Jazz and funny faces with the Hiromi Trio Project
I have been obsessed with jazz-rock for a while. My best friend in school is to blame, Armand Spee, who played bass (and still does) and made me listen to jazz-rock records and took me to concerts. He took me to a gig by Japanese band Caseopea at the North Sea Jazz Festival in The Hague, where I was virtually the only white guy in a sea of Indos and Moluccan-Dutch jazz-rock freaks, cheering so loud, applauding so enthousiastically you could read the astonishment on the faces of those Caseopea guys, who kept coming back for encores. Three, four, five, six encores. They kept on going and we kept on screaming for more.
Anyway, I even sold all my Bowie, Lou Reed and Iggy Pop records to be able to buy jazz-rock records and later jazz. I just didn’t see the point of rock anymore. For a while. Caseopea, Pat Metheny, Al di Meola, Larry Something, Miles Davis, George Benson, Steely Dan, which is in a way jazz related as well. A Christian band of studio musicians called Koinonia, led by the great Abraham Laboriel that we virtually stalked when they were in Holland.
Anyway, I just recently discovered the Hiromi Trio Project, a band around the very energetic and virtuosic Japanese pianist Hiromi Uehara and found it featured two familiar studio musicians, American bass-player Anthony Jackson, who played with a great many musicians I listened to at the the time and British drummer Simon Phillips. Yesterday I have been watching video after video of their performances at different festivals.
Anyway, enjoy the music. Watch the funny facial expressions of both Uehara and Jackson. (PB)
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