arsnovaworkshop.com/events/bradford-gjerstad-quartet-03-29-2014

[JSngry]

Edited the title to better reflect the current reality.

[mjzee]

Much thanks. Nice to see H-town getting it's due.

[JSngry]

Hell, you guys are the torchbearers at this point!

[kh1958]

Anyone besides me planning on going to see Charles Lloyd tomorrow?

[JSngry]

LTB & I will be there.

[kh1958]

February 22: Shelly Carroll Big Band at Sandaga Jazz.

[mjzee]

[kh1958]

February 25, 2014: The Music of Gil Evans with Ryan Truesdell, Denton

February 27, 2014: Tutu Jones at Keys Lounge, Fort Worth

March 6, 2014: Buddy Guy, Aztec Theater, San Antonio

March 7, 2014: Peggy Stern, Casa Karen, Austin

March 19, 2014: Kalmon Balogh at Poor David's Pub, Dallas

March 23, 2014: Bobby Bradford, Austin

March 24, 2014: Bobby Bradford, Beefhaus, Dallas

March 25, 2014: Bobby Bradford, Houston

April 4, 2014: Wayne Shorter, Cullen Theater, Houston

April 5, 2014: San Francisco Jazz Collective, Jo Long Theater, San Antonio

April 11-12, 2014: Marvin Stamm, Cezanne, Houston

April 15, 2014: Eric Johnson and Mike Stern, Paramount Theater, Austin

April 16, 2014: Eric Johnson and Mike Stern, Granada Theater, Dallas

April 19, 2014: Ud. Shahid Parvez Sitar and Gourisankar Karmakar Tabla, Allen Public Library Auditorium

April 27, 2014: Bombino, New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival

May 1, 2014: Lonnie Smith, Donald Harrison, Marlon Jordan, Bernard Allison, NOJHF

May 2, 2014: Pharaoh Sanders, Nicholas Payton, Walter Wolfman Washington, NOJHF

May 4, 2014: Terrance Blanchard, NOJHF

May 15, 2014: Nicholas Payton at Fort Worth Public Library,

May 17, 2014: Jason Moran's Fats Waller Dance Party, Jo Long Theater, San Antonio

May 22, 2013: Bill Frisell's Guitar in the Space Age, Dan's Silverleaf, Denton

June 20, 2014: Charlie Hunter, Jazz in June, Norman, Oklahoma

July 11-12, 2014: Lucky Peterson at Clarence Muse Theater, Dallas.

October 10, 2014: Chick Corea, solo, Wortham Theater, Houston

Edited February 24, 2014 by kh1958

[JSngry]

April 19, 2014: Ud. Shahid Parvez Sitar and Gourisankar Karmakar Tabla, Allen Public Library Auditorium

If he fliers in the local restaurants are any indication, Indian Classical Music is presented not-irregularly in the northern suburbs. I haven't attended any of the events, generally because of the stupid reason that I see a poster in a restaurant window and then forget about it after eating. So, thanks for posting this here, instead of in a restaurant window.

[kh1958]

April 19, 2014: Ud. Shahid Parvez Sitar and Gourisankar Karmakar Tabla, Allen Public Library Auditorium

If he fliers in the local restaurants are any indication, Indian Classical Music is presented not-irregularly in the northern suburbs. I haven't attended any of the events, generally because of the stupid reason that I see a poster in a restaurant window and then forget about it after eating. So, thanks for posting this here, instead of in a restaurant window.

Apparently the Indian Classical Music Circle of DFW has been presenting Indian classical music concerts in the area for many years, mostly at the Allen Public Library auditorium. They alternate instrumental and vocal concerts. I attended three instrumental concerts last year, and two of them were amazing (Nayan Ghosh (on sitar) and Mohan Bhatt (on a modified steel guitar)), and the third was at a lower plane but still good (the double violin player was very good). I think there is also a subculture of Indian popular music concerts happening from time to time in the area.

http://www.icmcdfw.org

Edited February 24, 2014 by kh1958

[JSngry]

$30/ticket vs $100 for an 12 mo. membership & 6-10 concerts/yr...hmmm...the membership, it looks good...have you gone that route?

[kh1958]

$30/ticket vs $100 for an 12 mo. membership & 6-10 concerts/yr...hmmm...the membership, it looks good...have you gone that route?

I will probably become a member this year. You also get let into the concert hall first as a member. (The concerts I've attended are no where near being sold out though.)

[Joe]

ICMC also used to put on concert at the DMA (Horchow Auditorium). Was lucky enough to see guitarist Debashish Bhattacharya there in the early aughts. Glad to know they are still active; seems like they had to curtail their activities significantly after 9/11, partly as a result of it becoming more difficult for individuals from "that part of the world" (specifically, Pakistan) to gain entry into the US.

[BFrank]

I was at last night's Cookers show as well. It was sold out - I put off getting tickets for too long, but scored a pair yesterday afternoon that had been released by season subscribers who weren't attending.

Definitely one of the more impressive shows I've seen in recent memory, with clear appreciation from the hometown crowd for Billy Harper.

I had to laugh when Weiss announced "Croquet Ballet" to silence, prompting him to ask if anyone knew that one, to which a couple of guys went "YEAH!"

That's kind of an inside joke with the band and it seems it's turned out to be the truest test of whether or not an audience really knows us (and our history) or not.

For instance, the next night in Detroit, when I announced Croquet Ballet the crowd went nuts like I was announcing Stairway to Heaven to a Led Zepplin audience......

It's old hat to those other guys in the band but to me it really gets me in touch with how much this music used to mean to people (and still does to some apparently/fortunately)

That's a great 'inside' tip, David.

I'll be SURE to yell "YEAH!" next time I see you guys in the Bay Area.

[JSngry]

Oh, I'm an alumni, even played in some of those bands, and still have some strong dislikes along those lines. But...I'm still contemplating attendance, just to hear the writing in person.

Truesdell's own album showed (imo) that if you play the parts well enough, the writing stands on its own, quite apart from feel (and really, abandon hope, all ye who enter here in hopes of anybody getting a big band to feel like it used to, especially on Gil's stuff...hell even his last bands didn't try to go there!). I had some reservations after the first few listens to Truesdell's album, but finally got over them...those charts are just amazing on their own, just play the parts well (no small feat, that, especially in terms of balance) and they speak, no, SING. Anything else is gravy.

I still have reservation, but it's such good writing, and the one thing you can count on with the 1:00 is that parts will be played well. I'm looking at it from that standpoint, Not expecting gravy, just some really choice meat.

But 5:00 PM Tuesday is one of the most WTF? times for something like this I've ever run across.

Yo, that 1:00 played them parts very well, Truesdell got them phrasing and balancing like it needed to be...whatever "shortcomings" one could find with solos, rhythm section (at times) etc. oh well, ok, whatever, that was not what I went expecting to be "impressed" by, I wanted to hear them parts put together like they were intended. This is some of the finest writing of any idiom, ever, and it got played very well, Now that Truesdell's got a "thing" going with this book, the opportunities to do something like hear the entire Miles Ahead suite performed live, or the transition from "Round Midnight" to "Manteca" executed seamlessly like the mindfuck it is, hey, those opportunities might one day become commonplace. I hope to live on that day in that world where it is. But hell, I don't know how much longer I'm gonna live, so I took a chance. I intentionally sat down-fronitsh so the miking wouldn't color things too much, and yeah, that Gil Evans, man that's some music for your ears right there, that is.

I don't know if I'll ever go to another 1:00 concert again, but even more uncertain than that is whether I'll ever again be motivated to give a standing O to that band for that job done that well.

Hell, they got some tuba player from the "classical" department, and this dude nailed the shit. Four days lead time, and tuba is to Gil what Carney was to Duke (notice similarity of that as well as difference), and this cat plays a 90 minute set damn near perfectly. Not Billy Barber perfect, but the world that produced Billy Barber no longer exists, so, hey, Howard Johnson, and then today, it's a chair, ok, just respect the chair and you're on the way there.

$8.00 & 5 PM. How 'bout that for some extreme variations on the misery?

[JSngry]

I continue to be haunted (literally...I've been stopping randomly day and night recalling certain passages, how alive they were) by the sound of those Gil Evans arrangements as played live...it's like, ok, I've heard the music on record for decades, and have formed a rich, vivid mental picture of it in a virtual 3D type of imaginary sound. And then to hear those same sounds in a REAL 3-D environment, coming out of instruments on a stage and not out of speakers "placed" somewhere...it's an upsetting experience, upsetting in a good way, but not easily recovered from, at least not for me. That writing has some kind of mojo, some kind of serious mojo...I told Brenda last night, that if I could, I would go out to hear that music played 7 nights a week, faithfully, and she could come along whenever she wanted, but I would go with her or without her. She understood, I think/hope. And then I realized that that was not a possibility even when Gil was alive, never mind now, and..geez, that just sucks.

The 1:00 gets kudos, not for being a badass college jazz orchestra in the forefront of today's jazz education whirlwind (or any other such kind of bullshit), just for having the humility and skill set to serve as honest deliverers of some of the most stimulating/evocative/deep/whatever music ever scored for an ensemble of any kind in any idiom. As well, to Ryan Truesdell, for treating this music as the orchestral music it is, and preparing the band according and appropriately.

If Ryan Truesdell comes to anywhere within non-fatal distance of where you live to do a Gil Evans Project presentation, and if you have any even modest sense of enjoyment for Gil Evans music, do what you have to do to get there. Records, no matter how well recorded/played back, do not give you the full sense of the reality of this music. I almost wish I hadn't gone, now it's like I've had a taste of it, and where to go for the next one? Where?

[kh1958]

I'm sorry I missed the concert.

There are no future events currently shown on the Ryan Truesdell/Gil Evans Project webpage.

http://www.ryantruesdell.com/gilevansproject/

[JSngry]

I wanna give the tuba player props. Like I said earlier, I was told they picked him out of the classical department just to do this gig. Per the program, the cat's name is Austin Crumrine, and that's all I can tell you. But if he ever does a Google search for his own name, he'll get a hit here, eventually, so hey dude, great job. Star of the show, afaic.

[CraigP]

Well, I feel bad for missing this but the time of the concert made it impossible. Was it well attended?

[JSngry]

Maybe 250 people or so, almost all students, which was....weird. Not in nature, because geez, 5 PM on a Tuesday in Denton, who else is gonna show up? But weird in that I got the impression that most of them were at best marginally familiar with Gil Evans, which on the one hand, I understand that, time passes by and old keeps getting older and you can't really expect people to be born into a world already knowing everything that has happened and still figure out what they're doing right now. I get that. But on the other hand, I'm sitting here at times shivering, and times moistening up in the eyes, and quite frequently trying very hard to not bust out LOL-ing at how freaking BEAUTIFUL this whole thing is, not just the music, but also the opportunity, and when I look around, it seems like I'm in an ocean of kids dutifully listening to a history lecture, like ok, this is just one more thing we're supposed to hear, yeah it's really great, ok, gotta get back to studying now. Just more Great Music for us.

To put it into a little bit of personal perspective, when I was at NT, the only Gil Evans charts in the library were two Kendor things, "Maids Of Cadiz" & "Theme" aka "La Nevada" both arranged by Gii, but neither was really what was on the record either (well, "Theme", maybe), they were published for "general use", such as it was. But all the rest of it was not there to be played. Not hidden or suppressed, just not there, period. Some people, including myself, attempted transcriptions, but between the inner voices and the instrumentation, hey good luck on that. Bob Belden probably got it right, but if he did, he kept it to himself for later usage in his own work (Bob got a LOT of things right like that, Bob Belden knew how to LEARN, dig?), but otherwise, no such luck. On top of that, Gil was still alive then, and making all these records full of synthy colors and free-ish solos, and HUH? said "the program", too much individuality to be taught, too idiosyncratic to pursue, too weird to be sanctioned, just...move on and let him and his do that thing.

And now, decades later, here's the opportunity to just show up and hear the shit played live and well, parts straight from the original manuscripts, just show up and there it is. The band surely had to bust ass (and to great return), but the audience...part of me wanted to jump up and scream DO YOU KNOW JUST HOW BLESSED, HOW MOTHERFUCKING BLESSED, YOU ARE TO HAVE ANY OF THIS, LIKE THIS, this is not a great soloist or small-ish group that has been heard everywhere but here until now, this is orchestral music - great orchestral music - that has really not been heard live too much anywhere in the world except on records, not even stuff that was once heard everywhere like Ellington or Henderson, this shit has not really been heard live ever, period, but no, that's not a right response, even though it is. People are born when they are born and the world they come into is not what they made, so in a sense, progress and the satisfaction therein is just as appropriate, perhaps moreso. Kids, this is time's gift to you.

But dig, Truesdell talked about "New Rhumba" and asked (in true adult talking to child manner, which is what it was, really) anybody here familiar with Ahmad Jamal? And.....ooooohhhh...apparently not, not really...so, how do you handle that as an grownass adult old fucker? And how about hellyeah I jumped up for a standing O after the last note and I was like, one of 5-6 people doing so, and all of them were old folks too, except for the ones that were gathering backpacks to book out of there.

I don't want to think about that...but I will never not want to think about how "Blues For Pablo" is still making me tear up remembering how it sounded. So I'll go with that, Alex, I'll go with that.

[kh1958]

I've never heard Gil's orchestral music live, but I can relate in the sense that the two times I heard his Monday Night Orchestra at Sweet Basil (and I don't even like that band anywhere near as much as the orchestral works) and Gil wasn't even alive any more (and George Adams was not present), that was still a powerful experience--it still felt like he was there.

[CraigP]

Ingrid Laubrock and Tom Rainey are touring the SW in support of their new CD And Other Desert Towns. Here are the Texas dates:

05/26 Houston/Avant Garden, "They Who Sound" series (duo + trio with bassist Damon Smith)

05/27 Austin/venue tba

[epistrophy arts]

Brotzmann Drake Parker Trio

Austin, Texas

June 3rd

North Door

presented by Epistrophy Arts.

more info soon

only Texas date!