This year, I’ve been play­ing the UW Lit­tle Big Band. The smaller of the school’s two jazz ensem­bles, it’s really more of a combo than any sort of big band. We had our first con­cert of the semes­ter last week, and I’m mark­ing the occa­sion by finally get­ting around to post­ing the record­ings from last semester’s con­cert. Last semes­ter, our group con­sisted of me on bas­soon, Mike Bailly on vibra­phone, Kyle Strohmaier on piano, Ben Willis on bass, and Ali­son Jeske on drums, with our coach Les Thim­mig on flute. Vocal­ist Mandy Comp­ton joined us for a cou­ple of tunes, and Mike Mix­tacki and Ian Dis­jardin pro­vided some Brazil­ian per­cus­sion for “Ser­e­nata.” Our instru­men­ta­tion is slightly dif­fer­ent this semes­ter, but I’ll get to that when I post our lat­est concert.

Any­way, the way the group is set up, we play a whole bunch of tunes in our rehearsals, then vote on actual con­cert reper­toire a few weeks before a con­cert. Once the pro­gram is set, each mem­ber of the group is respon­si­ble for arrang­ing one tune. We do a bit of work­shop­ping of the arrange­ments dur­ing rehearsals, and arrive at the con­cert with more or less fin­ished prod­ucts. A cou­ple of rehearsals before the con­cert, we also pick who will take solos on which tunes.

One thing we haven’t decided on by con­cert time is the nature of the blues we’re going to play. Les, our coach, sim­ply announces that we’re going to play the blues, gives us a key and a tempo, and we’re off. Unfor­tu­nately, the record­ing cut off his pat­ter (not to men­tion our pen­sive looks as we silently pray that he won’t call out an awk­ward key).

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.

Today, I bid a fond farewell to my trusty old Fox 240 bas­soon (shown at right with me and my dearly departed WileyKat — yes, I was a Thun­der­Cats fan when I got him). The instru­ment was a high school grad­u­a­tion gift from my grand­mother, Mil­dred Atkin­son, which is another rea­son I’m sad to see it go. But, I got a good price for it, so her gift is help­ing me pay for a siz­able chunk of my new bas­soon. The Fox is a good instru­ment — it got me through two bas­soon degrees and helped me win jobs in two orches­tras. But, the time had come for me to upgrade to a truly pro­fes­sional instrument.

So, my old Fox has now in a sense started over by going to a stu­dent about to start her last year of high school. UW-Madison is one of the schools she’s con­sid­er­ing though, so I may see my old friend again.

Last week, we were lucky enough to have a guest bas­soon­ist on cam­pus — Paul Han­son. Paul is one of just a few real jazz bas­soon­ists out there. That is to say, he’s not a bas­soon­ist who dab­bles in jazz or a sax player who dab­bles in bas­soon (although he does play a lot of sax, too), he’s truly a jazz bas­soon­ist. The list of peo­ple with whom he’s played and/or recorded is quite impres­sive; check out his bio at jazzbassoon.com for the full list. He’s prob­a­bly best known to gen­eral audi­ences for his work with Béla Fleck & the Fleck­tones, appear­ing on Out­bound and the CD/DVD Live at the Quick. I’d been look­ing for­ward to his visit for quite awhile. I’d heard Paul at the 2005 IDRS con­fer­ence in Austin, as well as on the Fleck­tones albums. Also, I’ve been tak­ing some impro­vi­sa­tion classes (appar­ently the first bas­soon­ist at UW ever to do so), and was eager to get the chance to work with him.

Paul arrived Mon­day, and was sched­uled to play a con­cert that night. Marc invited me to come sit in on his rehearsal that after­noon. The combo con­sisted of local pianist/composer Paul Hastil, Direc­tor of the UW School of Music John Schaf­fer on bass, and grad stu­dent Tom Ross on drums. It was quite inter­est­ing for me to see how the four of them — who’d never played together as a group — put together a per­for­mance in a sin­gle short rehearsal.
The con­cert that night was great. There were a few hic­cups (for instance, it was about 85 degrees in the hall), but it was very impres­sive and enjoy­able, nonethe­less. I’d adver­tised the con­cert in my Music 101 dis­cus­sion sec­tions, and quite a few of my stu­dents showed up. The band played a vari­ety of tunes by Wayne Shorter, Kenny Bar­ron, Kenny Gar­rett, Paul Han­son, and oth­ers. The high­lights (in my opin­ion) were a tune by Jacob Do Ban­dolim called “Flight of the Fly” which involved a perpetually-moving circularly-breathed bas­soon line, a solo impro­vi­sa­tion in which Paul explored effects and play­ing against loops of him­self, and a Kenny Bar­ron tune called “Voy­age” which really grooved.

After the con­cert, Paul came up to me and asked if I was the guy he’d heard hit­ting high Gs in the prac­tice rooms ear­lier. I admit­ted that I was (finally, my pen­chant for play­ing ridicu­lously high pays off!), and he asked if I’d show him how I did it the next day. I hap­pily agreed, of course. I was plan­ning to spend the rest of the evening prac­tic­ing. But, I ran into Marc, who invited me out for a beer. So, I went out to the Green­bush Bar with him, Paul, and John and Sarah Schaf­fer — pretty cool.

The next day, we had an improv class dur­ing our nor­mal stu­dio time. Paul talked a bit about how he came to be a jazz bas­soon­ist and some approaches to start­ing to impro­vise. Then, the whole bas­soon stu­dio went on stage to try our hands at impro­vis­ing. For quite a few peo­ple, this was their first expe­ri­ence with improv, but every­one did quite well. We did some call-and-response exer­cises as well as trad­ing fours around the circle.

Later that after­noon, we had a chance to have lessons with Paul. It was was actu­ally more of a masterclass-type setup, with a few observers. I went first, and started out with doing some basic modal impro­vi­sa­tion with Paul play­ing chords on the piano. He grad­u­ally made his pro­gres­sions more com­plex, chal­leng­ing me to hear the changes and add altered tones to my play­ing. It was tough — I’m used to play­ing over set chord pro­gres­sions, and it took a lot more brain power to try to react to what he was doing. Then, he wrote some pat­terns and phrases on the chalk­board to demon­strate how to think hor­i­zon­tally and con­struct an inter­est­ing fig­ure over a pro­gres­sion. It was a lot of fun as well as being kind of hard work. He gave me quite a few things to work on.

We thought Paul was just going to be here for two days, but it turned out that he was stick­ing around on Wednes­day, as well. Unfor­tu­nately, I was very busy that day — my 101ers had an exam the next day, and I’d sched­uled meet­ings with them for much of the after­noon. But, I man­aged to free up 45 min­utes or so. I was hop­ing to get another les­son, but Marc was using his stu­dio at the time, and there wasn’t really any other place to go. So, we just hung out in the lounge, and I picked his brain for awhile. I asked him about how much bas­soon play­ing he ends up doing com­pared to sax play­ing, what sort of elec­tron­ics he uses (and what a basic set of bas­soon ampli­fi­ca­tion gear would be), the inte­gra­tion of impro­vi­sa­tion into a tra­di­tional clas­si­cal bas­soon edu­ca­tion, and some other things. If I’d known I would get the chance to just sit down and talk to him like that, I’d have done more ques­tion prepa­ra­tion and maybe con­ducted a real inter­view. I still got a lot out of our chat, though.

It was very edu­ca­tional week for me, and it was a real plea­sure to get so much time to work with Paul. He’s an amaz­ing player, an enthu­si­as­tic musi­cian, and a really nice guy. Sadly, I only man­aged to get a few kind of crappy pics (using my point-and-shoot dig­i­tal in low light with no flash).