Jim Santella has published a fine profile of Cryptogramophone on All About Jazz. Check it out here.
More Crypto News Inside!
Our rez keyboardist David Witham continues to post blog entries on his MySpace page from his Summer of Relentless Touring. Here's one that amused us so much we just had to print it in its entirety.
I was thinking back on the past summer, and one story that didn't make this blog(probably beacuse it happened in early May, when I didn't even have a blog) was the day I introduced Nels Cline to George Benson.
I was in Chicago with GB to do a show with the Chicago Symphony - a bit of a perk for their big donors. Nels was there rehearsing for the Wilco tour and had the evening off, so we made a plan. Symphony gigs with GB are always a little ungainly, mostly due to the extra 90-100 persons chained to the band. But there are always culture clashes too, between the symphonic minsdset and the rock and roll touring mindset, as to how things are to proceed the day of the show.
First of all, the idea of a PA and monitors and a drumset and electric guitars on stage is anathema to the average symphonic musician. Therefore a lot of the time the regular musicians in the orchestra will send a sub to these lowly "Pops" shows, generally degrading the quality of the orchestra to some degree. There are major Union issues too, not only with the stagehands but the orchestra as well, pertaining to the length of the show (its' really hard to get GB to stick to a set list, which can potentially be a problem when you're trying to communicate on the fly in the middle of a show to 100 musicians just what's coming next), when the musicians get a break during the rehearsal during the day, stage volume levels, and the list goes on. In this case, I was most impressed with the musicians and the management of the Chicago Symphony - first class all the way.
The concert went well, nobody got hurt, and Nels made it backstage, where he was just beaming. I didn't realise what a huge influence George had been on him at some point along the way. GB never phones a gig in, and Nels was loving how he just went OFF on some thing during one of the last tunes in the show. I brought him back to GB's dressing room for a quick chat, and he was quite stoked to have met the man."
Thanks David. Oh, to be a fly on the wall now that Autumn is here...
And speaking of such, we're gearing up for our Fall 2007 releases: pianist Alan Pasqua's The Anti-Social Club, which features Nels Cline, Scott Amendola, Jimmy Haslip, and newcomers Ambrose Akinmusire and Jeff Ellwood, and Big Picture from Trio M, a collectively led ensemble featuring pianist Myra Melford, bassist Mark Dresser, and drummer Matt Wilson (recently voted #1 Rising Star Drummer in the 2007 Downbeat Critics Poll). Stay tuned for exclusive pre-reviews of both.
And coming up in 2008: It's no big whoop or anything -- but next year is CRYPTO'S TENTH ANNIVERSARY!! We have a lot of special stuff planned, including a special 2-CD Crypto Retrospective and new releases from bassist Todd Sickafoose, percussionist Alex Cline , clarinetist Ben Goldberg and the Jeff Gauthier Goatette. Our Fearless Leader Jeff Gauthier will be traveling to Warsaw, Poland in a few days to begin the recording sessions for Bennie Maupin's (pictured above) follow up to his critically acclaimed 2006 Crypto drop Penumbra. We even have a new Nels Cline release scheduled and it will be quite a special one: Nels' soundtrack for an upcoming film about L.A. artist Ed Ruscha. (It's about time those two got together...)
IN OTHER NEWS. . .In addition to the superlative book we're currently reading by Ian Anderson called This Is Our Music: Free Jazz, The Sixties and American Culture (just came out in paperback, by the way), we've heard through the cyber-vine about two exciting upcoming jazz-related books: George Lewis's long-awaited A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music and Ben Ratliff's Coltrane: The Story of a Sound. Man, just when we've finished our Summer reading. . .
