Summer Session comes to an end

Aug 12, 2012 | 0 comments

This group of people just spent a week living, eating and working together, performing jazz music in multiple different combinations, composing new music, learning new techniques and approaches, putting on concerts, holding jam sessions until dawn, drinking, laughing and generally having an amazing, creative, exhausting and life-changing time.

A lot of them have done it before. It happens every year. National Danish jazz agency Jazz Danmark hold the annual Summer Session at Vallekilde, and have done since 1969. Each year, professional musicians from around the country (and some from further afield) come to this unique intensive jazz ‘camp’.

Guest workshop leaders – world class players – come along and work with the musicians, new collaborations are formed, minds are expanded and sights raised for all of the people in attendance. It’s really quite an inspiring environment.

(more…)

If you go down to the woods today

Aug 10, 2012 | 0 comments

Last night was ‘party night’ at Jazz Danmark’s Summer Session.

The musicians have been working from morning until late at night (and beyond) for almost a week now, and the organisers figure that this is a good point for them to cut loose a little bit.

There was a surprise element this time, which nobody was prepared for and it went down really well. Probably the oddest jazz gig I’ve ever been to.

The Fringe (George Garzone, Bob Gullotti and John Lockwood) sometimes do this thing where they dress as Neanderthals and give a particularly ‘primitive’ spin to their avant-garde jazz improvisation. This time, the Summer Session organisers thought they’d take it a step further and dress Joe Lovano up as some sort of ‘man from the future’.

(more…)

All of the jazz, all at once

Aug 9, 2012 | 0 comments

Last night was the concert performance by all of the visiting teachers at Summer Session.

George Garzone (sax), John Lockwood (bass), Bob Gullotti (drums), Joe Lovano (sax and clarinet), Judi Silvano (vocals), Rebecca Martin (vocals and guitar), Larry Grenadier (bass), Lage Lund (guitar), Tyshawn Sorey (drums), Ralph Alessi (trumpet) and Enrico Pieranunzi (piano) played an amazing selection of music in small groups, different combinations, and then, finally, all together on an incredible, free version of Ornette Coleman’s Lonely Woman.

I was in the front row, and it wasn’t the biggest performance space in the world, so Joe Lovano was virtually sitting in my lap, while Ralph Alessi’s trumpet was more or less right in my face.

(more…)

Me: not nearly as terrible as expected

Aug 8, 2012 | 0 comments

My week at Summer Session is off to a good start. I’ve been here since Sunday night, and I’m slowly finding my way toward figuring out what my purpose is here.

I blogged a couple of days ago about how I was trying to make sense of my role, and I’m very grateful to the guys from Jazz Danmark for their approach, which has simply been that they thought it would be a good idea to invite me and “just see what happens”.

I was made aware that there had been some resistance to my involvement, by one of the musicians in particular – a veteran of Summer Sessions past.

It’s understandable, since the tradition of Summer Session has always been about bringing together only musicians to play… and I can kind of get how being away from the pressures of ‘the music business side of things’ could be seen as one of the things that’s special about this event that might well be lost by bringing someone like me into the mix.

For that reason, I’ve been trying to be fairly low-impact – hanging at the back, not staying too long in any one session, that sort of thing. I’ve been observing, without actually intervening, wherever possible.

But people are almost uniformly friendly, and I’ve been welcomed in beyond what I thought was likely even at this early stage of the process.

(more…)