"Homegrown" - Music from the Seattle Jazz Scene

“Homegrown” will feature compositions from my Seattle jazz peers. There are so many amazing jazz musicians in this town and I thought it would be cool to pay tribute to them rather than to a bunch of dead guys or composers I don’t know. I hope that this will bring some much-deserved attention to my peers and the Seattle jazz scene as a whole.

I made a hit list of people I wanted to ask for tunes, and so far every one of them has enthusiastically agreed! Not only that, but when I mentioned the idea on Facebook the other day a few people contacted me and asked if I was accepting submissions! I’m so thrilled with the response I’ve gotten and I’ve already collected a few charts.

Some of the tunes will be brand new and written specifically for this album. Some will be tunes that were previously written but not yet recorded. Some will be tunes that have been recorded before. All of them will be a joy to play!

So far the list of confirmed composers includes:

• Gregg Belisle-Chi
• Andrew Boscardin
• Ryan Burns
• Evan Flory-Barnes
• D’Vonne Lewis
• Thomas Marriott
• Cynthia Mullis
• Nate Omdal
• Michael Owcharuk
• Josh Rawlings
• Marc Seales

I still have a few more people to ask, and I wouldn’t turn more submissions away. I hope to record lots of music and then see which tracks make up a cohesive album. Then I’ll have some bonus material to play with as well or include on a later release. Or who knows, maybe we’ll end up with a double-album!

Realistically we won’t be recording until the Fall, but we will be performing all the tunes at our shows between now and then to see how they take shape. I’ll keep you updated on our progress and share live and rough recordings as they become available.

I submitted the first of many grant proposals for the album today…wish me luck!

I inadvertently stumbled across some comments I wrote back in May of 2011 on a post over at Digital Music News called The Music Industry: It’s Becoming a Third World Country… written by Paul Resnikoff. After reading the original article and the subsequent comments again I realized that the points I made back then (seems like an eternity ago!) crystalize my thinking on the state of music as we launch into 2012. I’ve decided to put my comments together into a blog post as a reminder to myself and others that there has never been a better time to be an independent musician, contrary to what most of the “experts” will tell you.

I hope you enjoy reading this and welcome any comments you may have.

Here’s to a fruitful new year filled with real personal connections, beauty and music!

The music industry is a construct. Musicians are the reality

The music industry has been around only for a blink of an eye. Musicians have been around since the dawn of time. For the majority of civilization, musicians didn’t need an “industry” to prop them up. They relied on either their fans or their patrons to keep them going. The music industry saw that there was money to be made (most of it NOT by the musicians, btw) and jumped in to capitalize on the situation. I do not think that was for the better of music or musicians, only those who controlled the music, i.e. the labels and publishers, and the very few they chose to prop up.

Times of change and upheaval produce the greatest art

The music industry is a construct, and constructs change over time. We are in a period of such change. And it’s times of change and upheaval that produce the greatest art. Musicians will continue to make music, writers will continue to write, painters will continue to paint. And the fans of these artists will continue to search out what they love and support it. No one needs to sell 14 million records or do stadium tours to make a living.

There are fans for everything out there

From bubble-gum pop to the most esoteric music you can envision, somewhere there are fans. And the internet has made it easier than ever before to find those fans. Yes, it takes hard work. But it’s work that we can do ourselves, and there are models of success out there for us to learn from and follow. Check out Steve Lawson, Zoe Keating and Hope and Social, just to name a few.

Fans will buy music

Fans will support artists they develop a relationship with. Fans understand the value of the music TO THEM. The “industry” stopped cultivating fans long ago, instead trying for the biggest buck in the fastest way possible, and telling people who they should like and buy, and how much it should cost. That’s why very few pop stars these days make it past 1 or 2 records. No one gives a shit. But people do give a shit about artists who develop relationships with their fans. If your music resonates, you tell a story that touches people, you don’t need an “industry” to help you be successful. You just need to find your fans and reach out to them.

For artists who develop true fans, and true relationships with those fans, paying is not a problem. My fans are happy to pay me for my music even though I offer all of it on a pay-want-y­ou-feel-its-worth basis. I stopped putting a price on my music last year, and since then have made MORE money on downloads and CD sales at shows.

I’m not concerned with the music industry

So, call me selfish if you want, but I’m not at all concerned with the music industry. I’m concerned with making a living doing what I want to do the way I want to do it. And as I’ve said before, there’s never been a time when that’s been easier. Artists all around the world are doing what artists have done throughout history. Creating great work and finding people who will support it. If you can do that, “piracy” (which is a term that excites emotions but has no real bearing on the situation it is currently being applied to) cannot harm you.

We just don’t need the music “industry” any more

I will continue to be vocal about this, because I believe the best thing that can happen for the music and the musicians is for us to take back the control of our own destinies. We just don’t need the music “industry” any more.

Tonight at 7pm on the World Wide Web

Tonight at 7pm my new band, Tango Ahora!, will make it’s debut live on the internet, thanks to the new technology called the Google Plus Hangout.

Google Plus is the new social networking site from the internet search giant. I hopped on board early, and have found it to be sort of a cross between Facebook, Twitter and instant messaging. One of the most intriguing features is called the Hangout. Hangouts are live, multi-user video chats where up to 10 people can be in a chat room and see and talk to each other. It has far-reaching implications for all sorts of cool applications, including music. I’ve seen “Hangout Concerts” from my friends Rob Michael and Daria Musk, and thought it was a great way to share music.

So tonight, I’m going to share my new band, Tango Ahora!, with the world! This will be our world premiere, as our first official gig is tomorrow night at Vito’s in Seattle. We’ve been rehearsing for that gig and were getting together anyway tonight, so we’re going to debut a few of our songs for the entire world!

There are two ways you can join in our debut Hangout Concert:

1. If you’re on Google Plus, you can get a “front row seat” by being one of the first nine people to join the Hangout live at 7pm. These people will be able to chat and interact with us as we play.
2. If you’re not on Google Plus or are not one of the first nine folks to join the Hangout live, you can get a “general admission seat” on a site called Hangout Party.com. These folks have found a way to stream Hangouts live so that those not in the “inner circle” can still check it out. Again, you don’t have to have a Google Plus account to watch this way, but you won’t be able to interact with us, you’ll just be a spectator.

The band consists of 3 of my favorite musicians in Seattle: Beth Fleenor on clarinet, Maria Scherer Wilson on cello and Michael Owcharuk on accordion. We’ve been working up tunes by tango master Astor Piazzolla, other tango favorites, and tango-inspired originals and covers. We’re an improvising tango band and we’re having a great time!

Hope to see you at our world premiere Hangout Concert tonight, either on Google Plus or Hangout Party.com! And if you’re in Seattle, you can see us live and in person tomorrow (Tuesday) night at Vito’s.

Music-lovers geek-out!

Turntable.fm is a site where you can spin your favorite tunes along with friends, old and new. It’s like a cross between Pandora and Facebook. You and up to 4 other people pick tunes to play and then can chat about them as they play. It’s a really cool integration of music sharing and social media, and I’m totally hooked!

Last night, I was in a room called Nextbop NuJazz, devoted to the type of new jazz music that is featured on the great website Nextbop.com. I was there with my good friends Dave Marriott, Donna, and Brad Gibson, along with some other folks we had just met. We were spinning tunes by artists like Aaron Parks, Charnet Moffett, Ambrose Akinmusire, Ben Allison and others and geeking out talking about the tunes.

One feature of the site is that you can click a Twitter button and tweet to all your followers that you are DJ’ing and tell them what you are playing. I did this, and a few minutes later I flipped over to my Twitter stream to see what was going on there and got his tweet:

@1WorkinMusician hey. you going to be DJing still in 2-3 hrs? BBC WS radio want someone live DJing on the show to talk to about #turntablefm

July 11, 2011 11:53 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@thedailylunge

Jessica Dowse

I was blown away! I replied and ended up chatting with Jessica about the piece they were going to do about the site and agreed to be interviewed about my experience with it. She asked me if I would stay up until 2:45am to be interviewed while DJ’ing in the room! Well, I couldn’t say no. I had only been on the site for a couple of days and all of a sudden I was being interviewed as an “expert”!

The interview was short and sweet, and the host talked more about his music than the music we were playing, but it’s still cool. Here’s audio, thanks to Dave:

Moral of the story: you never know where opportunity is going to come from. I was just minding my own business and having fun with my friends, but because I tweeted about it, I ended up on a broadcast that reaches 241 million people weekly(!) in 27 countries around the world.

Whoa.

This is the power of social media. I know lots of people who think of Twitter and Facebook as burdens, as being somehow “fake”, or as just plain stupid. But if you use these tools merely to enhance what you already do, in a way that is real and genuine, you can make connections that you never dreamed you’d be able to make. All I was doing was having fun, spinning records with my friends and checking out a new and interesting site. And it took me literally 10 seconds to tweet about it. In so doing, I got the attention of the BBC.

That was never my intended goal. But, you never know who’s listening…

Poppy Parker at 18wks, 2days. Isn't she beautiful???

My wife and I found out recently that we’re going to have a baby girl. Poppy, as we’ve been calling her (because when we found out we were pregnant, the book said she was the size of a poppy seed), will be joining us in October. Even though this is something we’ve wanted for a long time it still came as no less of a shock. It’s funny how something can be so commonplace and so miraculous at the same time.

Needless to say, we’ve been consumed by this news ever since we found out. We’ve been choosing midwives, eying every stroller we pass, debating the pro’s and con’s of cloth diapers, trying out hundreds of names and reading every book, blog, article and website we can get our hands on. There’s so much to learn, so much to know. And at the same time, I know that no amount of preparation or book-learnin’ can get us ready for the change we are about to undergo. When Poppy arrives our lives will change forever, and there’s no telling what that change will look like until it happens to us. All I do know is that we’re ready and willing to face down this change and make the best life we can for ourselves and our daughter. We couldn’t be more excited to be parents!

It’s an exciting time. It’s also a scary time. The unknown is daunting. The good news is that, as self-employed artists, we’ve both deal with the unknown every day. We’re intimately familiar with it, in fact. We’ve grown comfortable with the fact that we don’t ever know where our next gig will come from or how much the next check will be for. We’ve put our faith in our abilities as artists and as entrepreneurs and we trust ourselves and each other. We’re confident that we can do the jobs we’ve created for ourselves, and that confidence has been crucial to our success. Being self-employed isn’t for the faint of heart. It takes guts and perseverance and stubborn determination. And we’ve reaped the benefits of all of this. Being self-employed is wonderful in so many ways – our time is our own, we live on our terms, we love what we do, and we have time to spend with each other and with our new baby.

And now, with the realization that we’ll have another human being depending on us for her very survival and development, I know that we’ll need all of these traits more than we ever have before. Because we both want to continue to make a living doing what we love. We want to do it for ourselves, of course, but we also want to do it for Poppy. We want to show her by example that if you put your heart and soul into what you love, if you trust yourself and your abilities, if you put your head down and stubbornly plow ahead, you can have the life you dream of. You can have a job that satisfies your soul, a partner who loves and supports you, and a family that does not want for anything. All of a sudden, these ideals we’ve been living by have taken on greater weight.

To be honest, I have no idea how we’re going to do it. We sometimes struggle to make ends meet for the two of us, and now there will be three. But I have faith in myself, I have faith in Darrah, and I have faith that we will make it work. Sure, one or both of us could take a day-job and make more money. But at what cost? What would that tell our daughter about chasing her dreams? All of a sudden, it’s about so much more than just living our dreams. Now we see it as a life lesson for our little girl. We want her to know, not just think, but know, that she can do whatever she wants, whatever she sets her mind to. And the best way to teach her that is to live it ourselves.

So, off we go on the biggest adventure of our lives! We know not what the future will bring. We know not what our lives will look like come November and beyond. Yet we’ll continue to move forward chasing our dreams, building the life we want for ourselves so that our little Poppy will see that it can be done. And when it’s her turn, we’ll look on proudly as she chases her dreams with faith, determination, and yes, a little of that Parker stubbornness, and know that we’ve done our job.

How I spend my summer vacation...

During Spring break a couple weeks ago, we did something new with the kids. Instead of performing at the end of the week we teamed up with The Vera Project and had the kids record their original music. We had 7 students this time around, many of whom played multiple instruments. So we mixed and matched two bands and wrote two originals. Here they are, in all their glory:

“Keep Playing”:

“Trapped In My Mind”

I’m so proud of all the hard work they did to get these songs in record-ready form in just 4 days! Big thanks to all the budding rockstars, my co-teacher Travis, Rowdy at Vera who engineered and mixed the tunes, and all at the EMP for giving the kids this awesome opportunity, and giving me the opportunity to rock out! And special thanks to the students for letting me play keys on the first tune.

The call him Homeless Jack

Listening to playback

l-r: Thomas Marriott, Cuong Vu, Chad McCullough, Jason Parker

Do yourself a favor and download the four free tunes by clicking here, then go buy the albums directly from the artists! We would love to have your support.

And help me spread the word about the great trumpet players in Seattle!

On Tuesday, March 29th, “Five Leaves Left: A Tribute To Nick Drake” by the Jason Parker Quartet was released. Each day thereafter I wrote at length about one of the tracks – how the arrangement came about, what went down in the studio, thoughts about the performances, etc. Click here to read them all.

“Saturday Sun” marks the end of Nick Drake’s classic debut album Five Leaves Left. It’s a gorgeous, melancholy tune that is the perfect period at the end of the sentence. It’s also the only time Nick played piano on the record, showing himself to be accomplished on that instrument as well.

I knew that this would be a song that Josh could really sink his teeth into. The bluesy, gospel playing is right up his alley. We tried a couple takes with the full band at the end of the second day of recording. It had been a long day, and I don’t think any of us had much energy left to give it. The takes were fine, but I knew that I wanted to try again when we came back on the final day in the studio.

Josh and I were the first ones to arrive, and as we were warming up and getting ready, I asked Doug to roll tape and told Josh I wanted to run the tune with just the two of us. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision, and it turned out to be the right one! Five minutes later, when we ended the tune, I turned around to see Evan and D’Vonne sitting in the control room with Doug. They were all smiling, and Evan said matter-of-factly, “That’s the take”. There was no need to even try again. We knew we had it. The simplicity of the piano/flugelhorn duo fit the tune perfectly and makes a great end to our album.

For comparison purposes, here’s the Nick Drake version of the tune:

So there you have it. “Five Leaves Left: A Tribute To Nick Drake” by the Jason Parker Quartet, track by track. I hope you’ve enjoy these little glimpses into the tunes and the arranging/recording process. If you haven’t yet downloaded your copy of the album, please do so at the link above. All downloads are on a “pay what you think it’s worth” basis, so you’ve got nothing to lose! If you want a copy of the physical CD, you can purchase that too.

On Tuesday, March 29th, “Five Leaves Left: A Tribute To Nick Drake” by the Jason Parker Quartet was released. Each day thereafter I wrote at length about one of the tracks – how the arrangement came about, what went down in the studio, thoughts about the performances, etc. Click here to read them all.

I think of “Fruit Tree” as Nick Drake’s manifesto. It speaks directly to his frustrations about fame, life, and being unappreciated in his time. It also foreshadows his ultimate demise with lines like

Safe in the womb
Of an everlasting night
You find the darkness can
Give the brightest light.
Safe in your place deep in the earth
That’s when they’ll know what you were really worth.
Forgotten while you’re here
Remembered for a while
A much updated ruin
From a much outdated style.

It’s clear that even before he released his first album he was thinking about the nature of the life he had chosen, and was already resigned to his fate. Kind of amazing for a 19 year old to be that aware of his impending fate.

The power of this song is definitely in the lyrics. Even so, I elected to tackle it as an instrumental. I wanted to see if we could capture the spirit of it without using words. When we got around to recording it on the last day, we had only played in once or twice previously, so we had to find our way through it right there in the studio.

I decided to keep it simple and have Cynthia and I trade the melody back and forth, line by line. The song feels kind of like an internal conversation to me, so I thought it’d be cool to approach it that way, with Cynthia and I acting as two voices inside Drake’s head.

One of my favorite things about this tune is D’Vonne’s drum beat. It’s so simple but so huge! This was one of the only things that Don Gunn and I put some different effects on in the mixing process. I wanted it to sound as big a “rock-y” as possible. I also really like the way Josh and Evan handle Drake’s guitar line on piano and bass.

For comparison purposes, here’s the Nick Drake version of the tune:

Tomorrow we’ll talk about the final song on the album, “Saturday Sun”.

On Tuesday, March 29th, “Five Leaves Left: A Tribute To Nick Drake” by the Jason Parker Quartet was released. Each day thereafter I wrote at length about one of the tracks – how the arrangement came about, what went down in the studio, thoughts about the performances, etc. Click here to read them all.

If any song on Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left could be said to swing, “Man In A Shed” is as close as you’ll come! Danny Thompson’s bass line is so filthy, and Paul Harris was asked back to lay down some nice piano. Because of this, I decided that our version should take that swing to the next level!

I knew Evan would love that bass line, and as soon as he heard it he launched into “fat man swing” mode with a huge smile on his face. Much of Evan’s music shies away from that kind of swing, but when he wants to, he can lay it down with the best of ‘em. Add to that Josh’s bluesy licks and D’Vonne’s rock-solid time and you’ve got yourself a winner!

We recorded this on the third and final day in the studio, and it is take one (of only two) that you hear on the album. We all came in with renewed vigor after a long day two, and this was the first thing the whole band tried, after Josh and I laid down “Saturday Sun” as a duo (we’ll talk about that in a couple days). Obviously, the freshness served us well.

I had to coax D’Vonne into the little solo at the end, and I’m glad I did. He got the chance to open up a bit after playing so subtly on most of the record. His solos are always so musical and killin’!

And while I don’t like fade-outs on jazz records all that often, I thought this was a good candidate. It feels as if the song might’ve gone on forever! Be sure to dig Josh’s Art Blakey quote at the very end too.

For comparison purposes, here’s the Nick Drake version of the tune:

Tomorrow we’ll talk about track 9, “Fruit Tree”.