This weather stinks. It’s gone on too long and it’s set to go on still longer. Today was the kinder/school run, with scooters for the kids, then the kinder pickup, and then later on the school pickup. Too much time in the outdoors. Thank goodness one can run before the sun’s up. (If I re-wrote that sentence ‘Thank fuck one can run…’ I’d have something like a Tolkien rhyme pattern going on. Been reading LOTR to Oli, see.)
But isn’t the weather the dullest of topics. I changed the music in the SoundCloud player. Did you notice? (Did you care?) Well, I did. Change it, I mean. Promotionally, it seemed all of a sudden better to put up some stuff that was likely to be played again. You know? Shelley and I recorded in 2000 and it was a one-off; the session was fun like a riot but it was cooked up just for itself and we’ve barely played together since. Solo improvisation is something I’m still dealing with, and it’s represented in the new selections, but a change is as good, &c. (A cool change would be best of all, but that’s by the bye.)
When the trio played at Bennetts, we ran further back in the book than we’ve gone for some time. ‘Stops on the road to smooth’ is one of those tunes I’m not sure how I wrote; it’s not that it’s particularly good, it’s just that it’s so unlike me, and seems to contain more information than I’m generally capable of holding in my head at any given time. ‘Esj” and ‘Recessional’ are old favourites, and made their appearance in the second of the two gigs; but ‘Must be’ and ‘Sly-pie’ are tunes that, while we played them often for a while, haven’t been in our performing repertoire for some time. Like I said, there are lots of tunes now we’ve been together for nearly a decade. Two gigs a week apart meant we could play 22 different pieces.
Now it’s back to the eternal challenge of composition. Where to go next? How to refresh without repetition? Which ones are the good ideas?
8/iii/2013
Last Wednesday evening my trio took the stage at Bennetts Lane Jazz Club under its own steam for the first time in quite some years. We’ve played there once or twice annually as part of the program of the Melbourne Jazz Co-operative, and we’ve been enormously grateful for the Co-op’s support, but this was a gig entirely of our own. I had two things in particular I wanted to do at this performance: firstly, to distribute set lists so that the audience could know what was going on, and secondly to give the final performance of ‘Dances with Jimmy’, a piece included on Scare quotes. Although we’d normally organise the set list before going onstage, it might be subject to revision as the performance went on, and certainly we’d not have done it sufficiently in advance to permit anyone else being let in on the secret.