Last night was another epic evening at JZ Club, featuring three different bands who played from 9:30pm all the way through till 3am. It all started with a warmup set from JR, then two sets by the featured group David Braid Sextet, and then a closing set by regular saturday night band the Red Groove Project.
The short early set was JR, the “Jazz Revolution” jazz fusion quartet who have rotated bass players over the last few months. Last night was the first time I heard them joined the French bassist Jay Lasry, who sounded great and seemed quite appropriate for their sound with his fretless, funky slap-infused style. He’s got the skills and sound to continue this band’s forward progress in my opinion, but only time will tell what happens eventually I suppose. The band’s blog hasn’t been written on much in the last couple months except for Feng’s two entries over the last couple days, explaining how busy they’ve been traveling to other cities for gigs. Maybe they will make an official announcement once they decide on a bassist? Nothing in the blog so far about original bassist Scott Dodd’s leaving the band and the subsequent search for an appropriate replacement.
Anyway back to last night’s show- After JR’s short opening set, the main attraction David Braid sextet came to the stage and played two full sets of some great original creative jazz. I can’t complement the group enough, every tune had me psyched to be listening. Never predictable but always interesting and fun. Pretty much all of the show consisted of music composed by Braid himself, ranging in sounds from a more traditional Jazz Messengers vibe to very modern sound laden with odd-time signatures and forms.
This main part of the show was put on through the efforts of Aaron Low over at Lacuna Global Entertainment, who did the unheard of by facilitating the performance of a world-class six-piece jazz group in a Shanghai jazz club. It’s difficult already to bring smaller groups into town because of the costs involved and the limited support of jazz here, so to succeed in bringing this big a group is commendable. I’m not sure if he even “succeeded” per se, since it looked like he might only barely break even earlier in the evening. It is not normally possible to bring groups like this into town except with consular support, or if the group is already touring in Asia which minimizes travel costs to be covered by the venue. In this case, the group being so large, it was only possible because both consular support and Asia tour were happening.
Finishing the evening was the funk band led by Lawrence Ku, the Red Groove Project. We played one long set, well-received by all our musician friends and the crowd still remaining from earlier. It was an important occasion for the band, because it was the last night of its two-year long regular saturday stint at JZ. The group has been making live recordings of the last two months of the regular saturday night shows, so expect some sort of album release in the coming year. Follow the link above to check out a couple rough mixes of some of these live recordings on the band’s myspace page. It is also possible that the band will enter the studio in the next few weeks to do non-live versions of some tunes.
I will be posting shortly about a number of transitions that are just taking place on the scene, including what will replace RGP on saturdays at JZ…but since I might wait till I get back in a couple days to do so, I’ll just tell you: the JZ Jazz Orchestra, a new 16-piece big band led by Rolf Becker. It will be like nothing Shanghai has seen since the 1930s dancehalls, and will also approach some realms of newer big band music like big band pioneer Thad Jones. Rolf himself is an accomplished arranger and composer, so expect to hear some of his own output as well.