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NEWSGreetings everyone.
This part of the web page will be my periodic notice to all my friends and supporters around the world of all the "new and interesting good stuff" that is happening.
February 21, 2008
Hi Everyone. I can't believe it has been over 7 months since I updated my news. Lots of great things have been happening. I leave on Monday for 2 weeks of European concerts with vocalist Miles Griffith and our Griffith/Stevens Quartet. At the end of March the Fonda/Stevens Group will undertake our first extended USA tour - 7 concerts in the USA. Can you believe it!!!! We will also end the tour with a studio recording in Rochester, NY. Speaking of recording, the Griffith/Stevens Quartet will spend 2 days at Radio Zurich recording our debut CD. I just returned from recording two separate projects in NYC. The first is a new band of mine called "Brass Tactics". The band performs my music for 4 brass and piano. I am very happy with the results of the recording. Also I reunited with Mark Whitecage and Joe Fonda in the studio. We recorded some very beautiful trio improvisations. Next month I will be back in NYC recording the new Stevens, Siegel & Ferguson Trio CD. Also, my first Cadence Records CD release should be out by the end of March 2008. This is a quartet recording featuring Dave Schnitter on sax performing all my original music. Iin July I will be back in NYC recording with my good friend, Danish guitarist Jon Hemmersam in a session that will feature Bob Moses and Dave Liebman. Wow, I can't wait for that to take place. I also recorded my new Tennessee quartet project featuring saxophonist Don Aliquo. This is a really special band and I hope to start touring with them in 2009. I have two more European tours coming up in May: The Swiss "In Transit" Quartet has several concerts in Switzerland and my Eastern European quartet will be back in Hungary at the beginning of May. Conference Call will be releasing a new CD on Nottwo Records in the next few months. This is a live recording from our last European concert tour. I feel really fortunate to be involved in such great musical adventures.
Additionally I am teaching more and more. I have more students and ensembles at Rhodes College here in Memphis as well as a staple of serious private students whom I really enjoy teaching. I have also begun traveling back to NYC every few months to continue teaching some of my students in the NYC area.
The marriage is working out great. My health is very good and we are happy. I hope to see everyone in the next year. Please stay in touch and thanks for your continued support of my music.
Michael Jefry Stevens
Memphis, TN
May 31, 2007
Well, it has been quite an exciting four months. First, our “Stevens, Siegel & Ferguson” Trio released a new CD and toured Europe again for the first time in about 6 years. The concerts were fantastic and I am hoping to release a “live” CD once I have some time to listen to all the music. I also toured with my new “Griffith/Stevens Quartet” in Europe. This was a very successful tour with some wonderful concerts. We are now working on a March 2008 European tour with the same group featuring Dieter Ulrich on drums and Peter Herbert on bass. Conference Call toured Europe in April, performing our first concerts in Poland. The audiences were very receptive and we recorded a live CD at the Alchemia Club in Krakow (which is one of the treasures of Europe for sure!!!). The final European tour was with the Fonda/Stevens Group Trio featuring Szilard Mezei from Serbia on Viola. We had a great time with concerts in Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia and Austria. Our new Fonda/Stevens “Trio CD” was released on Nottwo Records. We are very happy to be a part of the Nottwo family of musicians!! Joe and I also started a new Eastern Europe project with the talented Hungarian drummer/composer Balazs Bagyi. We performed two interesting concerts in Hungary and will be returning to do a longer tour of Eastern Europe in May 2008. At the end of the trip I was lucky enough to record improvised duets with Szilard Mezei in a great studio in Budapest. I am very happy about this project and look forward to releasing it in the next year. Also, Conference Call will be releasing our 5th CD and first studio recording since our debut recording sometime in 2008. The recording is finished and the mastering is almost done!!!
Back at home here in the States, Vocalist Katie Bull will be releasing her latest CD in the Fall of 2007. We had a wonderful DVD recording party last month and I am looking forward to the release of this music. I will be teaching again at Rhodes College starting in August 2007. This will be my 2nd year and I am hopeful the jazz program will continue to grow. In November we will perform a jazz concert with Saxophonist Don Aliquo and the faculty. Don and I are also working on our own quartet project with several musicians from Nashville.
In October I will be touring Switzerland with my “In Transit” Swiss quartet. Our CD was finally released!! I will also be returning to Argentina in October for 2 weeks of teaching and concerts.
I look forward to hearing from everyone. Stay well. Thanks for your
Continued support!
Michael Jefry Stevens
March 19, 2007
Hi Everyone! Thanks for stopping by. I just celebrated my 56th birthday (March 13). Tina and I are very happy and I feel very lucky to be able to continue to share my music with so many wonderful people! I leave tomorrow for a 2 week European concert tour with my “Stevens, Siegel & Ferguson Trio”. It is our first European tour since I moved to Memphis (5 years ago) and we are all very excited about it. Our new CD “Get Out of Town” is available for sale on my web site and I think it is by far our best one to date!
My new “In Transit” Quartet finally released our debut CD on the Swiss “Unit Records” label. I am very excited about this group. We are planning our first European concert tour for October 2007.
I finished recording a wonderful new CD project here in Memphis with New Orleans saxophonist Breeze Cayolle.
Also, the latest Katie Bull recording was just mixed, and the release date is planned for the Fall 2007.
Upcoming tours include Conference Call touring France, Holland and Poland in April as well as the Fonda/Stevens Trio performing in Eastern Europe in May. Our new trio CD should be released on Nottwo Records in April.
Thanks for your continued support. Hope to see you soon.
Michael Jefry Stevens
Memphis, TN
November 23, 2006
Happy Thanksgiving and Seasons Greetings. This has really been a wonderfully busy year of great musical activities. Thanks to everyone for your continued support. It is only because of you that I am able to share our music with the world.
I just returned from the first annual EMU music conference in La Plata, Argentina. It was an incredible experience and such a success that we will now be making it an annual event in November to coincide the the La Plate Jazz Festival. The students were extremely musical and inspiring. Thanks to Waldo and Deborah and the entire gang at EMU for a great job. I was able to record at the end of the conference with some great Argentinian musicians and we are planning a CD and tour for November 2007.
The fifth and latest Stevens, Siegel & Ferguson Trio CD “Get Out of Town” was finally released on Imaginary Records. This is by far our best release. You can buy one on my web site and send it to a loved one for a holiday gift!!!! The trio will be touring Europe in March 2007.
My new quartet project with vocalist Miles Griffith – the Griffith/Stevens Quartet – will be touring Europe at the end of January/beginning of February 2007. This is a wonderful new project which features Dieter Ulrich from Zurich on drums and several different bassists including Christian Weber, Christian Ramond and Peter Herbert. There will be a debut CD released as part of this upcoming tour. I am also performing with Miles Griffith and New Ting at the IAJE conference in January 2007.
The Fonda/Stevens Group will be releasing our first “TRIO” Cd on the Polish Nottwo Records Label. This should come out in Spring 2007, and we are working on a Eastern European tour with violist Mezei Szilard for May 2007. Will keep everyone posted on this!
Conference Call released our 4th CD “Live at the Outpost Performance Space” last month on 482 Music. We are so happy to be a part of this wonderful record label. Check them out. They really have a great artist roster. This CD features Gerry Hemingway on drums. The group will be touring Europe in April 2007.
My new Swiss Quartet project “In Transit” will be releasing our debut CD in early 2007. We already have one festival concert scheduled in Schaffhausen on May 11, 2007 and are working on a Fall 2007 European tour.
I will be performing on Friday, December 1, 2006 at the first annual ISIM Conference in Ann Arbor, MI. This is an exciting new organization for improvised music and I am looking forward to my solo piano performance there.
Hopefully the Dave Schnitter Project CD will be released soon on Cadence Records. This is a recording from the archives of my compositions featuring Jay Rosen on drums, Dominic Duval on bass and Dave Schnitter on saxophone. I am looking forward to this release.
Finally, the mixing for the new Katie Bull CD Project should be finished by January. Hopefully the CD will be released early next year.
Thanks again for visiting and stay in touch.
As Elvin Jones told me once after a performance of his group in Italy “The world needs great music”!!
Michael
April 24, 2006
F/S Group Trio Eastern European Tour
March/April 2006
The Fonda/Stevens Group was formed in 1993 as a quintet featuring Herb Robertson on trumpet, Mark Whitecage on saxophone, Harvey Sorgen on drums, Joe Fonda on bass and Michael Jefry Stevens on piano. Mark Whitecage left the group in 1999 and the group has remained a quartet until the present. However, our most recent European tour in March 2006 was the first “trio” tour without horns.
Here are some notes on the tour:
March 29, 2006 – Darmstadt (Germany). The members of the trio meet up in Darmstadt at the Knabbenschule concert venue. This is probably my 4th time performing here and I love this place. Jurgen is a wonderful character who picks us up at the train station and tells us all about how he won re-election to the local parliament by running in the “punk” party. He forgot to book the hotel and now we are staying in an apartment that will only fit two of us. Fortunately, our drummer, Harvey Sorgen, arrived yesterday and is staying at a friend’s house. So this must be a good sign for the tour as a near hotel disaster is averted and everything somehow is already working out.
It is a good crowd and very attentive. This is our first trio concert and we are checking out the material in performance. I think we are all surprised at how well the music feels. While we love playing with Herb Robertson it is clear that the trio is a very strong group. We have been playing together for 20 years, since the beginning of the Mosaic Sextet in 1988. I think we are probably one of the oldest running rhythm sections still performing together today.
March 30, 2006 – Muenster (Germany). We arrive in Muenster after a nice short train trip. We have learned over the past 10 years of touring to try and make the train rides as short as possible! Someone from the club Cuba meets us and we walk 200 meters to the hotel. Somehow Joe Fonda ends up with the honeymoon suite apartment on the top floor of the hotel, complete with bathtub, sitting room and balcony. One of the great things about touring is the randomness of the hotel rooms. We never know what we will find and it is always nice when someone gets a luxury suite!! This is our first time performing at this club, which is a wonderful, small performance space: really a listening room. Once again we get a nice crowd and I am very happy with the concert. The concert ends up being recorded and I get 2 cds at the end of the evening, which I have just started to listen to in the past few days. When we first started touring 10 years ago I was hesitant to have the concerts recorded, but now I am happy to get recordings. Quite often we are able to turn these recordings into live cds that ultimately get released.
March 31, 2006 – Bielefeld (Germany). Our first F/S Group European tour was in the fall of 1997. During that tour we performed our very first concert in Bielefeld at the Bunker Ulmenwall (a restored WW II bunker). We love this club and all the people associated with running it. They have become part of our extended musical family. The Bunker has a great piano and we were anticipating a good concert. We had quite a large audience and the concert was fantastic. I believe we had to play 3 encores: A night to remember!!!
April 1, 2006 - We had a day off in Bielefeld and had dinner with our good friends Wolfgang and his wife Ziggy at a wonderful Italian restaurant. The older we get the more we require at least one day off a week to recuperate!
April 2, 2006 - Poznan, Poland. While Joe and I had performed in Warsaw 6 years ago with our Conference Call Quartet this was our first F/S Group venture into Poland, thanks mostly to my relatively new relationship with Marek Winiarski, who runs the Nottwo Jazz Label out of Krakow. He had released a Cd of my music several months earlier and was instrumental in booking two of the three concerts we would be performing in Poland. Poznan is the third largest city in Poland, and we were staying at a hotel in the old part of town. The old city is quite beautiful, and although our train trip lasted about 7 hours, we still arrived in Poznan with enough time to walk around the old town and enjoy its beauty and charm.
The concert hall was filled and the audience was enthusiastic about the music. The promoter was a very friendly and helpful person who really loves modern jazz and is obviously trying to bring this music to the Polish public. We had a wonderful concert and met some fantastic people!
April 3, 2006 – Bydgoszcz, Poland. We had to travel only a few hours to get to this little town in Poland. The hotel was first class and right around the corner from the club. I had my doubts about this club because the piano was un-playable and it seemed like a rock club. By unplayable I mean that at least a dozen keys did not work and the entire top two octaves of the piano were completely out of town!! But, by concert time they had found me a decent electric piano and transformed the space into a wonderful concert room. The audience arrived and we had a great concert. For the second half of the concert we invited several Polish musicians to perform with us, including a sitar player and a trumpet player. The audience was enthusiastic and we came away with another wonderful experience.
April 4, 2006 – Krakow, Poland. People had been telling us that Krakow was a very special place, but it is even more special than we could have imagined. What a beautiful city. We met Marek for the first time in person. He is such a charming gentleman and avid music lover. It was great to spend time with him face to face. He had arranged to record the concert at the club to release on his label, so we were very much looking forward to the concert. The hotel was quite charming and situated in the middle of the old Jewish quarter, which is now fast becoming a big artist community. We had enough time to walk around the city, visit the old city, and in general enjoy some of the wonderful atmosphere that surrounds Krakow. At the end of the concert we sat around with some locals and the club owner who proceeded to ply us with Polish vodka. I am not much of a drinker, but the different kinds of vodka (especially honey and cherry) were really extraordinary. We were each offered a free bottle of the vodka of our choice. I took home the honey!!!
April 5, 2006 – Mitterdorf, Austria. Today was the dreaded 12- hour train ride. We must have left the hotel 6 in the morning to meet the van that was supposed to drive us to the train station in the next town over (about a 1 hour ride). Unfortunately 20 minutes into the drive the van broke down with an overheated radiator. However, we were able to use the 2 bottles of drinking water I had stashed for the train ride to help get the van to the nearest gas station. In the end we made it with 15 minutes to spare. When we boarded the train, which was supposed to go to Vienna, we found out that because of high flood waters from the Danube River in the Czech Republic we might have some trouble getting to Vienna. And this proved to be the case. We had to change trains at the Czech border and take an alternative route to Vienna. This meant we had to find a new route to get to Mitterdorf, which is several hours away from Vienna up in the mountains. We ended up arriving at 7pm, which gave us 2 hours to get ready for the concert at Jorgi’s Bar. Jorgi is quite a character and one of the great things about this gig is getting to eat Jorgi’s cooking at the restaurant. He made us a fabulous meal. The crowd was small but attentive, the piano barely playable, but we managed to have a good time and were looking forward to leaving early the next morning for our first visit to Zagreb, Croatia.
April 6 – Zagreb (Croatia). Who could have imagined how incredible our trio to Zagreb would be?? Mate, the promoter, met us at the train station in Zagreb. It is always great to meet someone for the first time that you have only known through email (the miracle of the 21st Century). Mate is an amazing person who fascinates us with a short history of Yugoslavia on the way to the hotel. The hotel turns out to have a health club and all 3 members of the group are able to afford a ˝ hour massage for the pittance of 10 Euros. We will be performing at the University of Zagreb. The room is beautiful and the students crowd into the hall. We are overcome with their enthusiasm. They are yelling and screaming with excitement for our music. I have NEVER experienced this before at a jazz concert. We must have played 5 encores. It was exhilarating. I am anxiously awaiting our return visit to this wonderful city.
April 7 – Rudersdorf, Austria. One of our most intimate and dearest friends in Europe is Udo Preiss. Udo wears many hats, including healer, organizer, music promoter, husband and father, left wing radical and generally speaking a lover of the arts and of the planet. At the last minute Udo invited us to stay in his town for 2 days, play a concert, and in general spend some time visiting with him. The concert was great. Many people came, including a wonderful young jazz drummer from Budapest who drove 3 hours to hear us, as well as several people from Vienna and others from the surrounding towns. Rudersdorf is on the Hungarian border and is a very special place.
April 8 – Our second day in Rudersdorf is a vacation. We spend time visiting the schnapps man and tasting/buying a variety of home-made schnapps to take home. We visit the woman who makes pumpkin seed oil and buy some to bring home. We go up into the mountains and buy clothes from India and Nepal by a local clothing importer. We have a fantastic time. We met Udo on our very first European tour in Graz, and he has become family!
April 9 – Kanjiza, Serbia. The last concert is in Serbia. An early morning train will bring us to Budapest, and from there we take a taxi to another Budapest train station and catch the local train to a small town in Hungary. At that point we are picked up by a wonderful driver who speaks no English and drives us one hour to Kanjiza, which is a town 30 km from where Bartok was born (on the border of Serbia and Hungary). Like most Americans, I do not understand the subtleties and differences between Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, the war that terrified these nations over ten years ago, etc. But I am curious and am hopeful to learn more about this part of the world while I am here. Our concert will take place in a theatre. The opening band is a very interesting Serbian quartet playing original music by a great violist and composer named Mezei Szilard. We play the 2nd part of the concert and the audience is very enthusiastic. During the third part both bands improvised together. Once again we get to see first hand that this language of jazz and improvised music is a universal language that speaks to all peoples, all nations, all races. After the concert the entire group goes out to a wonderfully ethnic dinner. It is a great tour and the people are so generous and hospitable. We are already making plans to return next year and perform concerts with the Szilard.
April 10 – We get up 5am and are driven to Budapest where we will each begin our individual journeys home. I will fly to Amsterdam and then on to Memphis. Harvey will fly to Frankfurt and NYC, than take a 2 hour bus ride to Woodstock. Joe has to take a long train ride to Frankfurt where his bass case is stored and will fly the following day to NYC. It has been a great trio tour. I feel that we are opening up new doors by sharing our music with more people and more cultures. It is an amazing experience and I know how lucky we are.
Michael Jefry Stevens
April 24, 2006
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