Monday, November 13, 2006

Improvisation 101 with The Bays



THE BAYS- Live In Mexico VIDEO


I have been posting about The Bays for ages now and I have no plans in the near future to stop. I was very excited to find this video and it is not just a live concert clip. It is part of an educational workshop they were a part of where they spoke about improvisation and later had kids audition to play with the band. If you haven't checked them out already, make sure to download live shows from their website "thebays.com The band is made up of some of the finest producers in the house and electronic world. Jamie Odell aka Jimpster aka audiomontage and his Freerange Records is one of the most consistent labels out there. The video goes over their history.

“It’s important for people to know that we are actually improvising even though they don’t a lot of the time. There are no sequencers running or tapes or any kind of thing that would tie us down. We just purely go off in any kind of direction that we want to. For people to know that, it should be quite exciting for them because they know that what we’re doing is totally off the cuff” – Jamie Odell

“It’s a creative idea we think of at the time, and it doesn’t get diluted by having any business sort of side. There’s nobody watering it down before people actually hear it.” – Chris Taylor

“If you do like 70 gigs of a set that you’re just doing every night, I would imagine that you were not actually giving value for money near the end. You’d just be sort of pissed off and know it back to front. But every gig, we’re basically shitting ourselves a lot of the time because we have no idea what’s gonna happen. Not only do I not know what they’re gonna do, I don’t know what I’m gonna do, and that applies for all of us, so it’s very edgy all the time. That tension comes across and that’s why people get into it.” – Simon Smugg

"Our mission, if it has to be something specific, is trying to create music in the purest, least diluted form that is possible.

Firstly, on stage you are seeing a piece of music at it's conception as opposed to the recreation of a moment long past, and secondly, off stage there's nobody swaying the direction of the music with agendas about marketing us to the unseen masses, cos we don't sell anything.

So we constantly move on like musical nomads taking bits from here and there and working th
em into creating a sound that is totally our own, and there maybe is our ultimate goal.

To be just The Bays:
Andy Gangadeen
Simon Richmond
Jamie Odell
Chris Taylor"