"One Great Day..."

Eskelin with Andrea Parkins (accordion and sampler) & Jim Black (drums)
(hatOLOGY 502)


Here are the liner notes...

I grew up in Baltimore. In the early 1960s my mother played Hammond B3 organ professionally in clubs with her own group. In those days she could play six nights a week at the same club for weeks and sometimes months at a time. As soon as she finished at one club she could start at another right down the road a couple of miles. She had one steady gig that lasted two years. I took up the saxophone at age 10 (in 1969). By the time I started doing gigs (around age 15 or so) that had all changed. The scene I grew up in was so much different than my mother's that I sometimes wished I had been born a little earlier. With no six night a week gigs to look forward to I had to find another way to grow and another way to build a career. Me and everyone else, that is.

Local gigs ran the gamut from the occasional jazz date to the more common bad top 40 gig. During this whole time I was trying desperately to connect with jazz and jazz musicians, in an effort to someday become a full time working jazz musician myself. Baltimore's proximity to New York and Washington DC gave me the chance to hear a lot of great musicians on their way up and down the East Coast.

Perhaps it was my age but I began to feel like I had been born at the tail end of something great. The scene had become extremely fragmented. When my mother played music she pretty much knew what she had to do. Not that it was formula, but there were actually fewer paths to follow and explore. You could play the same music six nights a week and really get deep into it. Really hone in on a focused concept.

How have we survived this transition and where are we now? It took me a while to figure it out, but in many ways this is a great time for music. Musicians of my generation have had to devise creative ways around the lack of steady work. There are many more musicians writing their own music now, defining their own concepts. There's also been an explosion of independent record labels. So called "alternative" rock and punk have opened up the audience for jazz and improvisation to a younger crowd than it's had in years. By and large, our music reflects exposure to many more influences than previous generations. We have to work in a variety of different contexts and the audiences we play for are much more eclectic.

There's still no substitute for playing night after night and since most clubs no longer offer extended runs that means touring. Touring has it's good and bad points, the most important being the ability to bring your music to diverse audiences. In another way that can also be the hardest thing about it. How do audiences affect the way you play? Is that always a good thing?

This recording was made at the end of the band's first tour of Europe. It was interesting and sometimes surprising to see the various reactions from audiences. The predominant question during the first week was "What is your music about?" That threw me. After a few days of not knowing what to say it finally dawned on me that it's not about anything.

I suppose that liner notes often try to describe what the music might be like, or give the listener an idea of what to expect. Sometimes that's appropriate, sometimes not. In this case I'm really not sure. I do feel that this recording is different from my previous recordings in that it involved a heavy dialogue with audiences and some form of metamorphosis as a result. It also brought some ideas that I've been dealing with for a long time to a clear point, one being that it's the over reliance on metaphor and analogy (rather than the actual experience) that results in questions like "What's your music about"? I suppose that it really boils down to the concept of sensation versus ideas. My game is to short circuit that kind of thinking.

I try to make each composition it's own entity. The structure, shape and format of each piece is different from one to another. I often base these structures and shapes on how I perceive the motions of daily life. Sometimes it's not what you think of but what you notice. I've always thought that even if a composer felt that the music did mean something specific (or even general), that once it leaves their hands it's an open question. A question that for me at least, does not warrant an answer.

By the end of our tour we found a way to communicate something to the audience that even we didn't always know what it was. The reactions were very positive (even when there was confusion about the music) and we really grew as a band.

In some ways I think that recording is the best medium for this music. I can think of a lot of music that speaks better on recording than it does in a club where the environment and the audience's expectations exert an effect on the music. With this recording we've found a mix between the two. We recorded our last gig live for radio and also recorded at the concert venue without an audience during two previous afternoons. This recording comes from the second afternoon session.

It's been a long time since the days of six night runs when my mother played music. It's been a fascinating and sometimes bewildering journey since then. Many of the changes that I once thought were upsetting to the music have turned out to be some of the best catalysts for it's growth.

Writing music for this band has been a real breakthrough for me. Andrea and Jim have ears for anything I put in front of them. It's a great feeling to have a band that can realize your ideas and offer it's own surprises along the way. This group ties together all of the influences I have and allows me to put them together in a way that makes sense to me today, in 1997. I used to get depressed thinking about how jazz was over with. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, I really don't care anymore. I've found my way of moving on and it finally feels like "One Great Day..."

Ellery Eskelin
New York


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