What Lies Ahead, Part One

What Lies Ahead pt 1.

I am excited to announce a new project of mine! 

David Hogson (sax) Kaelin Murphy (trumpet), Chris Pruden (piano), Evan Gratham (bass), Jacob Slous (drums) featuring guests Julian Bradley Combs (Guitar) and Alyssa Giammaria (voice).

The instrumentation resembles the school ensemble led by Andrew Downing in 2019-2020. After spending the better part of a year composing this music, I will be happy to go into the recording studio with these friends in April. 

Of course with this recording comes the uncertainty of the covid-19 pandemic. I will do everything in my right to create a safe, musical environment where the members can interpret this music and make it our own. The reason that this is important to me, is that although everyone has faced a disproportionate level of equality when it comes to the past year, everyone has had a portion of the “spirit of music” stripped from them. This encompasess the ability to play with other musicians, plain and simple. We all have the tools to practice and create music, but what we don’t have is the ability to play with other people, or at least I have found this to be a challenge.With the Canadian government turning a blind eye to music, the arts, and the abstraction of these art forms that keep the social fabric in check, it us up to us artists to have our voices heard. 

This is to say as people we should possibly lead our lives based on reasonable thought, and allow ourselves to understand our emotions. This project for me was a way for me to find solace in the creation of new music, whilst battling the emotional instability that the covid pandemic has brought me. When I was writing the music at first, I just couldn't. As mentioned in my first blog, I initially had a writer's block. I was still trying to cope with the new world, and as I found happiness in creating beats, I knew that I wanted to create an album that just features mainly acoustic music. I first did not have a piano at this time, and found it hard to muster the thought of a conceptual band. As I was in this predicament, I thought of my previous years ensemble at the UofT, and that thought sparked the inspiration that would slowly grow into this project.

Over the months I would write compositions that all had very specific themes and sounds that I was hearing. To compose this music, even though I borrowed a keyboard from my roommate, I just composed using my voice and finale, which is a music notation software. This allowed me to write with the constraints I chose to impose on myself, ultimately laying the groundwork for the eight songs that will be recorded. The range of these themes come out of the innovations that appear on the New York jazz scene, the current canadian jazz scene that I am a part of, and my own personal thought of music creation. 

Some of the artists that inspired me during this time were (in no order):
Aaron Parks, Shai Maestro, Ambrose Akinmusire. Giveton Gelin, Joel Ross, Immanuel Wilkins, Gerald Clayton, Vijay Iyer, Gilad Heksleman and Kris Davis.

These musicians all have a dynamic that I believe is present in the recordings. This dynamic has to do with their odd instrumentations, time signatures, use of spoken word, hip melodies and ultimately the strong undying musical spirit that they all possess. What is the most important fact of these musicians however, is the concept of the “creation of new ideas”. This idea of new ideas is something that is not specific to New York, but it's unique as NYC is arguably the most diverse music scene in the western world. If you have the chance to listen to any of these peoples music, there are definitely aspects of “I am hearing ____’s influence on this person” but more importantly, you just hear something you haven't heard before. The most significant event of this happening to me, was when Kris Davis was the guest artist at UofT. Her musical concept, let alone her fantastic piano playing is enough to impress. But it is in her musical concept that there is a profound knowledge of creative music, that has its roots in Jazz. From her using extended techniques on the piano which included changing the timbre of the strings, to the hypnotic harmonies and sounds that come from her peers on the album Esperanza Spalding, and JD Allen (amongst other greats). My way of describing the sound was just that it was “new”. After checking out the SIM (school for improvised music) website, I was opened to a world of improvised music that opened my eyes to a new musical world. These words are no stretch of the truth. Like hey, I love canadian jazz and I grew up listening to Mike Murley like many others. But it's just to say that there is a world of music out there.

As I conclude this blog post, I would like to talk about some of the next steps in this recording project. Firstly the band has received their charts, to the expectation of drum charts….. sorry Jacob, and we will proceed to have multiple rehearsals in the month of April. These rehearsals will consist of the main band, then adding in the other guests into future rehearsals. This will finally culminate to the eventual recording date, which is on the 24th and the 25th of April at Canterbury Music Studios. This is partially able to happen due to the generosity of the Faculty of Music Undergraduate Association (FMUA) and their kind financial support. 

I look forward to sharing more information regarding this project soon.

Thank you for reading.