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Blog Entry 57 of 59 The Lush Report
I'm trying to bring some of the more overlooked stuff from the local music scene. I have to balance it against a full-time real job, so I can't be as thorough as I'd like, but hopefully you'll find some of the stuff that Mark Brown and Ricardo Baca don't cover. If you've got a tip on a great venue for live music or great musicians to check out, e-mail me here. To bookmark this blog, click here.

Blog Url: http://denver.yourhub.com/~JohnsMusicBlog

Violin Summit lets jazz fiddlers take a bow

Contributed by: John Zwick, YourHub.com   on 10/21/2008

Because the piano, trumpet, double bass and saxophone hog all the glory, the violin doesn't get all the love it deserves for its place in jazz. Plenty of fans, challenged to name some of the greats, would come up with a list you could count on one hand. And there's a pretty good chance it would include players from The Violin Summit. The 1966 jazz concert in Switzerland featured luminaries Stephane Grappelli, Jean-Luc Ponty, Stuff Smith and Svend Asmussen.

So it might seem not a little audacious to hitch oneself to that legacy, as Perpetual Motion violinist Josie Quick did when she put together the first Rocky Mountain Violin Summit in October of 2007. Lucky for her (and us), then, that she put together a band with unassailable credentials. The returning lineup of Quick, Julia Hays and Lionel Young, as well as last-minute addition Kailin Yong have backgrounds to put even ambitious musical name-droppers to shame, and Oct. 18, at Swallow Hill, 71 E. Yale Ave., they left no doubt as to why.

As spotlights flashed off instruments and reflections danced across the hall like will o' the wisps, Quick and company played a dynamite, genre-hopping set that took on straight-ahead jazz, the gypsy jazz that made Grappelli famous, bossa nova, blues and more.

It was a mix well suited to the musicians' diverse backgrounds. Quick, in fact, picked them in part for their different musical personalities.

"I just knew that we all had different styles," she said, "and I thought that we would complement each other well. We're all classically trained. And we all decided that we didn't like the orchestra classical root and we all went off on our own thing."

For Quick, that "own thing" was Denver band Perpetual Motion, ever the outlet for her eclectic leanings. Young leads his own blues band, Hays has a jazz and blues background and Yong, in addition to moonlighting on solo work, plays with folky, jazzy outfit Boulder Acoustic Society.

Out of a uniformly good set, stellar highlights included Young's electric blues number, in which he plucked away at his tiny violin like any other guitar, and soloed with the bow. Yong kept the crowd rapt during a transcendent improvisational number, and the whole band, including guitarist Tom Carleno, drummer Ed Contreras and bassist Mary Stribling, got a chance to shine during Quick's tribute to Grappelli, "Stephanology," which she says will appear on a Perpetual Motion album due in spring of 2009.

That's not the only thing in Quick's future, though. "I'm being asked if (the summit) was an annual thing, and I'm not sure yet, but it was just so much fun. I'm thinking I'll try to find other places to do it. Maybe once a year or every couple of months."


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