Tag Archives: steve tromans debop band

Two in line for Tromans

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News of two gigs this month by pianist and composer Steve Tromans. He writes:

The first is on Thursday 20 January, and is at the Yardbird Jazz Club.  The Steve Tromans Debop Band will be performing specially re-worked material from my 2010 THSH & BJ commissionMusickosmos.  The band lineup is: Steve Tromans (fender rhodes), Miles Levin (drumkit), Chris Mapp (bass), and Aaron Diaz (trumpet).

The second is a couple of days later, on Sunday 23 January, for Stratford Jazz.  The lineup and music-making will be slightly different, since we are missing Chris Mapp, but will instead be joined by a long-standing friend and co-performer of mine, the sitarist Jonathan Mayer.  Mayer and I met at the Birmingham Conservatoire, where I was fortunate enough to be taught composition by his father, the late John Mayer, co-founder of Indo-Jazz Fusions with Joe Harriott.  Jonathan Mayer is an established sitarist and composer, working in a variety of contexts, and I am looking forward to discovering what he is going to bring to the music-making of the Debop Band.  I have also composed some new music specially for the event.

Both gigs will be well worth checking out. For more about the Yardbird, go here; for more about Stratford Jazz go here.

“My song to the stars”

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That’s how pianist and composer Steve Tromans describes Musickosmos, his latest composition for the Steve Tromans Debop Band. It gets its premiere outing on Friday at the Symphony Hall foyer Rush Hour Blues session.

Steve has stretched this audience before – once with his reinterpretation of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. This time it’s all his own work, a four-movement, 80-minute-long piece c0-commissioned by Birmingham Jazz and Town Hall Symphony Hall as part of THSH’s Sounds Of Space weekend.

“[Musickosmos] is in part named in celebration of the extraordinary positive power of music-making (‘musicking’) in uniting past, present and future in the musical ‘moment’,” Steve explains. “It also celebrates our hopeful and continued optimism in the face of an indifferent, often hostile, universe.”

The Debop Band comprises Steve on piano, Miles Levin on drums, Chris Mapp on bass and Aaron Diaz on trumpet. The rehearsals are going well, Steve tells me, and the sound, he promises, really will be “cosmic” with both Aaron and Chris using effects pedals and the like to extend the sound possibilities of their instruments.

You can hear Musickosmos at 5.30pm on Friday. Just think: the universe in music, and all for free!

Find out more about Steve and this project here and find out more about the Sounds Of Space weekend here