(Full Article)
| POSTED BY: johnrae | POSTED ON: 18 Sep 2006 12:03 PM | ||
|
published: August 08 2006 01:50
Scotland's top jazz drummer has recently moved to new zealand. 'at the moment i'm spending around half the year touring in europe and the other half in new zealand. i just trying to avoid winter!'
LEADING UK JAZZ DRUMMER MOVES TO THE BAY
John Rae might have played in countries all over the world, but he thinks HB is one of the most beautiful places he has been and has some fantastic musical talent.
John and his NZ wife and family moved to NZ in October 2005 from his home country Scotland , but has spent the past 5 months working all over Europe, both as a teacher and a musician. Now he is back in Hawkes Bay and ready to start business here, both as a tutor and band leader.
through Thick-Skinned Productions I hope to have some very exciting projects happening in the Bay. Apart from my individual drum tuition I will be forming a world percussion ensemble involving over 20 percussion players of all abilitys, playing rhythms and instruments from around the world. I will also be forming an alternative pipe band that involves traditional bag pipes but with an eclectic drum core that will be using not so traditional rhythms and instruments.
John comes from a large musical dynasty. Both parents are musicians and 5 of his 6 siblings are jazz musicians. He has played jazz drums since the age of 5 and formed his first band at 18 The John Rae Collective. Since then he has been a key player on the UK jazz music scene, both as a band leader and a player and has recorded over 30 albums with some of the worlds very best jazz musicians.
In 2005, he won the acclaimed Herald Angel Award , presented by the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for his collaborative group with celtic and Hungarian Musicians. He has been a key player on two Albums of the Year in the prestigious BBC Jazz Awards, the UKs main awards for jazz musicians and been nominated three times.
the bay is attracting many good players to it and although a lack of opportunitys to perform is a problem, hopefully musicians can come together and change that. At the moment Im looking for a suitable venue to start a club night that will have live DJs with musicians and be able to attract a crowd. A five nights a week dedicated music venue could dramatically change the cultural scene here in the Bay..
As a tutor, he set-up a UK company Thick Skinned Productions to teach jazz improvisation to primary & secondary students as well as music teachers
Its important that our children have opportunitys to experience all kinds of music. I plan to set up a jazz ensemble comprising HB musicians to play educational concerts in schools and offer children workshops on how to improvise.
The jazz improvisational programme has been run successfully in schools in Scotland as well as the Singing Drum a six week programme aimed at primary schools that involves song writing, singing, drumming and performance. In 2007 Thick-Skinned Productions will be launched to schools in New Zealand. Meanwhile, John is loving living in Hawkes Bay, playing with the fantastic talent here and is now offering private tuition. Drumming up interest in Scots jazz KENNY MATHIESON A LEADING musician in Scotland, John Rae developed his love for music from an early age. And jazz was the dominant sound. It can be easily explained why John became one of the most accomplished jazz drummers Scotland ever seen and heard, as it all started with his dad. Ronnie Rae, Johns father and an accomplished bass player, encouraged indeed, required - his children to indulge in musical activities. That may help explain why five siblings are either musicians or singers and the sixth is at least thinking about it. John Rae performing at The Queen's Hall, Edinburgh. Picture: Rob MacDougall John, 38, performs regularly with his father and three sisters - Cathie, Gina and Sylvia - in their Rae Sisters band. "I grew up with jazz at home," John explains, "but my best pal when I was about 15 was a pipe band drummer, and we used to practise the pipe band drum patterns a lot." Born and based in Edinburgh, John is a member of the jazz generation that includes Tommy Smith, Brian Kellock, Colin Steele, the Bancroft twins, Kevin MacKenzie and several other movers and shakers on the Scottish jazz scene. John has firmly established himself as Scotlands premier jazz drummer since the formation of the seminal John Rae Collective in the late 1980s. At the same time, he has a long-standing love for Scottish music that has been reflected in a succession of projects, again going back to the late 1980s and the jazz-meets-folk fusions of the eclectic big band Giant Stepping Stanes. The current focus of his cross-genre experiments lies in Celtic Feet, the band he has led since 1999. The band has issued two CDs on the Caber label, the most recent being Beware The Feet in 2001. Celtic Feet is a jazz quartet plus two folk musicians, and Johns music for the group has broken new ground in merging the diverse elements of his musical sensibility, not to mention wearing "dodgy" kilts in a jazz context. Their audience is primarily a jazz-oriented one, but they have also won support among more adventurous folk fans. "In Celtic Feet, traditional music is a great source for melody and repetition of the form, and then we add all the harmonic and rhythmic possibilities of jazz," says John. "Ive always been interested in trying to find ways to bring my love for jazz and Scottish music together, although it would be easier just to have two bands!" Celtic Feet have branched out in even more diverse directions in three recent projects. The first saw them transform into a jazz big band under the name Big Feet at the Islay Jazz Festival in 2003, with the Islay Pipe Band thrown in for good measure. The project was a stunning success at the festival, and they reprised their efforts in Glasgow and Edinburgh. "I always thought it be great to have 40 of us instead of six in Celtic Feet," John says. "I had a whole set of plans in mind before I went to Islay, but to be honest I just started writing and the thing took on a life of its own. "Some of the material involved arranging Scottish traditional tunes and others were completely new," he says. John then wrote music for another project with a very Scottish theme, Dancebases production Off-Kilter, which toured in early 2004. John performed his music for the show with a slimmed-down version of the band, and relished the chance to work in a new genre and with some classic Scottish music. "My brief for the show was to look at old copies of television shows like The White Heather Club and Thingummyjig, and videos of Jimmy Shand," says John. "I jokingly called it a reconciliation process we had to go back and look at the reality of what that image of Scotland actually was, and then try and interpret it without just taking the mickey. That would have been the easy way to go, but there was a lot of good stuff in there with the kitsch, and we tried to tease that out." More recently, John toured with Celtic Feet and two musicians from Hungary under yet another variation on the name, Magic Feet. The project brought together Celtic Feets characteristic fusion with the gypsy-jazz traditions of eastern Europe. Despite all these digressions, Celtic Feet itself remains central to his work. The band his other family - features Brian Kellock on piano, Phil Bancroft or Julian Arguelles on saxophone, Mario Caribe on bass, Eilidh Shaw on fiddle, and recent recruit Martin Green on accordion, replacing Simon Thoumires concertina. "That was down to the instrument," John notes. "Simon is an excellent player, but I came to feel that the concertina was a little bit too light for what I wanted, and I needed the bigger sound that Martin gets from his accordion." The bigger the better for John Rae and his fans. Related topic
|
|||
(4.05)
