Thanks for your continued support and nice words about my blog everyone. I've received a lot of nice messages from people around the world recently and really appreciate your consideration and attention.
Here's a collection of a few random things that caught my interest lately:
- Calgary's longest jam session that had been running every Saturday afternoon at Broken City since 2005 has now been scaled back to only the first Saturday of every month. This is very unfortunate as it was a great jam but what can you expect if musicians stop coming out to sit in and the audience starts to dwindle? Seems like attendance has really dropped off in the last six months. Jam sessions are a very important part of jazz community so I think it's too bad that this is the direction things have gone.
However, I stopped by the session yesterday and was pleasantly surprised to see a decent crowd of both musicians and enthusiasts alike. Host drummer Jon May was in fine form and played with a really great creative sound and feel. He and bassist Simon Fisk have a great hook up and play great together. So hopefully this bodes well and the trend continues and we can expect at least a continued monthly jam at Broken City in the months to come.
- Montreal drummer/pianist Andre White has recently started his own blog:
http://zoltanzylox.blogspot.com/
Check out Andre's insightful commentary on music that he is listening to these days.
- Thank you to Pete Zimmer who sent me this Art Blakey radio interview via the Facebook:
http://www.powerhouseradio.com/archive/art-blakey.html
Here's some footage of drummers that I've really been digging lately:
- A couple quick ones here of drummer Willie Jones III playing with Cedar Walton's band:
- I'm really digging these ones of Jeff Ballard with his trio (I hope these guys record!) featuring Miguel Zenon and Jeff playing a very interesting percussion-hybrid drum set:
- This one has been making the rounds on the Facebook and creating a lot of interesting commentrary. Here's Jack DeJohnette demonstrating his single stroke roll:
Thanks to Bill Stieger who hipped me to that.
Sheesh....time to go practice after seeing that one !
- More great footage of Elvin Jones with his trio featuring Jimmy Garrison and Joe Farrell on "Gingerbread Boy":
- And finally here's an insightful clip of Marvin "Bugalu" Smith:
For those who don't know about Marvin and his drumming....the man is a force. He has quite a number of videos on youtube that demonstrate his deep playing and philosophy of playing Jazz drums. I'll be featuring more commentary about Bugalu and his drumming in a later post (hopefully interviews with both him and some of his students)