Free Jazz Explorations
This is my latest project begun in mid 2012 (in collaboration with the great pianist Ron Stabinsky) which explores the side of the genre known as "Free Jazz".
This band's lineup has recently included Ron Stabinsky-piano, Tony Marino-baas and Bob Ventrello-drum. Free (sometimes, especially back in the day, referred to also as "Avant Garde" Jazz) allows me the feedom to push my own improvisation to it's limits, where the result can often be the discovery of new and compelling sounds, spontaneous chord progressions, rhythms, and melodic and harmonic possibilities.
Listen to selections from my Free Jazz Explorations band recorded live at St. Stephen's Church in Wilkes-Barre, PA on 1-26-2012 featuring Ron Stabinsky-piano, Tony Marino-baas and Bob Ventrello-drum:
5 Motifs
Excerpt 1
Excerpt 2
Excerpt 3
Free Jazz is an approach to jazz music that was first developed in the 1950s and 1960s. Though the music produced by free jazz composers varied widely, the common feature was a dissatisfaction with the limitations of bebop, hard bop, and modal jazz, which had developed in the 1940s and 1950s. Each in their own way, free jazz musicians attempted to alter, extend, or break down the conventions of jazz, often by discarding hitherto invariable features of jazz, such as fixed chord changes or tempos. While usually considered experimental and avant-garde, free jazz has also oppositely been conceived as an attempt to return jazz to its "primitive", often religious roots, and emphasis on collective improvisation.
Free Jazz uses jazz idioms, and like jazz it places an aesthetic premium on expressing the "voice" or "sound" of the musician, as opposed to the classical tradition in which the performer is seen more as expressing the thoughts of the composer.