M&T Concert Series: Jazz Composers Workshop

BOY ARE WE SMART: we started the Buffalo Jazz Composers Workshop, and in a very few sessions we’ve already amassed some formidable sets of hip, funky, fresh, swinging, locally-sourced free-range original Jass Musicks. We’ve brought together six composers with six unique compositional voices, six guys with chips on their shoulders because we’re JAZZ musicians dammit and therefore We Try Harder and why has that very nice and slightly tipsy young couple decided to have their freewheeling and flirty conversation in the one spot of the room where I put my recorder?
It’s a workshop so, unlike other kinds of gigs, at the end of the day there’s homework: “now that I’ve heard it, I’m gonna transpose this tune up a fourth — it’ll lay better and the voicings will be clearer,” or “Let’s turn this part of the solo into a vamp; I think it just sounds better,” or “Is that a comfortable form to blow on, or should I chop off the last A section, since we keep screwing that up anyway?”
Or, for example: It was pretty damn cool to “deal with” John Bacon’s brand-fuggin’-new tune Lamentations with the workshop, and then to get a chance about a week or two later to play a full-blown, way expanded and frankly amazing arrangement of that same ding-dang tune with the Buffalo Jazz Octet!

Because THAT’S what happens in a workshop! Stuff Gets Done! And I guess my broader point is that BOY ARE WE SMART because we started the Buffalo Jazz Composers Workshop!

Hosted by Kelly Bucheger, Tim Clarke, Jared Tinkham, Alec Dube, Joseph Goehle, and John Bacon.