2017’s New Beginnings

2017 has so far been a year has been a year full of interesting new projects. I’ve started 2 new groups with some excellent musicians and have been enjoying playing residencies of 2 months for each group at Ric’s bar in Fortitude Valley on their Wednesday Jazz Nights.

The first group off the ground was a trio called 3 Down with Carly Minjoy (piano) and Aaron Jansz (drums) with yours truly on bass. The concept for the group is a real straight-ahead swinging piano trio vibe inspired by the trios of Wynton Kelly, Sonny Clarke, Oscar Peterson, Ahmad Jamal, Red Garland, Bill Evans and all our other favourites.

The second group is a quartet called Re:Bop and features Lachlan McKenzie (trumpet), Luke McIntosh (bass), Aaron Jansz (drums) and yours truly (tenor saxophone). For this group I’ve been writing contrafacts (new melodies) on some of our favourite standards. Some of these are pretty challenging and we’re finally starting to feel out where we can take this group.

Re:Bop’s residency continues througout May on Wednesday nights at Ric’s Bar so do come check it out! Details are here.

In other news, I wrote some new music for my long-running quartet with Chris Poulsen (piano), Helen Russell (bass) and Nathan Goldman (drums). We rehearsed and developed the new compositions a bit during April and then premiered the music on April 25 at the Brisbane Jazz Club. We had such a great time getting this group back together I’m really hoping to start playing regularly again in the second half of 2017.

You can here this group in action here playing music from our album ‘Now and Then’.