Tonight I missed the third concert in the Jazzy Shanghai concert series (Japanese singer Maya) due to some personal lack of planning issues, but I made it to JZ later in the evening to check out Pierre Favre and his quintet. They played one long set, but it was enough to get a sense of what tomorrow’s show at Oriental Arts Center will probably be like. They are one of the two groups who will play for the final show tomorrow in the Jazzy Shanghai concert series. I found out they are supposed to play the first half of the show, so I won’t go (since I’d have to miss the second half to go to work anyway).
The group consists of drum set, guitar, bass, tenor saxophone, and pipa (a traditional chinese instrument sort of shaped like a guitar). The music they played consisted of some standards and some other more free music.
The pipa was an interesting addition, but besides playing the melodies to some bebop tunes together with the other melodic instruments, I didn’t feel like it really added much to the sound or arrangements. It seemed more like a gimmick to get a gig in China. However I will admit I didn’t expect the pipa player to improvise according to the changes at all, yet she did actually seem to have a sense for the chord changes.
Overall I felt that the band wasn’t that musical. I didn’t get a sense that they were really listening and responding to each other with much depth, and I felt that the drummer (who is the band leader, Pierre Favre) sounded like the drum set was not his main instrument at all. I found his playing quite sloppy and too loud much of the time. Overall, not a very positive impression.