Matt Penman – Bass

This one is only an excerpt and features only the first 1:23. It came up on my mp3 player which is on shuffle. I love what the SFJazz Collective are doing. They get together for a few weeks every year for the SF Jazz Festival and play some incredibly creative arrangements of tunes by each year’s featured artist but also stick a few in of their own. This tune is listed as having been written by bassist Matt Penman. It is in 13:8 (which is probably why I wanted to write it down- so I could figure out what the hell was happening) but the lines is not structured conventionally and it is VERY easy to get lost. The 2011 featured artist was Stevie Wonder and there are some astonishing arrangements of ‘Superstition’, ‘Sir Duke’ and ‘My Cherie Amour’ amongst others but this one has does something strange to my ears so I wrote it down. It is essentially three bars long but those bars are complex and require concentration to read and perform. Other features artists have included Miles Davis, Coltrane, Monk, Horace Silver, Joe Henderson, Herbie Hancock and Michael Jackson.