EyeShotJazz | Jazz Photography

Charles Lloyd performing with The Charles Lloyd New Quartet with Jason Moran, Reuben Rogers, & Eric Harland at Town Hall earlier this month.

All Photographs on this website Daniel Sheehan © 2009. All Rights Reserved. Please inquire for permission before using.

Charles Lloyd brought his new group to town earlier this month and I wanted to post one last photo from the concert before the end of the month. Jazz Photography by editorial photographer Daniel Sheehan who covers jazz performances, and creates portrait photography for publications and corporations. He is also a Seattle Wedding Photographer at A Beautiful Day Photography, a wedding photographer with an artistic photojournalist style.

A Beautiful Day Photography, Daniel, Jana, Ema and Claire, wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. We were lucky to get our picture taken by a photographer’s photographer Michael Craft. Photos for this holiday’s posting are from the Studio of Michael Craft.

The Charles Lloyd New Quartet with Jason Moran, Reuben Rogers, & Eric Harland playing at Town Hall.

All Photographs on this website Daniel Sheehan © 2009. All Rights Reserved. Please inquire for permission before using.

It was a beautiful new group Charles Lloyd brought to town earlier this month. I have been meaning to post some more photos form this performance before the holidays. Here they are. If you missed the show it was a wonderful performance. Charles is one of my all time favorite musicians. And so is Jason Moran. I was happy to get the chance to hear Eric Harland and Reuben Rogers play as well.

These cats were very intense and yet the music was very spiritual.

“Since the 1960s, tenor saxophonist and flautist Charles Lloyd’s life has alternated between periods of musical and personal exploration. After spending a decade or so working as a sideman in different blues and jazz groups, Lloyd hit a goldmine of critical acclaim and popular support in with his quartet’s groundbreaking performance at the 1966 Monterey Jazz Festival (no small feat in a period when jazz’s audiences were largely moving in new directions). This particular group was notable not just for Lloyd’s debut as a fresh and exciting leader, but also because two of its members, Keith Jarrett and Jack DeJohnette, were themselves only a few years away from exploding as widely innovative and influential jazz musicians….

Lloyd’s New Quartet is fortified with relatively young but well-established jazz musicians who are fully capable of sharing Lloyd’s pursuits. A leader in his own right, Jason Moran (piano) brings the group a unique, mature second lead voice. He’s one of those pianists who sometimes convince you that you’re listening to 80 years of jazz piano history rolled into one set of fingers. His heavy left hand will dabble in vintage 1920s stride playing right before flowing through a sequence that breaks into advanced Andrew Hill territory, while his frank, direct solos often develop in unpredictable turns that take full advantage his repertoire’s diverse influences.

On stage, when Lloyd himself isn’t soloing, he doesn’t just stand there; he frequently can’t resist dancing to the pulsing, breathing rhythms provided by his fellow musicians. Reuben Rogers (bass) and Eric Harland (drums/percussion) form a reliable, gregarious backbone that’s perfect for bringing the exotic structures in Lloyd’s compositions to life. Whether the tune is funky, swinging, Latin, or has no definable rhythm at all, the team decorates it with outbursts that always feel natural and appropriate….”     – Nathan Bluford from the Earshot Jazz program guide. Jazz Photography by editorial photographer and photojournalist Daniel Sheehan who covers jazz performances, and  creates portrait photography for publications and corporations.

All Photographs on this website Daniel Sheehan © 2009. All Rights Reserved. Please inquire for permission before using.
Festival-goer claims it was ‘psychologically inadvisable’ for him to hear Larry Ochs Sax and Drumming Core perform

Jazzman Larry Ochs has seen many things during 40 years playing his saxophone around the world but, until this week, nobody had ever called the police on him.

That changed on Monday night however, when’s Spain’s pistol-carrying Civil Guard police force descended on the Sigüenza Jazz festival to investigate allegations that Ochs’s music was not, well, jazz.

Police decided to investigate after an angry jazz buff complained that the Larry Ochs Sax and Drumming Core group was on the wrong side of a line dividing jazz from contemporary music.

The jazz purist claimed his doctor had warned it was “psychologically inadvisable” for him to listen to anything that could be mistaken for mere contemporary music.

According to a report in El País newspaper yesterday, the khaki-clad police officers listened to the saxophone-playing and drumming coming from the festival stage before agreeing that the purist might, indeed, have a case.

His complaint against the organisers, who refused to return his money, was duly registered and will be passed on to a judge.

“The gentleman said this was not jazz and that he wanted his money back,” said the festival director, Ricardo Checa.

“He didn’t get his money. After all, he knew exactly what group he was going to see, as their names were on the festival programme.

He added: “The question of what constitutes jazz and what does not is obviously a subjective one, but not everything is New Orleans funeral music.

“Larry Ochs plays contemporary, creative jazz. He is a fine musician and very well-renowned.”

“I thought I had seen it all,” Ochs, who reportedly suffered a momentary identity crisis, told El País. “I was obviously mistaken.”

“After this I will at least have a story to tell my grandchildren,” the California-based saxophonist added.

by Giles Tremlett  guardian.co.uk

Jazz Photography by editorial photographer and photojournalist Daniel Sheehan who covers jazz performances, and  creates portrait photography for publications and corporations. He is also a Seattle Wedding Photographer at A Beautiful Day Photography,  a wedding photographer with an artistic  photojournalist style.

John Hollenbeck at 2009 Earshot Jazz Festival performance at SAM.

Newsweek has another article proclaiming that Jazz is dead but not really. They go on to say that “The music may never again be a popular force, but it is still swinging—if you know where to listen.”

The article by Seth Colter Walls is in part a response to critic Terry Teachout who asked the question “Can Jazz Be Saved?”  in The Wall Street Journal. That article set off ” a fiery round of objections from musicians in the trenches'” Walls goes on to talk about how as a mass culture  force jazz may be dead but the musuc is alive and kicking even if not that many people are exposed to it.

“It’s easy to see how Teachout came to ask if contemporary jazz can be “saved” in light of comparing its modern station with the past glories.Pops, his valuable new biography of Louis Armstrong, is a study of international jazz fame that credibly treats its subject as a figure of complexity on par with politicians.”….It’s time, finally, to separate the question of “Is today’s jazz good?” from the question “Is today’s jazz popular?” It’s a difficult, slightly counterintuitive thing to do, particularly because jazz—even before that watershed year of 1959—started out as a dance-hall craze. But the radical blues Armstrong blew—and which Teachout capably helps you hear during several passages in Pops—is no longer the strict language of top 40, which is now ringtone-based as much as it is 12-bar-based. If anything, today’s jazz boasts a surfeit of excellent stylists who can speak to that splintering pop audience: pianists Vijay Iyer and Craig Taborn are both brilliant, though in nearly opposite ways. Iyer is a sometimes cerebral, always impressive player of tunes, whether they be those of Stevie Wonder and M.I.A., or his own compositions (all are featured on the new album Historicity). Taborn is an enthusiastic free-form player, both on his own extended-jam albums likeJunk Magic and when playing as part of the exciting, electric-based Chris Potter Underground. Two highlights from 2009—Steve Lehman’s Travail, Transformation, and Flow and Stefon Harris’s Urbanus—each kicked up a big ol’ time by embracing avant-classical sounds and hip-hop sensibilities. Along with Urbanus, John Hollenbeck’s bold album for his big band,Eternal Interlude, recently notched a progressive-minded nomination from Grammy voters.”

Read the complete article at Newsweek on line.

The Charles Lloyd New Quartet with Jason Moran, Reuben Rogers, & Eric Harland played tonight at Town Hall. It is a beautiful new group Charles Lloyd has brought to town this time. So different from the last few times he has played here yet remarkably similar to the time he played with drummer Billy Higgins back in the late 1990’s. He mentioned him in his wonderful rambling opening remarks. I will post some more photos from this performance in the coming week. Come on back.

“Since the 1960s, tenor saxophonist and flautist Charles Lloyd’s life has alternated between periods of musical and personal exploration. After spending a decade or so working as a sideman in different blues and jazz groups, Lloyd hit a goldmine of critical acclaim and popular support in with his quartet’s groundbreaking performance at the 1966 Monterey Jazz Festival (no small feat in a period when jazz’s audiences were largely moving in new directions). This particular group was notable not just for Lloyd’s debut as a fresh and exciting leader, but also because two of its members, Keith Jarrett and Jack DeJohnette, were themselves only a few years away from exploding as widely innovative and influential jazz musicians….

Lloyd’s New Quartet is fortified with relatively young but well-established jazz musicians who are fully capable of sharing Lloyd’s pursuits. A leader in his own right, Jason Moran (piano) brings the group a unique, mature second lead voice. He’s one of those pianists who sometimes convince you that you’re listening to 80 years of jazz piano history rolled into one set of fingers. His heavy left hand will dabble in vintage 1920s stride playing right before flowing through a sequence that breaks into advanced Andrew Hill territory, while his frank, direct solos often develop in unpredictable turns that take full advantage his repertoire’s diverse influences.

On stage, when Lloyd himself isn’t soloing, he doesn’t just stand there; he frequently can’t resist dancing to the pulsing, breathing rhythms provided by his fellow musicians. Reuben Rogers (bass) and Eric Harland (drums/percussion) form a reliable, gregarious backbone that’s perfect for bringing the exotic structures in Lloyd’s compositions to life. Whether the tune is funky, swinging, Latin, or has no definable rhythm at all, the team decorates it with outbursts that always feel natural and appropriate….”

– Nathan Bluford from the Earshot Jazz program guide.