Last week, the Adam Unsworth Ensem­ble came to UW for a con­cert and series of mas­ter­classes. The group (for this uni­ver­sity tour, at least) con­sists of: Adam Unsworth, horn; UW’s own Les Thim­mig, wood­winds; Tony Miceli, vibes; Brian How­ell, bass; and Tony DeAn­ge­lis, drums. I prob­a­bly haven’t men­tioned this here before, but I’m play­ing the UW Lit­tle Big Band (more of a combo, really) this semes­ter. The LBB par­tic­i­pated in the rhythm sec­tion mas­ter­class given by Tony, Brian, and Tony. Les was also in atten­dance, but since he runs our ensem­ble he kept his involve­ment to a min­i­mum. We played one tune, and the rhythm sec­tion from the reg­u­lar Big Band played one tune. I gleaned some good points from the class, namely:

1. Wean your­self of printed music as quickly as possible
2. Keep track of the form
3. If some­thing goes awry, some­one needs to take charge and do some­thing obvi­ous to get every­one back in sync

After the class was over, Brian asked if we’d like to stay and jam. I had to run a brief errand, but came back and joined Brian along with Ali­son, our drum­mer, and Kyle, our pianist. A lit­tle later we were joined by Mike, our vibra­phone player. My jazz reper­toire is painfully small, which sort of lim­ited what we could play. We played some blues, messed around with some grooves pro­vided by Brian, and I did what I could to learn a cou­ple of tunes by ear on the fly. After a lit­tle while, Tony DeAn­ge­lis came back in, worked with Ali­son a bit, and shot some video of us jamming.

Tony posted one video of us on YouTube. The tune we’re play­ing is “Mr. PC,” a tune from John Coltrane’s album Giant Steps. I’ve heard the tune many times, but hadn’t actu­ally played it before. I man­aged to pro­vide a pass­able ver­sion of the melody and sort of learn the chord pro­gres­sion as I took an exploratory solo.

There. Now that I’ve qual­i­fied this as an infor­mal jam ses­sion on a tune I only kind of know, I present, with­out fur­ther ado, the video:

I had great fun in both the class and in the jam ses­sion. I think play­ing more like this would do me worlds of good, both in terms of my ear train­ing and my impro­vi­sa­tional abil­i­ties. If only there were more hours in the day…

Unfor­tu­nately, I missed the group’s con­cert that night — I never did get to hear Adam Unsworth — as Mad­Winds was play­ing for a School of Music func­tion (per­haps more on that later).

Update (10−29−07): Another video just popped up from Tony. In this one, we’re play­ing “The Boy Next Door,” a tune by Ralph Blane with lyrics by Hugh Mar­tin. While I do know this tune, I appar­ently don’t know how not to play flat.