Pete Roth Trio feat. Bill Bruford - Summertime (Donostia/San Sebastián, Spain, July 23 2025)

Описание: It’s likely that most of our listeners know the main melody of George Gershwin’s ‘Summertime’. It’s been around since 1934; almost as long as me. So the point of us playing this song, or any other ‘standard’, is to do something to differentiate it from other versions.

In doing so, an improvising group would seek to convey it’s own character – it’s own way of doing things. The listener hopefully carries the main theme in her head while we slowly defragment it. There’s a nice slice of that here. The ‘head’ or main theme is followed by Pete Roth’s fresh, spontaneous harmonic meat from 1’37 to 2’13. Where did that come from? Probably even Pete doesn’t know.

A bit like a photographer who can achieve a pinpoint sharp focus on the object or a blurred one by moving the lens, PRT would hope to present the ‘object’ - in this case ‘Summertime’ – in a fresh light. Like a stone-carver tackling some rough-hewn soapstone and, after some time, holding it in her hand, turning it in the light, looking at it from all angles, seeing what the stone is saying to her. A bit less here, a shade more taken away from there, and she has the ambiguity she seeks. She set out to carve a bird. She didn’t know at the outset that her piece was going to have that quizzical look on its face that almost makes it human, but that’s the way it turned out, and she’s satisfied. For now.

It's a risky operation. Too much fiddling with the lens and we’ve lost the object altogether. And how are we going to put the song back together again, to find our way back to the original theme? Sometimes it works well, sometimes less well, but it’s unlikely to be the same the following night.

One great thing about live performance is that you usually have another go the following night to make it better. The music object we create nightly is effectively unrepeatable. What never goes away though is the group effort and skill in making this work as well as possible as a collective, real-time collaboration.

PRT strives for an intimate, relatively unscripted music that thrives in small places and dark corners. Such a level of music invention cannot survive a 75-date arena tour, or even a 50-date theatre tour, were such things even available. 28 dates in small, intimate clubs where everybody can see and hear everything, and no one has to shout, will suit us just fine, this autumn 2025.

#jazz #jazzrock #yes #music #kingcrimson #livemusic #peterothtrio #drummer #prt #drums #musicimprovisation