The first day of the JZ Festival saw excellent weather, an interesting new venue for a music festival, and a wide range of music styles. It's already made lots of improvements on last year's festival at Fuxing park (except for the being held in a nice park with trees part) like slightly more food and drink selection and a great mass of artists selling cool stuff made themselves, like bags, jewelry, and kitschy animal-shaped gifts. Also the weather being nice is already a massive improvement over last years threatening storm clouds. Opening the festival at 3pm was Lawrence Ku's septet, playing his own compositions and arrangements from the group's recent release "Process". The group has a well-developed modern jazz sound that unfortunately doesn't get featured locally very often, even though all the players are locally based. After Lawrence's band finished on the main stage, Susanna and her magic orchestra played on the second stage. She has a dreamy, floating sort of sound to her music, and her orchestra was a one-man synthesizer orchestra but quite effective all the same. She was the first group of three that were brought into the festival through NOTCH, the festival of Scandinavian music that has merged with the JZ festival this year. She and the group that followed her, Supersilent, both hail from Norway. Supersilent played on the main stage, and made a pretty amazing show that started out with industrial-sounding sample-based free improvisation. Then they moved into some dark realms of free experimental music that was like a continuous segue. Very creative and different from everything else at the festival. The fourth band, the Skull Defects, were also making some quite interesting music with some electronic sampling and improvisation. However, they were a bit more rock-based, using more continuous rhythmic elements and interesting instruments like a big plastic water jug with a mic stuffed in the hole to get a nice deep drum sound. more ›

JazzArt, as you might have heard, is a monthly jazz concert series held at a different gallery each month. They have become our favorite regular jazz event, not just because we happen to be involved with the planning and implementation but also because art galleries are fantastic places for jazz concerts in general. Also people who show up to these kind of concerts tend to really listen to the music, whereas in smoky bars at night many people come to chat, or conspicuously consume pricy bottles of booze, perhaps giving the occasional nod toward the music in the background when it happens to catch their attention. The JazzArt series has been wildly successful, much to the chagrin of the evil gallery owners who pulled out at the last minute of planning early this year. Drawing an estimated 250 people to last month's show, at least 300 people are expected to pack this month's concert on the 3rd floor of MOCA to the brim. So get there early in order to get a seat, as there will only be about 100 chairs. more ›

The JazzArt concert series got off to a fantastic start with a packed house enjoying two sets of Lawrence Ku's original music on this past Sunday. His group of seven musicians featured the cream of the crop on the Shanghai jazz scene, nearly all of whom are also faculty at the JZ school — including EJ Parker, Alec Haavik, Andy Hunter, Chris Trzcinski, the author of this post, Lawrence himself, as well as the amazing Beijing-based pianist XiaJia. The concert was held at the TwoCities art gallery on Moganshan Lu, and was a perfect room for the band to play in. It's just the right size for that kind of ensemble, because there was no need to use microphones at all. In fact the only amplification used was for the bass and guitar, and it was minimal. more ›

This first week of the JazzArt concert series will feature the Lawrence Ku Septet playing at the TwoCities Gallery at M50 on Moganshan lu. The septet, which performs quite rarely, is in fact playing quite a few times this month. This is partly because trombonist Andy Hunter is in town through the end of the month, and there aren’t really any other good jazz trombonists in Shanghai. Besides the Jazzy Shanghai festival performance last week and this weekend’s JazzArt concert, the group will also play a CD release party on the 24th (and the Beijing jazz festival at the end of the month). Of course, the imminent release of the album is the other main reason for the increased performance frequency. more ›

Sunday night we headed down to the House of Blues and Jazz to check out the new band from New Orleans, “Continuum”. They started a couple weeks ago but already have their groove on, with an easy stage presence that shows they are comfortable playing together and a group sound that is starting to come together nicely. Front man Thaddeus Ford, who plays the trumpet and acts as MC, is a 6th generation New Orleans jazz musician, and has about four different names for each of the musicians onstage as he announces them. He and the vocalist Evelyn are actually the only ones originally from New Orleans, as their band was originally scheduled to come play later in the year but was recently contacted by the club and asked if they could come earlier. Because of the short notice they were not able to use their regular band members, but were still able to bring some solid players to fill in on piano and drums. In fact they were never able to line up a bass player before arriving in town, so they picked up Michael Brownell, a bass player who has been based in town for the last half-year or so now. In any case they are creating a good atmosphere already, mixing some jazz standards in with the funk, soul and R&B where Evelyn really shines. more ›

We were lucky enough to hear about the concert held by the Espoo Big Band from Espoo, Finland held last night before it happened. Held in a ballroom at the Regal International East Asia hotel, the show was not widely publicized, and most people we talked to at the event had only heard about it a few days beforehand like us. There was still a pretty good turnout, but it’s too bad more people didn’t make it because it was a pretty amazing show. more ›

GigShanghai: Robots, poems and bagpipes more ›