Octuor

Last year I booked 2 dates at the Pobre Diablo jazz club in Quito with the idea of writing new music for these shows. I don’t consider myself a composer as I don’t write music everyday, so I need to put myself in situations where I “have” to write music for it to happen. I am an “under pressure” composer.

The 2 shows were planned for October 14 & 15, so I decided to write during summertime. First thing’s first, I needed a band, as my main inspiration for writing is the musicians I am writing music for and playing with. I knew I wanted a medium size band with non orthodox instrumentation. I also wanted warm timbers and voices singing in unison, but with no lyrics. Marimba is one of my long-time favorite instrument and Cello is simply the instrument I’m jealous of… haha ! A solid jazz rhythm section and we’re good to go…

I was fortunate to have good friends and great musicians accepting to be part of this crazy project ! Here they are:

Viktorija Pilatovic (Lituania): Vocal
Grecia Albán (Ecuador): Vocal
María Tejada (Ecuador): Vocal
Juan Carlos Moreno (Ecuador): Cello
Carlos Albán (Ecuador): Marimba
Ryan Hagler (USA): Double Bass
Michael Kihn (Germany): Drums

So I wrote 8 new compositions for this amazing setup. I will probably publish the charts for them in later posts on the blog. Meanwhile, some nice musical moments were captured during the 2 shows at Pobre Diablo:

Octuor At Pobre Diablo

The shows went really well, with 2 full-house concerts. We were then invited to participate at the Ecuador Jazz Festival for 2016. Playing with this band at Teatro Sucre was really a blast…