check out: Malcolm Braff

While I really hope not to sound cheesy or too philosophical again, I would still like to share a jazz concert moment.
One shouldn't dare to try to summarize the beauty of a good concert in too few words, I guess. But tonight would make it easy for me.
We're playing workshop concerts this week, presenting what we (at least should have) practiced over the last three months with a group of other students, coached by musicians known nationally and internationally (like Jorge Rossy, Adrian Mears, or Wolfgang Muthspiel, just to name a few).

                               (just an example: Mr Braff with two other great swiss jazz  musicians)

One of these concerts tonight presented the music of Malcolm Braff. He's an incredible piano player, a rhythm wizard, and he plays the piano like a lion - as the listener, you're always a little scared that he might actually destroy the piano (and as a side note, he very successfully invents board games). His music is as down-to-earth as it's intellectual. The last piece of the concert was called "Together", the rhythm section playing "against" the horns, whose theme sounded like the salvation army playing after the invasion of spaceships leaving the earth sick and destroyed (maybe Cormac McCarthy comes to mind). At the end, instead of playing a ritardando, or the mandatory drum fill, the whole band just held the last note, and while the audience waited for the ending, ready to clap their hands, it just went on, and it slowly got louder, till the bandstand actually vibrated, and still they held it, people started shouting out, it was so loud and so intense, it sounded like the end of the world, and when it finally stopped, I just thought, two minutes longer, and the audience might have completely freaked out (like in "Das Parfüm").
The beautiful melody, seemingly simple and unostentatious, but actually going through all sorts of tonalities, against a busy rhythm, and this intense ending, touched me so much it made me cry.

To me, an experience like that is like an earth quake, things get into perspective, and I wander around in a blur for a few hours, and I'm always so thankful to be able to feel something like that. I can only hope that I'll maybe one day through my music be able to give that gift to someone else too.

Got philosophical again! Oh well. Good night, and good luck!

Firsts

Tomorrow, for the first time, the whole group I assembled is going to play together - for the first time, I'll hear my compositions played by eight people, two violonists and a violist included. For the first time, after this weekend, I'll have a recording in my hands, a recording of two of my own songs, written on the train from Bern to Basel and back.
I will have to deal with a recording engineer, microphones, the right places and seating arrangements, I will direct the whole thing musically and at the same time try to keep the whole bunch punctual, happy and more or less well-nourished.
And, for me the hardest thing of all, I'll have to will myself into a place where I'll feel self-confident enough to play what I can play, to see something in my head instead of just playing some "right notes" in my solos.
I know it takes a lot of experience, and maybe also a bit more looseness, to get at that point in an always rather stressful studio situation. I guess I'll get there someday. For tomorrow, I just hope I'll be so excited by the new sound that the music behind it will be stronger than my own nervousness. And if I'm not entirely happy by the result - well, then that's apparently what improvisers have to live with. There will always be a next time.
So, officially stated here: this weekend is about firsts - firsts are allowed not to be perfect. Let's see what I can get out of them!