Shelton Nordeson at Blue Six 9-24-2009

Played duets on Thursday night at Blue Six in the mission with Kjell Nordeson. Part of the Active Music Series, it'll be a monthly concert where I'll be bringing a project and inviting another group to share the bill. This night Darren Johnston brought a new quartet called Farallon where he's joined by Sheldon Brown on alto, Noah Phillips on guitar and Jordan Glenn on drums.

Kjell and I played the first set, all improvised - we played four pieces, the first two were more rooted in tempo based forms with Kjell creating multi-layered rhythms with lots of variations and colors of sounds stemming from his kit that includes many "little instruments" in addition to the standard elements. Really fun to play with him, I like his feel when playing time - driving & intense, with a solid pulse supporting all the variations.We played four pieces - the first two were pretty high energy tempo driven affairs, lots of forward momentum and repetition. I started on tenor and switched to alto halfway through the second. The third piece dealt with more quiet tones and silence at first. Kjell then created a pulsing theme utilizing some complex sounds which developed into an ostinato in a kind of 12/8 feel with cross rhythms on top. I was able to float on top of this with melodic material. A very patient feel to the piece. We were able to record it with 4 tracks, here's the second track, where I play first tenor and then alto:



Farallon played the second set. It was quite good, some originals by both Darren and Sheldon and one Herbie Nichols tune which was quite an interesting interpretation largely due to the instrumentation and the playing style of Noah Phillips. Instead of comping in a jazz way, Noah's concept has a strong rock influence, and he would create backings which reflected this, while maintaining the chordal aspects of the written music. It was a real juxtaposition which I thought worked well. The music written by Darren and Sheldon was strong and you could tell how much those two had played together in the past. Darren's been sounding extra good these days - a benefit of playing alot of shows all over the place (I think he was in Chicago, Toronto and New York in the past month.)