Prominent jazz bassist and band leader, Brendan Clarke will present his new trio as part of the popular live music series at Jazz Music Institute (JMI Live) in Brisbane this November.
The Brendan Clarke Trio is a new configuration featuring Brendan on double bass, James Sandon on tenor saxophone and Aaron Jansz on drums, who is also an ex-student of JMI.
“This is actually a brand new trio I've put together for this performance,” Brendan says.
“We haven't done any gigs together. I've done gigs with these guys in other projects but this will be the first time we play as a trio, so it's going to be really great and I'm really looking forward to it.”
For the JMI Live performance, Brendan says he and the trio have planned a mixed setlist of original songs composed by Brendan and James as well as some much-loved jazz standards.
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“We'll do a few of my originals and we'll do a few of James' – he's got some tunes he's told me he wants to play – and we'll also be playing some jazz standards,” he says.
“So it'll be a mixture, which is what I always like to do; I always like to play a few of my own songs but also throw in a few tunes that people might know and tilt my hat to the tradition of jazz. I like to play swinging music so it will probably be a lot of swing, a few funky grooves and Latin feels.”
Brendan says the set-up of just bass, saxophone and drums lends itself to greater exploration of the bass, which is commonly a rhythm instrument and allows him to take on more melodic lines and phrases. “It's a classic combination, no harmony instrument, and I really love playing in that kind of setup,” he explains.
“I was lucky enough to play with the great Bernie McGann for many years and we never had a harmony player. As a bass player it's heaps of fun because it's quite open harmonically and there's lots of space for me to have a lot of fun.”
Brendan will also be teaching at JMI as part of their summer clinic programmes, which helps both amateur and professional jazz musicians to develop a wide variety of essential skills for performing particularly improvisation, the cornerstone of jazz.
The summer clinics are a very important part of Brendan's work as a musician and educator, seeing his role in the programmes as facilitating the sharing of knowledge and experience with students so as to bolster the incoming generation of musicians. “Jazz is an experience,” he says.
“It really is a unique experience playing this kind of music and I want people to have the experience of knowing what it feels like and what it feels like to play this music.
“I want to try and give people a foundation of what to do and just give them the tools that they need to be able to do it. I bring my experience of 25 years doing this professionally and share it with these guys as best I can.”
