10th Anniversary!

Saturday, June 23rd, 2007

Giant Animated Steps

Watch this visualization of Coltrane's Giant Steps and experience the beauty and complexity of this great piece.

Amersfoort is cool!

On saturday the 12th of May I joined a group of groovy bachelor partygoers in Amersfoort (NL). Why Amersfoort? Well, the organizing bachelor party committee liked the idea of visiting the Amersfoort Jazz Festival, since Mr. Bachelor is a real jazz fanatic. A great idea, because the festival, the weather, and the atmosphere turned out to be very good. After a Bachelor Pizza Meal we entered the Amersfoort city center and saw interesting out-door performances of the Stefan Lievestro Sextet, Trijntje O., Gino Vanelli with the Houdini Horns, and Get the Funk Two. The Lievestro Sextet was in my opinion the best 'bachelor proof' jazz formation. Gino V. was OK and Get the Funk Too Loud, although it is always good to hear the ultimate ToP song There is only so much oil in the ground at high volume. The party and the festival were a success. Or as one may say: a perfect match.

Lobith is hip!

Myspace Music is a realy intriguing music database. One of the most interesting bands I came upon recently was Lobith, a Swiss pop/jazz formation named after a small town in the Netherlands, where the river Rhine 'passes' the border. The music of this band is great: the compositions are solid with nice surprising turns. I think this band deserves more credit and therefore I present you in this blog a video clip of their latest single. It is a nice song, but on Myspace and their web site you find even better ones. My favorite is Lost Head, a great piece of music in five-four time. For now, enjoy the song Sunday Land!

Theatresports Lloyd Hotel

Friday PaQ and I played at the Cultural Embassy of the Lloyd Hotel in Amsterdam. We accompanied a performance of Pink Lloyd, a group of theatresports students. The performance was the closing up of a 10 week course that was guided by good old Remp. After the public had taken their seats the show started off with a theatresports introduction. Remp explained the public the concept of theatresports and 'warmed them up' for the show. After the warming up, the student improvisers playfully introduced themselves to the audience; the show took off! The improvisers performed a variety of scenes, like the Random Scraps, where audience members are asked to write brief sentences on scraps of paper. The improvisers begin a scene, and, at regular intervals, read one of the scraps of paper and work it into the scene. Another successful scene was the Typing Scene where a typist narrates as s/he mimes typing a story, and the improvisers jump in to enact the scenes and add some developments of their own. PaQ and I 'colored' the different kind of scenes/games and tried to guide the improvisers by producing all kinds of musical spheres and blur. The musical scenes like 'It's time for a song!', the Opera and the '3 scenes - 3 musical styles' were fun to do, especially because the improvisers did a very good job. We liked playing at 'The Embassy' and hopefully there will be a sequel of 'Pink Lloyd at the Lloyd Hotel'.

Popovic

Today I saw this video clip of Ana Popovic on the web. It reminded me of a great live performance I saw of her (somewhere in the middle of 'niks'). Interesting lady, interesting music.