A very short clip of our concert in Vaires-sur-Marne, filmed by flutist Emilie Laroubine (thanks, Emilie!), who came to sit in with us for a few tunes.

Çasonando will participate in Vaire-sur-Marne’s concert series “On Stage: Current Music by Local Artists.”

As always, Çasonando promises a swinging blend of Caribbean and African spices, from salsa to cumbia, rumba and changüí. Bring all your friends to dance the night away, or just kick back and listen, ¡pa’ gozarlo bien!

• Where: Centre des Arts et Loisirs, Vaires-sur-Marne (a suburb of Paris, France)
• Cover: 5 €, 3€ with Passport Jeunes Vairois or the “Culture Pass.”
• Doors open at 8pm.
• For more info, contact the Centre des Arts et Loisirs at 01.64.26.10.96

Cécile will be 27 on the 27th of March this year, so we’re throwing her an birthday bash in the style of her birth year: 1981. Oh, the nostalgia. This theme of course is also in honor of the fact that 80s music has now been officially relegated to the realm of oldies, or “Classic Hits,” as the youngsters are calling it these days.

I whipped up a swell invite in photoshop, which you can see by clicking on the image here. Lots of fun 80s icons. As they say in show business: Good times, great oldies.

A la Mairie

29 Photos

Au Château

51 Photos

Thanks to everyone who came and made this a wonderful day!

Yes, I’ll be back in action with the original members of Conjunto 23 this summer, the weekend of June 27th. We’ll be in Brooklyn for the Zolov-Gordon wedding on Sunday, June 29th, and that same weekend there will be a pachanga in Philly at one of our old haunts, most probably the RUBA Club.

To keep up to date about these gigs, you can subscribe to the Gigs RSS feed, or visit the contact page and get on the mailing list there.

We’ve just finished the arrangement of singer Eddy Carvajal’s new tune, which includes a bridge that Eddy and I worked on together. We’ve been looking for a solid medium tempo song to include in our new demo recording (to be completed by the early spring, we hope!), and this track looks like it will make it on the list. In the meantime, this rough mix will give you an idea of what’s to come!

I’m teaming up with the old pals from Barrio del Este for a quick gig at the Créteil Marché de Noel on Friday, December 21st. We’ll play an hour-long set starting at 7pm. The event is open to the public and free of charge!

Ask me for more info…

A rough take on one of my favorite Cuban son standards, a tune that is actually a recent composition by Alejandro “el viejo” Almenaris, of Santiago de Cuba. After his quartet was featured on a Putumayo release back in the ’90s, the song has made the rounds and has been covered all around the world. I like the simplicity of it, which seems to lend itself well to really opening it up and looking around inside.

The Way Blue Bucket is nothing if not experimental. The very makeup of the group, drums, saxophone, and electric guitar, began as an experiment.

In 2000, I was in my junior year as a jazz guitar major at Temple University. I had been playing for several months with a drummer named Rob Smith, who shared my interest in creative improvisational structures, and two events led directly to the formation of this group. The first was the fact that our beloved bass player, Steve Kerr, was leaving for New York City. The second was the night that Rob took me to see the Tiny Bell Trio, a trumpet-guitar-drums project led by the great Dave Douglas.

Excited by the sonic possibilities of improvisation without a bass player to anchor things, and suddenly without a bass player, Rob and I decided to seek out a horn player. I also started writing a bunch of tunes specifically for this instrumentation. After a brief stint playing with tenor player Ryan Harrington, we got in touch with Aino Soderhielm, whom we knew from her playing with Tintinabulus, and the Way Blue Bucket was formed.

While the goals of the group shifted over the years, our basic measure of whether or not we were on track was the continued difficulty of describing the music we were making. The only kinds of sounds that we ruled out were ones that were too close to clearly “jazz” or “rock” or “folk” sounds. As long as it fell slipperily “in the cracks,” we were happy.

We also fought against the idea that improvised, avant-garde, or any aurally challenging music had to be serious. Inspired by the likes of Frank Zappa and Sun Ra, we tried to find ways of making otherwise esoteric music accessible through humor, by wearing silly hats, doing post-modern sing-a-longs, and any other kinds of stunts that we could think of.

In 2002 we started work on our studio recording, of which Green Bean is one of our most successful efforts. Green Bean had long been one of the favorite numbers at live performances, and we sought to capture some of that energy in the studio. Working up to the recording, we rehearsed two or three times a week, and the tightness of the group at that time comes through right away. For a copy of the whole album, contact me directly by email.

The Way Blue Bucket has been inactive since 2003, when I left Philadelphia for Wesleyan University, Cuba, and then eventually Paris. Will there ever be a reunion? Only time will tell.