Jazz is all about interpreting, following your creative direction. When you talk jazz, you naturally talk about the most dynamic of these interpreters, the pacesetters, past and present. This month, we’re lucky enough to host one of jazz-rock’s major composers and electric piano wizards at the Jack Singer. In the ’70s, Chick Corea set the tone for jazz to come, toured with Miles Davis and took jazz improv in totally different directions. He collaborated with Dave Holland, gigged with Anthony Braxton and Gary Burton and has explored abstraction in its most European sense. Corea’s performances, style and composition set the pace for generations of young jazz musicians. He’s one of the originals, and he’s in town with Hubert Laws on November 25.
It’s appropriate, then, that Vancouver’s major young improvisers, The Inhabitants, bring their own stamp to improvisational sounds. Their music’s been called mind-bending — it’s purely instrumental and it respects no boundaries. The Inhabitants are touring their second full-length CD, The Furniture Moves Underneath, and they’re playing the EmQAS Screening Room on November 16.
The Inhabitants aren’t the only groundbreaking act from the West Coast to hit hits Calgary in November. Watch for Hugh Fraser, founder of the original VEJI band, creator of the Hugh Fraser Quintet and a trombone player who’s been a staple at The Banff Centre for the Arts. Musicians know Fraser as a major composer and a piano player who’s collaborated with and continues to influence new jazz musicians. He brings his own style to a JAZZIS performance at Cantos on November 23.
It’s said sometimes that what’s old is new again, and in jazz circles, some styles just never age. Bop, and later hard bop, set jazzers off balance in the ’50s, and the style stayed with us and reinvented itself ever since. CKUA jazz DJ and saxman Don Berner hits Calgary on November 17. His music reflects his confessed passion for early Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley and Art Blakey’s hard bop sounds. Watch for Burner at Beatniq on November 17.
