Hey guys!
Just updating you with my latest news... Diáspora (www.diasporamusic.co.uk) remains my main concentration, as ever. Since Christmas, we have been joined by 2 fabulous new vocalists, Roberta Ana De Francia from Italy and Zee Filho from Brazil. I have been working with them on some new material which we will be performing at venues in London soon! March 29 will mark the band's 3rd year, and what better way to celebrate than with a long awaited return to Matt & Phred's Jazz Club in Manchester, where we will be premiering 4 new songs ('Conundrum', 'Lullaby', 'Superstarlight' and 'Sign of Love') as well as our funkyfied new arrangement of the jazz classic 'Moondance' with the 6-piece band. This gig will feature the imitable Alyss Rose on vocals, with keys master Andy Stamatakis-Brown, our very own Latin American import Will McGee on bass, and 2 new percussionists Jack McCarthy (kit, timbales) and Venezuelan conguero Arturo Aranguen (congas) - all musicians who I have had the pleasure of playing with in the past, and look forward to playing with at Matt & Phred's. As always, I'm still working on some writing, whenever I get the time and space (usually during the weekends!)... There are three new salsa compositions in the pipeline, one of them will be entitled 'Reggae-Reggae-Reggaeton'. The other two ('Follow Me' and 'Creeping') are both timba style compositions in 3-2 clave, which will be great fun to play! In May, the Diáspora 11-piece band will be playing at St Mary's Church, Prestwich (still awaiting confirmation - sign up to the mailing list at www.diasporamusic.co.uk). This gig will feature Alyss Rose and James Vielma on vocals, Misha Gray on piano, Will McGee on bass, Jack McCarthy, Frank Mata and Rosemary Toll on percussion, Olly Syrus on tenor saxophone, Mark Harrison on trumpet and myself on alto saxophone, flute and backing vocals. For advanced, cheaper tickets (£7.50 I think) EMAIL white548@btinternet.com or PHONE 07980092311. For this price, you get 2 sets of wonderful salsa, samba, jazz, funk, pop, reggaeton and dancing brought to you by an 11-PIECE Latin funk salsa orquesta! With Alyss Rose from Diáspora, I have been playing flute with the newly expanded Beleza (www.myspace.com/belezamanchester) Brazilian with a tinge of Manchester Bossa Nova band, with Julian Harris on guitar, Justin Shearn on piano, Holly Prest on cajon and Nicki Dupuy on bass. We have been working on some original material written by Alyss and Julian. My favourites have to be the uplifting 'Miracles' and the beautiful 'Bless the Moment'. Our first gig will be on Saturday March 31 at Chorlton Green Arts Festival. Make sure that you sign up to Alyss' website (www.alyssrose.co.uk) for more information on this developing project. With smaller ensembles, I have been working with Italian guitarist Giovanni Capiocco, who you are probably familiar with from the Dalston Gypsy Jazz trio (www.facebook.com/DalstonTrio), on some Bossa Nova, acoustic Latin and jazz repertoire which we will be taking to some London venues very soon! In London, I have also been playing piano with the absolutely fabulous charismatic jazz/cabaret vocalist Claire Benjamin, with whom I have also been recording some demo material, and we will be working on some arrangements of jazz classics and theatrical original material in due course! As ever, I have also been busy with private bookings for the jazz quartet and Latin trio. The quintet gig at Cloud 23 Bar, Hilton Hotel, with KLM Airways and Air France, went down a treat! So there you have it, a roundup of my latest happenings. And there will be more dates to get into your diaries, so stay tuned... Here’s a roundup of some of the stuff I’ve been involved with lately.
I have been busy fixing a 10-piece brass section with Manchester School of Samba (www.sambaman.org.uk) for 2 gigs at Manchester’s Park Life Weekender in Platt Fields Park (Sunday 12 June) and Manchester Day Parade (Sunday 19 June). The lineup will consist of 2 trumpets, 2 alto saxes, 2 tenor saxes, 2 trombones, bass trombone and tuba and should be pretty stonking. The 12 June gig is sold out I believe, but you can catch the Samba School marching through Manchester City Centre on Sunday 19 from 2pm. Composition is continuing slowly. I’m currently working on 3 new tunes. I actually started the first one just before Christmas but I left it for a while, came back to it and completely reworked it! It’s a crazy mixture of funk (think Brecker Bros ‘Some Skunk Funk’ style), Brazilian samba-reggaeton and middle-Eastern grooves. I’m still developing the lyrical content, but it’s going to be a song about going round in circles and never getting anywhere - pretty much sums up my life, I think! The second song is a very Snowboy influenced Samba/Latin fusion, which definitely leans more towards the jazz/experimental side of Latin music - and contains an AAB head geared towards instrumental solos. This will repeat and repeat and repeat and... finally it breaks out into a new unusual sequence that I created with a funky horn riff and vocal montuno creating a nice counterpoint and vehicle for improvisation. The third composition is going to be a samba. I’m experimenting with blending the coro/pregón (call/response collective refrain vs. individual improvisation) structure deriving from African music with samba rhythms inspired by one of my favourite Brazilian composers Ivan Lins. I realised that there are a lot of structural similarities between Cuban and Brazilian (as both African-derived) musics and, frankly, I’m bored of all my compositions going into standard montunos (call/response sections) so I’m experimenting with these techniques in Brazilian music. I’m really excited to share all three compositions very soon (once I get my head round to writing some lyrics!). I’ll upload some onto the Laboratory to give you a taster. I’ve got several gigs coming up with the Latin trio featuring Julian Harris (guitar), which will hopefully give me an opportunity to workshop these new songs. See the Diary section for details. A busy month it is for Diáspora too , we did Matt & Phred’s last thursday May 26 with the small band, where we played to a packed dance floor. Tomorrow we’re playing at Prestwich Festival with the full 11-piece band (which is going to be recorded and filmed live) and on June 24 we’re playing at Civic Hall Saddleworth Oldham with the 7-piece. Details for both of these gigs and how to obtain tickets can be found on the website. On Saturday May 28, myself and Alyss Rose were kindly invited to participate on Latin DJ Amos De Roover’s radio show Global Vybz which airs every Saturday 6-8pm on North Manchester FM 106.6. Here we hung out with the Latin Crew, discoursed generally about what Diáspora means to us, and played a couple of songs too (Golden Section and ‘Move To The Music’). Details of how you can ‘listen again’ are at the bottom of this page. We are planning on doing a possible date with the band at Club Copacabana this July - of course, we will keep you posted. Check out the website (www.diasporamusic.co.uk) and Facebook pages for all the latest scoop on this exciting project. With all this and various other appearances (including another outing to Burma with ‘The Burma Play’ in Taunton, summer looks to be busy. Hopefully see you at a gig soon! - - - Saturday 28th May 2011 Diáspora on North Manchester FM 106.6 fm - The Global Vybz show with Amos de Roover -www.northmanchesterfm.org 1st hour of the radio show - we're talking in the last 7 minutes or so http://www.podcasts.canstream.co.uk/manchesterfm/index.php?id=894 2nd hour of the radio show. We're talking off and on from the beginning and then songs at times below 1st song "Golden Section" at 12 mins 51 secs 2nd song "Move To The Music" at 42 mins 26 secs (or 43mins 54 secs without the long intro) http://www.podcasts.canstream.co.uk/manchesterfm/index.php?id=895 |
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