What's going on: my recording of Ornette Coleman's Mothers of the Veil

While I was traveling recently, I got a note from a reader who had very kindly purchased my CD Little Played Little Bird, the music of Ornette Coleman, asking for some analysis and explanation of my drumming on the opening track, “Mothers Of The Veil”:





First, listen to the original Ornette Coleman recording, from the album In All Languages:



You can hear that Billy Higgins does a sort-of Latin feel on the head, seemingly at a faster pace than that of melody; the rhythmic connection between the drums and horns is somewhat obscure. It sounds like he's playing a shuffle rhythm on his cymbal, but it's really a quasi-Latin feel in a fast 3; what his left hand is doing really coordinates with that, and where the time goes during the solos is based on it:

Here's my chart, which is basically just a transcription of the melody as played by Coleman and Don Cherry— I don't know what the original music, if any, looked like, but you could play this chart with a steady pulse all the way through, and arrive at something fairly close to what's on the original record— putting it in 5/4 I think gives it a similar pacing to the original, which might have just been phrased with a breath every measure. Listen through the head of each of the recordings while following the chart:

Continued after the break:

Tour wrap-up

After our first gig, at Hot Club de Gand, in Ghent.

The tour went quite well, by the way— the shows were all well attended, audiences were very appreciative, we got some good press, and we are well situated to expand our reach next year. And we actually turned a profit this year; the gigs paid well, and I sold all of the CDs I took with me— 60 of them, I think. This was my fourth trip to Europe leading my own group; the first one lost a lot of money, another one made a little money, and another roughly broke even.


There's a gallery of photos from the tour here, and our updates from the road are here.

Earlier I posted the tunes I was including in our book— we ended up playing:
Mothers Of The Veil
Feet Music
Strange As It Seems
Enfant
Mob Job
Lonely Woman
Owl of Cranston
Guinea
Mopti
Empty Boat
Valse de Melody

And less frequently:
Comme Il Faut
Check Up
Las Vegas Tango
Olhos de Gato


Here's the group playing Mopti, by Don Cherry, at the Jazz Station in Brussels:



The musicians there are: Weber Iago — piano / Jean-Paul Estievenart — trumpet / Olivier Stalon — bass / Todd Bishop — drums

It's funny, this was the second gig of the tour, I was feeling pretty jetlagged, and felt that the group was under-rehearsed, and that we were kind of hacking out a performance; with a little distance from it, though, you forget what you were feeling, and what you were trying to do, and you can see the thing for the respectable performance it is. That's become one of my rules: the gig was always better than you think it was. I can't promise that holds for everyone at all times— it most certainly doesn't, in fact— but time and time again I have heard recordings from what I thought was a really off night, and they are inevitably totally fine, or even good.

So, now it falls on me to make a new record fast— which is how I like to do them— and get booking the November '14 tour in January/February... onward...

2013 tour repertoire

Here's a list of the tunes we'll be working with on my group's Belgium trip next week. We won't end up playing all of this stuff, but it's in the books. A little over half of those are my own arrangements— I transcribed them off the record and made a playable lead sheet out of them, anyway.

Alice In Wonderland — Sammy Fain
Beatrice — Sam Rivers
The Blessing —  Ornette Coleman
*Blood — Paul Bley
Check Up — Ornette Coleman
Comme Il Faut  —  Ornette Coleman
Country Town Blues — Ornette Coleman
*The Empty Boat —  Caetano Veloso
Eighty-One — Ron Carter 
Enfant —  Ornette Coleman 
Feet Music — Ornette Coleman 
Guinea — Don Cherry
*Happy House — Ornette Coleman
Ida Lupino — Carla Bley
Las Vegas Tango — Gil Evans 
*Let's Play — Ornette Coleman
*Law Years — Ornette Coleman
Lonely Woman — Ornette Coleman
Mr. Joy — Annette Peacock
Mob Job —  Ornette Coleman 
Mopti — Don Cherry 
Mothers of the Veil — Ornette Coleman 

Never — Steve Swallow
Olhos de Gato —  Carla Bley
Owl of Cranston — Paul Motian
*Somnambulist — Rich Cole 
Strange As It Seems — Ornette Coleman
Syndrome — Carla Bley
Valse de Melody —  Serge Gainsbourg

Bold — likely players
 * —  new additions for 2013. We'll see if they work...

Another best of 2012 list

Another Best of 2012 list for my CD Little Played Little Bird, this time on the Bird Is The Worm blog, written by eMusic contributor Dave Sumner. We're in the number 12 slot:

So, take obscure compositions from the songbook of a challenging artist and perform renditions… the math for that equation should result in something resembling a didactic lecture of music theory and not the refreshingly listenable Little Played Little Bird. Todd Bishop tackles the music of Ornette Coleman, and without watering down the source material, has created a recording that was both tuneful and a fun listen. It’s an impressive accomplishment, and a solid album when judged on its own merits. I find this album as infectious at the end of the year as I did when it originally came out.

You can buy my infectious record through links in the sidebar, either as a CD, or digital download.

Show TONIGHT

This Wednesday [Update: That's tonight], at the Secret Society Ballroom in Portland I'll be playing music from my new record, Little Played Little Bird (which you can listen to, and more importantly purchase in the sidebar), along with Tim Willcox, Weber Iago, and Dan Schulte.

It's a fairly rare for me all ages show, starting at 6pm, and my group will hit at 7. Cover is a sliding $5-20. The venue is located at 116 Northeast Russell Street Portland, OR 97212.

If you're in Portland, come on down!

See you in Seattle!

Heading up to Seattle to play the Ballard Jazz Festival in a moment. Tonight is the Brotherhood of the Drum, hosted by Michael Shrieve, which I'll be playing with saxophonist Rich Cole and bassist Paul Gabrielsen; also featured are Sonny Rollins drummer Kobie Watkins, Eric Eagle,  and the massive King Tears Bat Trip.

Friday is the Jazz Walk, where my quartet will be playing downstairs at the Salmon Bay Eagles- that will be a good hang, because upstairs will be the Table and Chairs Label Showcase, which will feature players like Gregg Keplinger, Neil Welch, Greg Sinibaldi, and more. We play at 8pm tonight (Wednesday) and 8-12 on Friday. See the Origin site for further details.

See you there!

UPDATE:  We got a lot of great feedback on the new CD, and had really fun shows on Wednesday and Friday- thanks to the musicians, to all the nice people who attended (and who bought CDs!) and to Kobie Watkins and Michael Shrieve for being incredibly nice and for buying my book, to Gregg Keplinger for putting rivets in all of my cymbals and for being very supportive, and of course my friends and family, and everyone at Origin for putting all the hard work putting on the event.  

DBMITW: Lonely Woman

Maybe I shouldn't be posting this so close to the release of my own CD with this tune, but it's too good let go. Would you have the nerve to do what Paul Motian does at the end of Dewey's solo?



I'm going to be in big time work mode getting stuff together for the imminent release of my CD of Ornette Coleman tunes, Little Played Little Bird, so posting may continue to be a little a light this week.