The Ocular Concern

Portland, Oregon-based creative jazz clothing the Ocular Concern began like a trio featuring Andrew Oliver (co-founder from the Portland Jazz Composers Outfit in 2007) on electric powered piano, Dan Duval on guitar, and Stephen Pancerev on drums. The group produced its documenting debut with an eponymously entitled EP — offering electric innovative jazz, post-minimalism, and Eastern Western/Middle Eastern affects — in 2011. During August of this yr, the Ocular Concern had been joined by visitor clarinetist/saxophonist David Evans, carrying out Oliver’s original rating in accompaniment to a testing from the 1966 Japanese monster film Gamera vs. Barugon at Portland’s Hollywood Theater; the achievement of the film task led the group to consider completely adding a clarinetist towards the lineup, so when mentioned Oakland, California-based reedman Lee Elderton used home in Portland in 2012, he decided to end up being the Ocular Concern’s fourth member. The group quickly extended to a quintet with the help of Portland percussionist Nathan Beck on vibraphone and mbira; an associate from the ten-member Zimbabwean-style dance music group Boka Marimba, Beck got researched the mbira — the original thumb piano from the Shona people — during an 18-month sojourn in Zimbabwe. Oliver and Duval started writing fresh quintet repertoire for the Ocular Concern, and in 2013 Portland’s Regional Arts & Tradition Council granted a give to Duval for the composing and efficiency of songs by an extended ensemble offering the quintet of Oliver, Duval, Elderton, Beck, and Pancerev plus violinist Erin Furbee, violist Brian Quincey, and cellist Justin Kagan (people from the Oregon Symphony Orchestra as well as the Neah-Kah-Nie Task String Quartet) and bandoneonist Alex Krebs (Krebsic Orkestar, Alex Krebs Tango Quartet). Through the summer of this calendar year, the Ocular Concern got into the Map Area Studio room in Portland with engineer Josh Powell to record Sister Metropolitan areas, that was released with the Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble’s PJCE label in January 2014. The record featured five monitors performed with the primary group alone in addition to the four-movement “Sister Metropolitan areas Suite,” using the quintet supplemented by Furbee, Quincey, Kagan, and Krebs. With two actions constructed by Oliver and two by Duval, the rating for “Sister Metropolitan areas Suites” was predicated on musical notation matching to words in the brands of Portland’s ten sister metropolitan areas worldwide. The collection — as well as the record in its entirety — significantly extended upon the musical palette from the group’s 2011 debut EP, melding innovative chamber jazz, electrical fusion tastes, post-minimalist modern structure, and global affects from Argentina to Zimbabwe right into a exclusive amalgam of noises.