Theo – The Feral Jazz Cat

JAZZ, Songwriter, JAZZ, Poet, JAZZ, Composer, JAZZ

About the artist:

Pianist, guitarist and vocalist: As a Composer and Songwriter, Theo has explored every music genre known to the western world. With the launch of this latest release, The BLACK BOTTOM Cultivating Jazz, Theo surveys the full breath of the art form we know as Jazz from the rich valleys of Beat Jazz to the mountaintops of Swing.

With influences ranging from Hoagy Carmichael to Bill Withers. Fats Waller to Mose Allison. Carlos Jobim to Tom Waites, Theo brings a unique voice to the jazz medium.

About the CD:

The BLACK BOTTOM
Cultivating Jazz: The Full Measure

In the 1920’s America, Jazz was smack dab in its formative years, distending the edges of the musical landscape. The neighborhood of Detroit that was then known as The Black Bottom represented Detroit’s own particular percolation point.

The name The Black Bottom harkened back to an even earlier time in Detroit’s history when this land under the city’s cement was a farming community and the dirt was a rich basin of black soil legendary for its agricultural potency. There is some beautiful poetic symmetry for The Black Bottom to transition from nurturing agriculture to nurturing music-culture.

Roughly speaking, jazz has been a part of the American experience well nigh a century now. It has brought America new musical scales and fresh rhythms while reimagining the scales and the rhythms that came to us from Europe.

But jazz is not a static music. It is a multi-hued genus with many subgenres, subgenres that have become endemic to the American music experience. And it is in these furthest reaches, these subgenres that Jazz continues to play an important role in shaping America’s aural landscape.

With The BLACK BOTTOM Cultivating Jazz: The Full Measure, I am hoping to share a more acute comprehension of jazz in its many manifestations; what one might listen for when searching for something to suit ones particular palate, and to enhance ones appreciation for the full breath that is jazz.

This effort will explore the periphery of jazz, “jazz on the edge,” to demonstrate just how far reaching jazz as an art form has become. To this end, I will not be covering the main genres of jazz. With the exception of Swing, I will explore an assortment of the lesser jazz outlets, that is, jazz genres outside of the mainstream.

My purpose here is to unearth some of the more remote alleyways of jazz in hopes that we may round out our “ear” and trek some jazzy paths less tamped. Traversing these outermost frontiers of the jazz landscape we might well gain a greater appreciation for just how ubiquitous this century of America’s great art form has saturated our lives.