October 23, 7pm – 9 pm
Mogani live at Ball & Chain Cafe
Briggs Carriage Bookstore,
16 Park Street, Brandon VT 05733
Come check out Mogani, a Jazz | Latin | Fusion sextet playing a funky fusion of hot Latin numbers, cool jazz classics and originals. The group features a veritable who’s who of the area finest musicians: Cobey Gatos, keyboards; Glenn Goodwin, bass; Michael Morera, saxophones; Justin Perdue, guitar; Daniel Scharstein, drums; Carlos Velez, percussion.
Sept 24, 7pm – 9 pm
Perdue, Shores & Harlos live at Ball & Chain Cafe
Briggs Carriage Bookstore,
16 Park Street, Brandon VT 05733
Perdue, Shores & Harlos is reinventing the jazz guitar trio, fusing guitarist Justin Perdue’s Miles and Coltrane-esque modal jazz flights with drummer and hand percussionist Travis Shores’ intense, multi-layered African and Middle Eastern rhythms – all over the solid grooves of bassist Jeremy Harlos. This adventurous group of seasoned jazzmen delves into everything from Indian ragas to funky backbeats as it pushes the envelope o…f improvisation with their repertoire of original compositions…
An original Monkish number built on changes that (in part) move in diminished thirds. The tune came to me on the sidewalk in Chicago – the melody then and there, the chords years later.
August 14, 9pm-11pm Mogani live at 51 Main at the Bridge
51 Main St., Middlebury, VT 05753
Come check out Mogani, a Jazz | Latin | Fusion sextet playing a funky fusion of hot Latin numbers, cool jazz classic and originals. The group features a veritable who’s who of the area finest musicians: Cobey Gatos, keyboards; Glenn Goodwin, bass; Michael Morera, saxophones; Justin Perdue, guitar; Daniel Scharstein, drums; Carlos Velez, percussion.
This piece has recently evolved from a more Trane Quartet-type of modal tune (over a pedal tone, a la the beginning of “Spiritual”) to something with a more eastern feel. I’d been using a standard, clean jazz guitar tone with Travis playing in more of an Elvin vein on the full kit. Jeremy started using slide on the bass and a an old Mu-Tron envelope filter for this, and that opened things up a bit in terms of timbre… I’m playing guitar synthesizer sitar sound here, with Travis playing Egyptian tabla. This was our first time playing the tune with this instrumentation/orchestration, recorded live at Langdon St. Cafe, 7/15/2010 (though unfortunately cut-off after a few minutes when camcorder battery ran out).
The melody figure vexed me for some time: while harmonically simple, it shifts tonalities over the G/C pedal tones towards the end (introducing Bb and Eb into a C major tonality), and I found the using standard and Lydian chordmodes based on this for improvisational development of the melody wasn’t really sustaining the mood of the piece. After revisiting Yusef Lateef’s brilliant “Repository of Scales and Melodic Patterns” book to work on some Indian and Japanese scales, I realized that several of these were a perfect fit for this tune. The Indian Todi scale (C-Db-Eb-F#-G-Ab-B) and Japanese Naka Zora (B-C-E-F#-G-B) and Kumoi (C-D-Eb-G-A) scales – which are both really partial subsets of Todi – allowed me to explore the relationship between the E/Eb fulcrum and initial CM7 arpeggio of the melody, and created some intriguing tensions over the pedal tone. Coincidentally, I’d also started playing around with the guitar synth again for the first time in years, and this all seemed to fit together nicely: really getting at the sound I’d been hearing for this tune.
Although this excerpt only features synthetic sitar, the overall form returns to a standard guitar tone after this eastern section.
October 23, 7pm – 9 pm