Todd Clouser: BLOG

I took a class from Marc Ribot once. I love most everything about his playing. What I took above all from the 90 minutes or so was his adamance on avoiding cliche, predictability, repetition in improvisation. There are countless guitar cliches, musical cliches beyond that, and we run the risk of just reciting licks or patterns that are comfortable to us if we don't carefully seek new approaches to creating a solo, tune, or whatever it is we're doing. Assuming we don't want to sound the same each night.
One way I've been trying to assure Im discovering each time we improvise recently is to consider tunes I know the lyrics to from my youth, using their rhythmic phrasing as the basis for what I'm playing. For example, I can still recite Method Man's "Tical" record more or less front to back from my days as a teen. Same goes for the first Wu-Tang Clan record, some ODB, and Bob Dylan. Some masters of phrasing.
  So I'll take "Bring the Pain", and if Im not particularly inspired by anything [...]

Following up on the last blog, we're also often asked by musicians how we get gigs, to travel to play, and so on. There is no secret besides persistence and skin thats willing to thicken, and making friends with people. Hang with folks, its fun, you learn, and shows come out of it. 
Here's the info we've been sending out to get on some festivals this April for a tour with A Love Electric and Cyro Baptista
Coming April, 2012, legendary percussionist Cyro Baptista (Sting, John Zorn, Yo-Yo Ma) and Neo jazz-rock burners A Love Electric will combine for a tour of Mexico that will serve as part philanthropy, part record release, and part creation. For two weeks, A Love Electric (Clouser, Hecht, Cruz, Aanderud, Allen) and Cyro will be traveling through the country, providing workshops to area youth, performing in some of Mexico's most celebrated venues, and recording two pieces of music highlighting their interaction with children of all socioeconomic backgrounds and experience as "musicians". [...]

It happens often in interviews we are asked whether we are a jazz band or not. The easy and unoffending answer is no, though Im told otherwise often. I usually go on a long winded detour of speech about being influenced by a variety of genres of music, its up to the listener, background as a performer, and settling back at the beginning of the sentence fragments at I don't know.
I can pretend I don't care, my music is what it is and Im unaffected whether its taken or left, or how it is classified. That would be untrue. I care deeply about the music we create, music as an art form, its place in society, and how our music is received. How it is classified, I care less about, though amongst jazzers, the word "jazz" when classifying one's own music has become synonymous with "of quality" and "serious". There is a battle within then that I have, knowing that we are not a traditional, nor modern jazz group in the accepted sense, that is completely nonsensical when looked at from a distance, that [...]

We've been playing music in some unique spots of the country of Mexico these couple weeks, which seems to serve us well. I've been writing every morning which is always positive and we're making music this week on the beach in the state of Oaxaca, a town called Puerto Escondido. Its tourist driven, more in the way that certain European towns are tourist driven, there are no resorts, large developments, or chain restaurants. Feels more personal. 
I was writing from the balcony of our bungalow style hotel this morning, its up about 30 yards from the ground, a tall flight of stairs that seems a sif it was built into the Earth, not in spite of it. While sitting there, a mother whale and a newborn calf passed heading south in the Pacific. The newborn was breeching, was about the size of a dolphin. It was very liberating to watch. 
Its interesting, for me, to consider how quickly the world is moving, and how the lone constant seems to be the power of nature. We are being left behind [...]

The past 5 years or so in the Baja have been an incredible run. Being there has allowed me to grow musically at my own pace and without giving up on it all, moving into a hotel lobby, or growing so sick with doubt and cynicism that I couldn't function in the industry. I am hyper sensitive to these things, lots of things. I began to really play there, as a working musician. I got to town as a teacher disenchanted with music, tattered by carelessness, and was able to rediscover a sense of purpose and the discipline in practice and writing that I'd lost while playing in studios and clubs for a few years in Minneapolis. I quit music for about 6 months, but really couldn't, that doesn't work for me, or not playing music does not work for me. So one evening, nervous, I went to what used to be the jazz club in town, Havana's and started playing the simple standards I could remember from college on solo guitar, ended up playing some rock gigs with Jack Sonni and my own trios, was hired out for [...]