launch a serious music project

Well, I’m marking this as done. The african music project was just a pipe dream, unfortunately. I have however launched a gypsy jazz outfit, as a founder member. We are Django’s Tiger. You can find us here:
http://djangostiger.wordpress.com/

this will be a vehicle for me to achieve a really high standard playing bass with a loose collective of pro and semi pro musicians. We will do afro/latin dance/funk. The fundamental concept is Toumani Diabate’s Symmetric Orchestra and the Afro-Cuban Jazz Project. Executed by a goodly size ensemble of committed musicians who are there fundamentally to have fun. Rehearsals will be fun. We will commit time and energy to rehearsals because, although it will undoubtedly be hard work getting good enough to play out, we will enjoy playing every minute of this music. We will rehearse until we’re big enough and good enough to pull off a performance. The rehearsals will eventually become performances, as the band matures, and there will always be room for passing talent to drop in and cause sparks. We will put together a big set of dance numbers and a few smouldering tunes. When we go live we will build a residency somewhere, and play parties balls and festivals. It will fundamentally be friendship music. New friends will be welcome if they bring talent and happiness, but membership of the collective will be my say.

I will be most happy if the majority of the membership of the collective is musicians whose ethnic origin matches the character of the music. I really don’t care if I am the only white guy. I have African music in my blood. It moves me. And I need to learn this idiom by playing with people who have grown up with it.

I will set up a blog site and attempt to find traffic enough to build up a small online community of people with an interest in playing or seeing live top quality Afro-Cuban style dance music, and use that as a way of defining what this is about, so there will be a small but enthusiastic group of people attending the rehearsals, once we’re getting close to performance standard, who will help provide the buzz when we kick off the live stage.

The ultimate goal will be to have a collective capable of making this a pro project with me holding the business interests, and the artistic direction, and the collective itself defining how it wishes to operate in terms of touring commitments. We could build a network and have local talent guesting when we visit a place. We need to be so good that we can invite Toumani Diabate to guest.

Looking forward to this already.