A Workshop

Brass Ecstasy delivered a very wonderful workshop at Arcata High on Friday, September 4.

Libation and Jazz

Ed Campbell at Libation provides the wine for the Redwood Jazz Alliance shows and other functions.

Libation is a friendly place for local jazz musicians as well as wine connoisseurs. On Friday and Saturday nights, Ed hosts a wine bar at the shop, where you can try out an assortment of reds and whites to the accompaniement of local musicians.

Good stuff.

Ed is one of the major reasons the RAJ is succeeding in bringing good new jazz to Humboldt.

Check it out at on the west side of the Plaza in Arcata and online.

Miguel and Band

Here's Luis Perdomo, Miguel Zenon and Hans Glawischnig at their RJA Show this past spring.

Ben

Here's Ben Allison at his RJA Workshop in 2008.

Plays Monk warms up.

September 27, 2007, the trio calling itself Plays Monk, Scott Amendola, Devon Huff and Ben Goldberg, prepare for the premier concert of our first full season. The show took place in the rotunda at the Graves Museum in Eureka, California. It were great!

Redwood Jazz Alliance Starts a Blog!

For the inaugural posting of the brand new web log of the Redwoods Jazz Alliance, I'm sending in from Picasa 2 a fuzzy picture of Bill Dixon I took at last year's Guelph Festival. You may imagine the big fat tone coming out of that bell, the humungous cathedralic reverberation that guy gets from his horn.

This blog is meant to accompany the weekly radio show "Bright Moments," on KHSU radio, and the web page of the Redwood Jazz Alliance. Our members Michael Eldridge and/or Michael Quam and/or Thomas Fossier host this fantastic two hours of jazz every Friday night from 8:00 to 10:00. Tune in at 90.5 on your FM dial if you're in the listening area or listen online.

For a detailed introduction to who we are and what we do, please visit our web site.

Here at the blog, we hope to keep the world apprised of our comings and goings especially in the downtime of our season, the dry spells between our shows. My hope is that the members of the Alliance and many others will use this space to talk about the music they love. I hope to be able to facilitate such discussions with mp3 sound and moving image, very soon. We'll have the usual lists of links and a blogroll, and some pics and sound files and even amateur vids from our shows.

We have had four shows so far, each of which has been a total gas. Kenny Werner Trio, ICP Orchestra, Plays Monk, Kenny Werner and Claudia Villela. We have an actual, real, live, formal season of shows up and running, and it's gonna be amazing when the next five concerts come to town between January and May of 2008.

We have a number of really generous sponsors to tell you about, some local musicians to highlight, and some far flung friends to keep in touch with.

We have a whole heck of a lot to be really excited about, and I hope this blog picks up some of that spirit and sends it flying around.