Getting into it: Free Passage and Improvisational Jazz

Welcome to my Music Blog! I hope to post new music and commentary on a regular basis, but I’ll start with a little detail about “Free Passage”, my improvisational jazz quartet.

When you hear the phrase “Improvisational Jazz” your eyes might immediately glaze over, or you might become hyper-thoughtful, or perhaps restless and eager to depart. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Our goal is to engage our audiences with music which is based on the familiar but is clearly new. We frequently recall familiar chord changes or melodies, even playing through the whole song structure once or twice, before getting back to the free improvisation. We are not focused on just getting “out there”. Instead, we go out, then come back and sort of check-in, before we go out again.

The main thing is, I think, that our audiences quickly learn that our music is not nearly as scripted as other bands. They know it when we are doing something spontaneous, and the energy gets multiplied by ten, for us and for them. They know that much of the time we have no idea what may happen next, and it makes for compelling listening.

More soon…