The Balance - Dave Holland Quintet

This tune is from the album Extended Play - Live At Birdland. Here is a great live rendition from the Jazz Baltica festival on Youtube.and here. Chris Potter on sop and Robin Eubanks on bone, Steve Nelson, vib & mar and Billy Kilson, ds. Soloists really give it the big one over that 10 feel. Amazing. This is the lineup when they came to the Brighton Festival a few years ago. I know some of you were there.

 From Mark...

The tune we are due to look at is The Balance by Dave Holland (from the album Points Of View  ECM 1998). 

I have prepared an additional sheet called The Balance - bits. It has a couple of backing lines used in the arrangement. (See below).

I think this is a beautiful piece of music and a really interesting arrangement. However, it is also very hard (in my opinion!) I chose it - sorry!

I originally transcribed this piece (about 10 years ago) in a slow 5/4 - much of the melody is written in semiquavers. More recently I found a transcription on the net (credited to Ville V. 2010 ) which notates the piece in 10/4 (or 6/4 + 4/4). I thought this looked more friendly, it also avoids the semiquavers. However, I still find the best the way to 'feel' the rhythm is in a slow 5. I'll bring along a semiquaver version for comparison on Friday.

I know a number of you may feel that perhaps we have done enough work on odd time signatures recently. I somewhat regret this choice now (it was supposed to finish off the final block of 2013!) All four of the tunes in our next block are in 4/4!!!

Anyway, I have a couple of ways to approach this tune which we can try on Friday. One of them involves improvising over the chords ... but in 4/4 :-)

10 Jan 2014, The 4th of this Block

Ash and I met with Mark last week to discuss dates, tunes and arrangements for next year. These dates are confirmed:

Block 2 -  remaining date - 10 January

 

Block 3

17 Jan, 24 Jan, (delete 31 Jan), 7 Feb, insert 14 Feb

 

Block 4

insert 28 Feb, 7 Mar, 14 Mar, (delete 21 March) 28 March

 

Dates for Blocks 5 & 6 are provisional for now so will let you know when they have been confirmed.

 The level of support for the workshop indicates that it is a popular format. So far we have requested Mark to repeat some tunes. If anyone has other tunes we have done that they would like repeated then let us know. We discussed the emphasis that the sessions have had on timing. Mark said that he felt that this is an often ignored element of music and is as important as what notes to play. Ash suggested looking at arranging on the hoof on the bandstand. That way we could look at backing riffs which would have an impact on our phrasing when soloing.

We intend to keep the contemporary spirit. It would seem that a number of people have been happy to discover new music and to broaden their listening. If anyone has got suggestions for tunes then let us know. Otherwise we will continue to foist our tastes on you. We will be doing more tunes in 4/4 though!

Some ideas for themes for blocks are British , Middle Eastern, European and Scandinavian composers. We have already done tunes by Avishai Cohen and Henri Texier but there is a lot of really good stuff out there. We also want to look at some pop/rock tunes that have been covered by jazz artists. After all that is how most standards started life.