upcoming

Michael Blake (jazz)

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The fall portion of the Redwood Jazz Alliance 2010-2011 season concludes with Canadian-born, Brooklyn-based tenor saxophonist Michael Blake, whose “Lucky Thompson Project” pays tribute to the under-appreciated saxophonist and composer who fell into self-exile, then obscurity, after a promising career in the 1950s and 60s.  

Blake himself grew up in California and Vancouver, British Columbia.  After attending the famed Banff Jazz Workshop, he moved to New York in the late 1980s, where he joined John Lurie’s new-wave big band The Lounge Lizards and became a fixture on the downtown scene.  While he has had long collaborative relationships with trumpeter Steven Bernstein (Sexx Mobb, Millennial Territory Orchestra) and bassist Ben Allison (with whose group “Man Size Safe” he appeared here in 2008), Blake’s credits also include sideman stints with musicians as diverse as the Gil Evans Orchestra, Pinetop Perkins, Medeski, Martin, and Wood, and DJ Tricky, as well as work for Hollywood (Get Shorty) and TV (Nickelodeon’s The Backyardigans).

Since 1997, Blake has released a series of acclaimed albums, leading a variety of innovative ensembles who (as All About Jazz put it) manage “to simultaneously embrace jazz history while challenging it head on.” That description fits this project perfectly.  Its honoree, Lucky Thompson (1924-2005), was a tenorist who adapted the big, burnished swing-era tone of Coleman Hawkins to the style of bebop and hard bop. (His most famous early sideman appearances were on Charlie Parker’s Dial sessions and Miles Davis’s * Walkin’.) Thompson relocated to Europe in 1956 to escape the racism of the American music business, and his Paris recordings in particular are highly regarded by those in the know.  But that group’s numbers have dwindled over the years—a trend that Blake has set out to reverse.  On his 2007 recording The World Awakes: A Tribute to Eli “Lucky” Thompson, Blake reimagines several of Thompson’s tunes and adds a few of his own.  Jazz Times *concludes that Blake “does right” by Thompson, a figure “whom jazz history needs to readdress.”

Blake’s touring band includes two Danish musicians who also appeared on the album: prize-winning pianist Søren Kjærgaard, who in recent years has recorded with major jazz figures on both sides of the Atlantic, and bassist Jonas Westergaard.  In the drummer’s chair is Ben Perowsky, an associate of Blake’s from their Lounge Lizard days who was last heard in these parts with the Uri Caine Trio. 

Michael Blake’s Lucky Thompson Project performs in HSU’s Kate Buchanan Room at 8:00 p.m. Monday, November 8.  Like all Redwood Jazz Alliance guests, Blake’s band will also present a free public workshop the following morning at 10:00 a.m. on the HSU campus, with support from HSU’s offices of the President, Provost, and College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. (Updated details may be found at RedwoodJazzAlliance.org.) 

Tickets ($15 General Admission, $10 Students and Seniors) and more information are available online RedwoodJazzAlliance.org.  Tickets are also available at People’s Records, Missing Link Records and The Works.

The Redwood Jazz Alliance is a 401(c)(3) non-profit charity dedicated to jazz performance and education by touring artists of national and international renown.  With support from local businesses, professionals, and individual members, and in partnership with the HSU Department of Music, it is promoting its fifth consecutive season of concerts and workshops.

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