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: