Another Best of 2012 list: All About Jazz

Dan McClenaghan at All About Jazz has included my record Little Played Little Bird on his Best Releases of 2012 list. He had this to say:

“Drummer Todd Bishop is an underground treasure. He doesn't boast the highest of profiles, but he has put out two consecutive great CDs for the Origin Records label: 2009's 69 Annee Erotique and now, this nod to alto saxophonist/free jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman.”

Thanks Dan!

Jazzques writes up our Café Belga show

Photo by Jazzques

Here's a review of our Brussels show at Café Belga in November, written in French by Jacques Prouvost, AKA Jazzques. Google Translate certainly distorts his original meaning, but is rather poetic:

“This Sunday, November 4, [Todd Bishop] was Café Belga Brussels.

The world, the noise, the usual deal of the place. So Todd Bishop slams the first shots on the snare. Must be heard. His game is tight, bright and dry. The pulse is strong. And it works! The quartet starts like clockwork.Very quickly, the soloists take their brands and Méreau Martin embarks on a solo feverish Check Up. Then it's Guinea Don Cherry with his throbbing trance. The music hums, rolls and fills the space.

This is a fantastic playground for Jean-Paul Estiévenart. His way up phrases, to invent by mixing always that little bit of humor shifted, this slight ray of light that is in the density of the moment, make him a trumpet definitely always interesting to listen . Guess we always looking for novelty, the truth and the desire to never repeat.Todd Bishop was quickly understood and exchanges with accomplices enrich natural confusing.Then the music turns better and Olivier Stalon benefits and spaces to enter the dance. His improvisations, extremely effective - both rich and simple - revive a Martin Méreau increasingly released vibraphone.

The themes are connected (Feet Music, Comme Il Faut) to the powerful Enfant, played here with an incredible passion. This is probably the best moment of the concert. Dialogues ignite quickly, ideas jostle. This dizzy and it seems that nobody wants to stop. There is a chorus of bidding more attractive to each other. The quartet has found and pleasure on their faces. Each dare go further, driven by one or the other. Bishop gives some indication at a glance, module tensions, holds and releases the clamp. [...] 

Ornette be happy, he really has not been betrayed.

A +”

Hit read more to read the complete review in the original French:

2012 Europe tour repertoire

Rehearsing jetlagged at Jazz Station
in Brussels, with Martin Mereau
and Olivier Stalon

A little tour documentation here. These are the tunes I had in my book on our 2012 outing, along with some notes on how our actual performance rep shaped itself. The gigs were all two to four hours long, mostly for listening audiences, with one regular restaurant gig at which we were mostly playing background music. The group consisted of trumpet, vibes, bass, and drums. I set out with a big pile of tunes, not knowing what was going to work best with this collection of players, who, except for bassist Olivier Stalon, I had never played with before. The new players worked out great, and we ended up with a couple of very effective, nicely-programmed sets of music.

Tunes with an * are on Little Played Little Bird, the CD we were promoting with this tour. Tunes with a † are my own transcriptions/arrangements; others are fake book charts. The Steve Swallow/Carla Bley tunes are from their site, which has a bunch of free lead sheets.

We played these tunes from my record on almost every gig:

†*Check Up — Ornette Coleman
Friendly tune, an easy swinger.

†*Comme Il Faut — OC
We used this free jazz anthem as our set-opener several times. We would keep it fairly short, since the gig was just starting, and I would be paranoid about scaring off the audience.

†*Enfant — OC
Bright swing tune with drum breaks on the head. By the end of the tour we were doing the first solo as a trumpet/drums duet, and trading eights with the drums after the other solos.

†*Feet Music — OC
A grooving, crowd-pleasing tune.

†*Lonely Woman — OC
One of our set pieces. You can't do an Ornette Coleman presentation without including this tune. We played it with the drums in an Afro 6/8, with the other instruments floated in at a ballad tempo. Since we were already playing a couple of other full-blown Afro-jam numbers, I had to remind the group not to play on the same 6/8 grid as me— similar to the original, in which the drums play a fast bop tempo while the rest of the group plays slowly.

More after the break:

Best of 2012 list: Bird Is The Worm

Another Best of 2012 list for my CD Little Played Little Bird, this time on the Bird Is The Worm blog, written by eMusic contributor Dave Sumner. We're in the number 12 slot:

So, take obscure compositions from the songbook of a challenging artist and perform renditions… the math for that equation should result in something resembling a didactic lecture of music theory and not the refreshingly listenable Little Played Little Bird. Todd Bishop tackles the music of Ornette Coleman, and without watering down the source material, has created a recording that was both tuneful and a fun listen. It’s an impressive accomplishment, and a solid album when judged on its own merits. I find this album as infectious at the end of the year as I did when it originally came out.

You can buy my infectious record through links in the sidebar, either as a CD, or digital download.

PUT! A! BIRD! ON! IT!

Funny little tour story: Being from the Pacific Northwest, I've never felt we projected any kind of cultural identity to the rest of the world. Even within the region all we ever had to latch onto were Prefontaine, Henry Weinhard's beer, Nirvana, and Drugstore Cowboy. Usually when I'd go overseas if people knew where Oregon was, all they would know about it is that “it's rainy.”

So I was kind of happy to actually be able to live up to a stereotype when we were performing in Europe in November. A friend of one of our Brussels musicians, who was familiar with Portlandia, heard where I was from, and was getting a kick out of quoting this to me all evening:





It took me a little while to remember my own CD cover and merch:

An epic 48 hours of travel

Among the last civilized moments of the trip,
despite the automatic weapons.

Got up early on our last morning in Paris to go see the Eiffel Tower at dawn and then hustle with our luggage from our hotel in the Bastille to St. Michel to meet Casey's friend and mentor Mario Sprouse, who arrived in town that morning for his own tour. Straight to Gare du Nord on faith that our train to Brussels will be running despite the raging austerity strikes happening there.

Made it to Brussels for mussels and champagne, and then white box wine at Olivier's house with Casey, Catherine, Bram, Teun, and Bruno until way late. Up at 6 for a typically hairy early rush hour ride to the airport, then our flight to New York (on the incredibly civilized Brussels Air). Three hour layover in which we had to collect our bags, go through customs and immigration transfer from JFK to the Newark airport— a 30+ mile manic, Cairo-style shuttle ride— for our domestic leg, on the incredibly uncivilized US Airways. Think Greyhound with wings.

Last minute itinerary change routes us through Phoenix (key moment: bleached blond sorority chicks at the gate complaining loudly in church-lady voices about all the weirdos in Portland, and the "quality" of people there in general); ~5 hour flight with no movie and no meal (OK, you could buy one, but the hell with that) and lots of not very restful sleep in 3-second increments. Brief 65 minute layover before equally miserable two hour flight to Portland itself (key moment: after weeks of listening acutely to how people speak, noticing the middle-American, slightly-country Oregon accent on the people in the airport, and how much quieter people are in general.) Adjusting nicely after first real sleep since Paris, which was the first real sleep since Portland before that. New content coming soon.

Rehearsal @ Jazz Station in Brussels

A few shots from our rehearsal at the Jazz Station (who were kind enough to let us play on the premises) in Brussels on our second day in Belgium. The band is myself with Jean-Paul Estiévenart (trumpet), Martin Méreau (vibes) & Olivier Stalon (bass):

 

More after the break: