Brian Blade Fellowship Live at the Village Vanguard
September 2005
When I first heard Blade’s album “Perceptual” it didn’t come off rotation on my minidisc player for months.
Brian’s drum sound alone had the range of an entire orchestra to me, and all I wanted to do was be wrapped up in that sound every waking moment.
I was at Berklee, we were all listening to it. We weren’t playing the tunes from the album like we were Wynton’s “Black Codes from the Underground”, but everyone was finding a way to insert Brian’s feel and the band’s sound into every jam session we played.
We would play from 6pm (as soon as school was done) until midnight (when the school closed) almost every night of the week. The only thing stopping us was a gig.
I’ll probably never experience this level of intensity with something that seemed so casual to us at the time. We didn’t need to say it out loud or discuss how we might be even more serious about the process of working on our sound than we already were, we just did it.
No cell phones, no internet, no youtube. No distractions.
Listening to this show takes me back to the urgency of wanting to know everything about jazz all day and all night. I hope it transports you somewhere too while you listen.
Enjoy,
Janek.
Perceptual
King’s Highway
Crooked Creek
Cowherd and Myron
Patron Saint of Girls
Trembling
Rosabelle
Personnel:
Brian Blade - Drums
Kurt Rosenwinkel - Guitar
Christopher Thomas - Bass
Myron Waldon - Sax
Jon Cowherd - Piano
Chris Cheek - Sax