Dave Morecroft, keyboarder/compositor and leader of the British band WorldService Project, goes on telling Toonari Post about their music and their upcoming plans and projects.

Toonari Post (TP): In regard to the different genres of music you blend, what artists have influenced you? 

Dave Morecroft (DM): Late jazz, free jazz, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, all the way of true sounds like contemporary free great from Evan Parker and that school, classical music is very important to me and then I’d say a lot of groove stuff. With groove I mean all the way from Chick Corea, fusion, true tone, Rage Against the Machine, and also some kind of more popish styles and funk.

TP: Why and how did you approach jazz?

DM: Personally, I came to jazz quite late. Before going to the Sixth Form College, so before the age of 16, I literally had heard no jazz ever. I’d just never heard anything. Then, at the age of 16 I heard a lot of stuff very quickly. The first moment for me was when I went to the Alston College and we had a kind of “open day” and as part of it there was also a showcase and the Alston College Jazz Band was practicing and rehearsing for a gig and I sat down and listened to them. I remember they were playing Chick Corea’s ‘Spain.’ That was indescribably ear opening, I hadn’t heard anything like it before, I didn’t know musical sounds like that. It was incredible, a kind of hurricane, extremely affecting. Before I was a classical pianist. It was like an explosion of music for me.

TP: You are running a project called “Match&Fuse,” can you explain what it is about and how it works?

DM: We wanted to meet up with other bands around Europe and help each other also out of the Peter Whittingham Jazz Award, which led to the first Match&Fuse exchange with Norwegian SynKoke. We went on applying for more Arts Council funding and they funded four more exchanges with the German band Schulbus, the Irish ReDiviDeR, the Italian Tribaco and the French Alfie Ryner, and we have nearly finished this stage of the project.

We tried to find bands very like-minded that had a kind of similar mash-up, bands that are looking to combine jazz and improvise music with more contemporary and popular styles, sort of dynamic and energetic bands. It’s been an amazing fantastic experience, we’ve learned a lot. Each time you book a gig in your own country and in their country, it’s a double tour.

Every sort of risk that you run when you go on tour in another country it’s partially eliminated, shouldering the risks. The audience of contemporary and modern jazz is tiny and there is much competition in the music industry. In Match&Fuse there is no competition, it’s sense of joining, helping each other, introducing each other to other audiences, media and places, it’s creating social occasions as well. Linking up and sharing audiences to create a network. Two bands combine countless possibilities of learning and doing.

TP: You also announced the upcoming “Match&Fuse Festival,” which will take place next June in London. Can you tell us more about it? 

DM: The Match&Fuse Festival is happening in June and is a kind of celebration of everything we have done so far. We have four of the five bands coming back to play with us and also bands we plan to play with in the future, 13 bands across 8 different countries, 15th and 16th of June taking place at the Vortex Jazz Club and in Gilett Square in Dalston, East London.

It’s all free entry ,there are a lot of things going on, Match&Fuse Big Band – a mash-up of all bands-, workshops, local school kids, an incredible mix of styles, improvisation, drum&bass, jazz, rock, pop, fusion, punk, experimental jazz, electronica, funk, UK headliners like Led Bib and trio VD. It will be a weekend of music to join musicians and audiences.

TP: What are your future plans and what should we expect from you in the next months?

DM: At the moment, it’s very difficult to think about something else outside of the festival and organize everything to make sure it all runs smoothly. In October, we are going to France for the French lane of Match&Fuse with Alfie Ryner. The 20th of June we play at 12 Points Plus Festival Slovenia, an extension of the Irish 12 Points Festival, similar to Match&Fuse.

We are also doing a recording in Cologne, Germany, for WDR and some gigs. So, June is going to be a very hectic month and in July and August we will take a break. Then we are supposed to be mixing and bringing out the second album that we’ve just recorded and between November 2012 and January/February 2013 there will be other three Match&Fuse exchanges with three more bands.

For news and updates about WSP:

Website http://www.worldserviceproject.co.uk

Facebook https://www.facebook.com/pages/WSP/167984746174

Twitter @WSProject

Youtube channel http://www.youtube.com/user/worldserviceproject

Match&Fuse:

Website http://www.matchandfuse.co.uk            Facebook https://www.facebook.com/matchandfuse

Soundcloud http://soundcloud.com/match-2/sets/match-fuse-festival-2012-1

Twitter @MatchFuse

WSP Funders: Arts Council England, PRS Foundation and the Polish Cultural Institute

A Punkish Jazz Interview with WorldService Project – Part 1

Image Courtesy of  http://worldserviceproject.tumblr.com

The article A Punk-Jazz Interview with WorldService Project – Part 2 appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

WorldService Project (WSP) is a young British jazz/punk/experimental quintet formed by Dave Morecroft (keyboard/compositions), Tim Ower (saxophones), Raphael Clarkson (trombone), Conor Chaplin (bass), Neil Blandford (drums).

Dave Morecroft, keyboarder/compositor and leader of the band tells to Toonari Post the whole story of WSP and their unconventional music mash-up experiment.

Toonari Post (TP): How long have you been playing together and how did you start?

Dave Morecroft (DM): WSP in its current form has begun approaching three years ago, [but] we have known each other for a lot longer because we all went to the same sixth form college in Alston, Hampshire, where four out of five of us studied at the age of 16 to 18. We were there in different years and times.

Our average age is 23 years and 2 months, I think, because of the actual gap between the oldest – Neil, the drummer, who is 26 – and the youngest – Conor, our bass player, who is 20. The great thing about this college is that there was a very active music department. There were computer LAN night shows where we knew about Neil.

Me, Neil, Conor and Tim, the sax player, were very familiar with each other playing, and we met up and played together. We have been playing since a very young age, especially myself and Conor.

We did our first gig when he was 12 and I was 15. So, we’ve  known each other playing for a long time and I think that it really helps and gives a kind of brother fit to the band. When I left the college, I went to university in York, in the north of England, and I met Raph. [That] was when WSP started. Raph joined in with us just to see how it worked out and then in 2009, we recorded an EP and that was the real start.

TP: In 2010, you got the prestigious Peter Whittingham Jazz Award for best emerging jazz band. Can you tell a bit about this experience and how it affected your path?

DM: In 2009/2010 we were working on some material and defining the sound — and rehearse as much as possible. Then, in the winter 2010, we were very fortunate to be awarded with the Peter Whittingham Jazz Award which creates fantastic opportunities to young musicians. If you look in the scene there is no[t] really many other things like it, it’s very unique. The musicians kind of curate the benevolent fund that comes from the Peter Whittingham Award and the Whittingham family. There is nothing else like it, especially for this kind of music.

If you look at the previous winners there are some fantastic British jazz musicians from several generations. I think it really did kickstart on to what we are doing now – the “Match&Fuse” – that is the project proposal we’d submitted for the Peter Whittingham.

TP: Your music is a patchwork of styles, how would you define it and how did you come up with this mash-up?

DM: As you said, the music we play is a patchwork of styles. Defining is always very interesting and difficult. Sometimes we’ve done gigs and people came up at the end saying different things. Some people listen in a very kind of gestural sense, or they see just diversity of colors on [a] structure scales, completely [choosing] the contradictory term. Some people listen in a way like ‘oh you must listen to Frank Zappa’ or ‘there is a bit of Meshuggah’ or ‘you really like Weather Report’ and that’s how we came up with this mash-up and what every individual member of the band brings to WSP.

Neil the drummer is very interested in metal and funk as well as 80’s music. I’ve studied in university all kind of improvisation, contemporary and 20th century classical music like Stravinsky and Meshuggah, so that’s what I brought compositionally. Conor is very much the kind of funk bass player and strains at jazz classics, Raph and Tim the horn players are [into] all ranges [of] stuff, it’s really a mixture.

There [is] a press review we use that says our music is a kind of “a four-way cage match between Stravinsky, Meshuggah, Weather Report, and Frank Zappa” or something like that. It’s the mash-up literally of the composers I’ve listen to, combined also with the mash-up sense of each individual band member’s different sound that go together and form who we are.

A Punk-Jazz Interview with WorldService Project – Part 2

Image Courtesy of  http://worldserviceproject.tumblr.com

The article A Punk-Jazz Interview with WorldService Project – Part 1 appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.