Bluiett/Jackson/El'Zabar mini-west coast tour

Just got back from a whirlwind four day mini-tour of the West Coast with my collective group Bluiett/Jackson/El’Zabar. The group had until recently been on an unofficial hiatus. As Bluiett has often said to me, he didn’t want the group to be one in which we were actively soliciting gigs; he felt (perhaps rightly) that he was at a stage where if the interest was somehow “in the air”, then he’d be there, ready to play, but otherwise he didn’t want to force it. This was, incidentally, also the attitude he and the World Saxophone Quartet have always had - they’ve always just seemed to keep going, to continue to find work, with the word continuing to spread and success building upon success for now some 25 years. If word of mouth is any indication, we thankfully were off to a nice, renewed start. We played Hot House in Chicago last week and were pleased to receive a rave review; this recent leg involved the Eddie Moore fest in Oakland, followed by the Jazz Bakery in L.A., and finally the Kuumba Jazz Center in Santa Cruz. The Eddie Moore fest had recently been forced to move their quarters from Yoshi’s to the much less tried and true Oakland Asian Cultural Center and they found themselves having to consequentially rebuild their audience base. A free-wheeling concert the night before ours featuring the legendary Sonny Simmons along with Michael Marcus was, in fact, rather poorly attended, and so we didn’t necessarily have high hopes for our performance. But thankfully we had a decent crowd, and the program was even picked up for live radio broadcast on KPFA (both my girlfriend Elizabeth back in NY and my father up in Ottawa, Canada were surreally able to hear it live, in fact.) It was a rousing success, and really made us look forward to the subsequent nights, which, in turn, kept surprising us with the level of enthusiasm of the audience. Perhaps Bluiett is on to something with his “letting things take care of themselves” philosophy about the group. There certainly is something very unforced, spontaneous, and joyous about the music we’re enjoying making with each other; it’s really quite a fun and exciting conception and we’re all gratified that people are so sincerely moved. Hopefully we can get another album in the can soon and “keep rollin'”, as Bluiett might also say…