Hi folks, happy spring to you all! I've been keeping busy, recording what I think will be a great album with drummer and composer Bryan Bowman at the legendary Fantasy Studios, getting ready for my own recording there with the Quintet+1 in April, and playing as much as possible! I wanted to let you know about a few shows coming up which I think you'd enjoy...First up is a show this Sunday at Rose Pistola in North Beach--pianist Ben Stolorow and I will be joined by bassist Doug Miller for an evening of standards, originals, and jazz rarities.WHO: Ian Carey, Ben Stolorow, & Doug MillerWHERE: Rose Pistola, 532 Columbus Ave, SFWHEN: Sunday, February 15, 8-10:30pmHOW MUCH: no cover!The following Sunday, I'll be back in North Beach playing with the great new big band The Electric Squeezebox Orchestra (formerly the Bay Area Composers' Big Band, but it's still almost entirely original music!), led by the great trumpeter Erik Jekabsen and featuring some of the Bay Area's finest. This is turning into quite a hang, so don't miss it! (With a little luck I may even have an arrangement to premiere).WHAT: The Electric Squeezebox OrchestraWHERE: Doc's Lab, 124 Columbus Ave, SFWHEN: Sunday, February 22, 6:30pHOW MUCH: no cover!And the Sunday after that, Ben Stolorow and I will bring our duo project Duocracy back to the landmark Old St. Hilary's (on the hill above beautiful Tiburon) for a very special show featuring our unique take on rarely-heard gems from the American Popular Songbook. This is a great, intimate place to hear music and was one of my favorite shows last year.WHAT: Duocracy (Ian Carey & Ben Stolorow)WHERE: Old St. Hilary's, 201 Esperanza St., TiburonWHEN: Sunday, March 1, 4pmHOW MUCH: $20/$15 (available here)Hope to see you there!UPCOMING:April 24: Tony Corman's Morchestra featuring Ed Reed, CJCMay 7: Bryan Bowman Quintet, Bird & BeckettMay 16: Ian Carey Quintet+1, The Sound Room
Hello folks,I wanted to give you a heads-up about a show next month that I'm very excited about. My group will be giving only the second performance of my new 4-part suite Interview Music (made possible by a grant from the San Francisco Friends of Chamber Music). The show will also be our first appearance at the historic Hillside Club, a beautiful Maybeck-designed hall at the foot of the Berkeley Hills.I wrote the piece over the past year and a half, specifically for my Quintet+1 (Adam Shulman on piano, Fred Randolph on bass, Sheldon Brown on bass clarinet, Kasey Knudsen on alto saxophone, Jon Arkin on drums, and myself on trumpet). It's close to an hour long and contains the most involved writing I've ever done. You can read more about it, including what the title means, here.More importantly, we're going to be doing a recording of the performance which will hopefully be released as our fourth album next year--and you have the opportunity to say, in the words of Pee Wee Marquette, "that's my hand on that record!" This is also likely to be your last chance to hear Interview Music in its entirety for quite a while. We'll also be playing other music from our book including music from our album Roads & Codes ("★★★★½ " - DownBeat).The show will be Friday, November 14 at 8pm, and the Hillside Club is located at 2286 Cedar St. in Berkeley. Hope to see you!
I also wanted to let you know about two exciting shows this weekend--the first is Friday 10/24 at 9pm. It's the debut of a brand-new 17-piece big band, the Morchestra, which is led by guitarist/composer/arranger extraordinaire Tony Corman, and features an embarrassment of local riches in the band. We're going to be playing at the newly-relocated Birdland Jazzista Social Club in Oakland and it should be a great time. More info here.Saturday night (10/25), I'm excited to be getting together with my friends Fred Randolph, Adam Shulman, and Bryan Bowman for some good old bar jazz at the Albatross Pub in Berkeley from 9:30-12:30. Just a $3 cover. Come on by and see if we can be louder than the crowd!
Hi folks, I wanted to let you know about an exciting show coming up this Sunday at one of my favorite venues. Duocracy, a duo project with my friend the great pianist Ben Stolorow, with whom I recorded an album of the same name ("a lively trip down a straightahead path, deriving a refreshing joy from the familiar sights" —DownBeat) will be doing an intimate show this Sunday afternoon at Bird & Beckett, a long-time institution in San Francisco's almost unbearably cute Glen Park neighborhood.Duocracy focuses on classic tunes from the rare to the familiar, ranging from Gershwin and Gordon Jenkins to Thelonious Monk and Henry Mancini, plus occasional original tunes by Ben and myself. But within that repertoire, we aim for interplay, unpredictability, and surprise. (You can see us performing an old favorite below.)So please come on by if you're in the neighborhood (and pick up some books and records to support this great independent local business while you're at it)!WHAT: Duocracy (Ian Carey, trumpet & Ben Stolorow, piano)WHEN: Sunday, October 5, 4:30-6:30pWHERE: Bird & Beckett Books & Records, 653 Chenery St., San FranciscoHOW MUCH: $10 (suggested donation)
Hi folks, I'm very excited to announce the premiere of a new piece for my Quintet+1 which I've been working on for the past year. The piece, titled Interview Music: A Suite for Quintet+1, and made possible by a grant from the San Francisco Friends of Chamber Music's Musical Grant Program, will be presented Saturday, September 20 at the California Jazz Conservatory (formerly known as the Jazzschool) in Berkeley. It will feature the talents of Adam Shulman, piano, Fred Randolph, bass, Jon Arkin, drums, Kasey Knudsen, alto saxophone, Sheldon Brown, bass clarinet, and myself on trumpet.Below is a press release about the piece, including what that name means, my own background as a composer, and the history of the band. I hope to see you at the premiere!
"The first thing you need to know about 'Interview Music,'" says Bay Area trumpeter and composer Ian Carey about his new jazz suite, "is that it's not about trying to get more interviews." (Though he's not averse to the idea, he adds.)The piece, which will be premiered at the California Jazz Conservatory (formerly the Jazzschool) in Berkeley on Saturday, September 20, at 8:00 pm, is a 45-minute, four-movement adventure and Carey's longest composition to date. It is a vehicle both for his intricate writing and the improvisational chops of his group, the Ian Carey Quintet+1, last heard on 2013's acclaimed album Roads & Codes (Kabocha Records), which received praise from DownBeat and NPR, and appeared on many critics' best of 2013 lists.The title of "Interview Music" refers to a recent discussion in the jazz world over the increasing percentage of new music being funded through nonprofit commissions and grants, and whether that system favors what the late pianist Mulgrew Miller called "interview music"—high-concept, programmatic works, often with subject matter like visual artists, literary figures, or social movements. "Everyone started to get the feeling," says Carey, "that they'd never get a second look if their music wasn't about Pablo Neruda or the grape boycott or the Fibonacci sequence or whatever."
Carey has turned the tables on the argument by writing a new extended piece for his ensemble which specifically rejects that approach. Somewhat ironically, "Interview Music" is being funded by just such a grant (from the San Francisco Friends of Chamber Music's Musical Grant Program), but Carey noted when applying that he specifically did not want to go into the project with such a pre-existing concept. "Classical composers have created amazing works for centuries with no topics at all, other than the music itself—Symphony or String Quartet number whatever, 'Octet for Winds,' and so on," he says. "I feel like jazz composers think they need to use catchy concepts and topics to stand out, but shouldn't the catchiest part be the music?"Carey adds that he never felt comfortable trying to decide what a piece should be about before writing it—paraphrasing Miles Davis's famous "I'll play it and tell you what it is later" quip, he says, "I just don't work that way. I write first and figure out what it's about after I hear it. If it's about anything!" Happily, the grant committee agreed, and funded the piece's composition and premiere performance.The result is a challenging work which runs the gamut from intricate through-composed sections to raucous group improvisation, showcasing the chops Carey has developed over his past decade of writing for the ensemble. His goals as a composer—providing individually tailored solo contexts for each improviser, utilizing the dense counterpoint favored by his favorite composers, and moving beyond the melody-solos-melody roadmap of more traditional jazz writing—show up in surprising ways, including a passacaglia (a classical form built around a cycling melodic figure) and a movement in which the horns and rhythm section each spend most of the time in completely separate tempos (borrowing a trick from Carey's idol Charles Ives), but the improvisational talents of the ensemble are never far from the forefront. "As complicated as the writing got, I never wanted to lose sight of the fact that it's a jazz piece," Carey said. "Improvisation and swing should still be the stars of the show."Originally from upstate New York, Ian Carey lived in Sacramento and Reno before moving to New York City in 1994, where he attended the New School (studying composition with Bill Kirchner, Henry Martin, and Maria Schneider, and improvisation with Reggie Workman, Billy Harper, and Andrew Cyrille). During a productive seven years in New York, he was able to perform with musicians as varied as Ravi Coltrane, Ted Curson, Ali Jackson, Marion Brown, and Eddie Bert, but when an opportunity arose to spend a summer in San Francisco, he realized he was ready for a break from the Gotham grind. He soon met the musicians who would become the core of his quintet, which transformed over the following twelve years and three albums (2005's Sink/Swim, 2010's Contextualizin', and Roads & Codes) into a tightly-knit unit dedicated to tackling Carey's original compositions. In 2012, looking to augment the group's sonic palette, he expanded the group to six members.The Quintet+1—which, in addition to the leader's trumpet, features Adam Shulman on piano,Kasey Knudsen on alto saxophone, Sheldon Brown on bass clarinet, Fred Randolph on bass, and Jon Arkin on drums, each an accomplished artist in his or her own right—may have their work cut out for them in preparing "Interview Music," but Carey doesn't doubt they'll bring their "A" games: "These guys are the real deal. There's no one I'd rather ask to bring this thing to life."The California Jazz Conservatory is located at 2087 Addison Street in Berkeley. Tickets are $15 ($12 student/senior) and are available at 510-845-5373."Interview Music" is made possible through the Musical Grant Program, which is administered by the San Francisco Friends of Chamber Music, and supported by the Heller Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, the San Francisco Foundation and San Francisco Grants for the Arts.
Hi folks, it's been a while since my last update. As you can see, I've redesigned my whole site from scratch; the reasons were a) it was time, and b) I've been learning some new tools and this was a good opportunity to put them to use--for the design-nerd details, I created the site as a whole in Adobe Muse, the homepage animation in Edge Animate, and the blog is still in Wordpress with a customized template (since Muse doesn't yet have its own compatible blogging engine). Please have a look around--there are now pages for my projects, albums, a new bio, my design & illustration portfolio, a list of upcoming events, and you can let me know what you think at the new contact page!Gigs-wise things have been interesting--I've got at least two more hits with Circus Bella this summer, had a really challenging and interesting show with the great Satoko Fujii at Duende (I hope they'll continue their adventurous programming now that Rocco Somazzi is leaving), and am busily preparing for the world (!) premiere of my new piece for Quintet+1, "Interview Music" (if you follow the jazz media at all you'll get the joke/reference), this September at the California Jazz Conservatory. Ben Stolorow and I have also just confirmed Duocracy's first San Francisco appearance, at Bird & Beckett in October.Finally, I'm overdue to give you a "New to Me" installment—here's a quick rundown of some of the music that's been on heavy rotation in my ears lately.The top five:
- Israel: The Music of Johnny Carisi — I can't overstate how deeply this record has bowled me over since I picked it up (on Marc Myers' recommendation) earlier this year. So intricate, so creative, so swinging--it's everything I aim for in my own music.
- Olivier Manchon: Orchestre de Chambre Miniature — This random used CD pickup was a lucky find. Gorgeous small-group string writing by this French violinist, lush harmony, creative textures, layered through with solid blowing by John Ellis and Gregoire Maret (who I was lucky to get to play with a few times in NYC). This is listed as "volume 1"—I hope more is on the way because this one is over way too quickly.
- Hindemith: Kammermusik 1-7 (Berliner Philharmoniker/Claudio Abbado) — This is a bible of modern contrapuntal technique. Drop the (virtual) needle anywhere for an immediate sonic bath of virtuosic counterpoint and texture. He makes it sound so easy (maybe it was for him). The cello-focused #3 is my current favorite, but they're all amazing.
- Villa Lobos: Wind Music — As much as I love Hindemith, he can sometimes feel a little dry emotionally—the first time I heard this record, it made me think of a more soulful (and due to the Brazilian connection, inevitably more reminiscent of jazz harmonies) version of a Hindemithian texture. The duo, trio and quartet are all great. I am stealing lots of stuff from this record.
- Halvorsen/Fujiwara/Formanek: Thumbscrew — I was lucky to hear these guys last month during their Duende residency (where else would that ever happen outside of NYC?) and was really floored. All three players are forces of nature, and the tunes are perfect vehicles for what they do best. (Although they do just fine without tunes as well, as demonstrated by the all-improvised second set they did with perfectly attuned sitter-inner Ben Goldberg when I saw them.) This (as well as the Satoko Fujii show) has really inspired me to get into more free playing.
Other records I've been crazy about lately include:
- Darcy James Argue: Brooklyn Babylon
- Donald Byrd: How (with incredible string charts by Clare Fischer)
- Jimmy Giuffre: New York Concerts
- Charles Mingus: Pre Bird ("Half-Mast Inhibition"!)
- Henry Cowell: Piano Music
- Kirk Knuffke: Chorale (Finally got to hear him live recently with Todd Sickafoose--one of my favorite young
trumpeterscornetists) - John Swana: Bright Moments (My friend Lorin turned me on to Swana, who is a mother$#&* of creative changes-playing and sounds equally scary on trumpet and EVI)
... plus a bunch of other great stuff I'm forgetting! Anyway, that's a good start. Stay tuned for more news about "Interview Music" and part 2 of "Blues, Authenticity, and the Hopefully Not-So-Abstract Truth."