Been a couple of small slow/steady runs, and today went out for 5 miles that, while not exactly race pace, was pushing it a wee bit.
No “big” races planned for a while, but just hope to spend a few months “pottering around” getting a few 10Ks and half’s under my belt.
Haddington have upped their 5 mile race to a 10K – so I want to do that, and I want to do the Portobello 4 miler (especially as I do most of that route a few times a week anyway).
On the non running side? Well, I was at a gig on Friday by The Scottish National Jazz Orchestra and Bill Evans (yes. “That one”. )
Really enjoyed it. It was a “gig of two halves”. The first part of the evening was a rendition of Tommy Smith’s Torah. Now. I thought that Bill Evans was there to take some of the workload off Tommy Smith by sharing the saxophone solos (this is a piece of music that goes on for about an hour). But no. Tommy played the whole lot.
I’ve said this before about this piece of music, but it really is epic, and to get to hear it live was great.
While Torah is a “suite” of 5 pieces this is just one continuous piece and soared along from smooth, soprano sax led ballad tempos through to full on punchy tenor led funk. At some points, especially on soprano sax Bill Evans tone reminded me of Andy Sheppard. I don’t know what the technical/musical term for it is, but they both seem to have a thing about rather than filling space with one continuous note filling the same time frame with a series of the same short, rapid, machine gun like note… but it doesn’t sound harsh or brutal.
Anyway, this work was probably about 45 minutes long, but the time just flew in. A piece that must surely be due recording.
As an added bonus, for an encore Tommy had penned a special arrangement of one of his pieces for his new quartet Karma which for this appearance Evans augmented up to a quintet. So after two big band, orchestral pieces, we were given a small combo hard hitting bopish foot tapper to send us off home.
All in all a great gig.
No comments:
Post a Comment