Bring the beat back

Following my last blog on the lack of jams in Manchester, 'Kick out the jams', I've checked out what appears to be one of the only remaining ones at the excellent Matt and Phred's jazz venue in central Manchester. It's only monthly which is a shame.

It is pretty much straight ahead jazz and I found it quite tough actually. We did a funky blues track as the first tune that I played on and I played pretty well on that one I think. I put in some nice altered sounds using pentatonics placed around the keys (as opposed to just the blues scale pentatonic) which worked really well. See the 'Pentatonic lines- navigating outside tonal harmony' blog entry in the fanatastic Casa Valdez blog by David Valdez for more information on this approach. The next track was a tune called 'Yesterdays' from the Real Book. My repertoire is still quite poor and I had to read it from the sheet. That was more or less OK but I didn't then have the confidence to improv on it. We also did One Note Samba and things seemed to go a bit wrong in that as well. I really need to work on these tracks but also learn how to cope better in these sorts of situations. I'm fine on fusiony tracks and can really burn on them but some of these latin tracks stump me. All in all it felt like a 'mixed' performance shall I say and there's plenty of work to do.