Paul Read News

It’s been a few days since PRO’s performance at the Port Hope festival and I am still feeling the positive vibe. What a wonderful experience. The band played superbly and the crowd and festival organizers were thrilled with the performance. Even had an encore.

Now the next step is getting the recording done and finish up some new writing for the band.

I’ve been commissioned by the Music Coalition of Canada to write a “Grade 2-2 1/2″ level jazz band arrangement of a song called “Our Song”. My thanks to my good friend Jane Cutler for hooking this up for me. It is one of the hardest things for me to do, personally. That is, writing for a younger band. I don’t want to write DOWN to them, but I want the music to sound good, be easy to play and that remains a great challenge. Largely why I accepted the commission. The arrangement will be written over the next couple of weeks as I can find time to work on it while carrying out my duties at the university.

Anyway, thanks for stopping by. And I invite you to sign up on the mail list so we can let you know when and where we will be playing and any other gigs I have coming up.

All the best

Paul

Today is the first FESTIVAL appearance of P.R.O. (by now you know that is PAUL READ ORCHESTRA…I hope). We are playing the final headliner slot at the Port Hope festival starting at 5:30 pm – 7:30 pm. Tickets are $30 and the band sounds great so I hope if you can make it out, you will be able to make it. I feel very fortunate to have such a wonderful group of musicians (18) playing my music (and a couple of things by Andrew Jones, Terry Promane and Andy Ballantyne) on this inaugural occasion.

Port Hope is about 100 clicks (klicks) east of Toronto and the website for the festival has good directions and maps. Its located at http://www.allcanadianjazz.ca/.

Hope to see you there!

Paul

PS Haven’t been making many entries in the blog lately due to the rogue wave that hits every year at this time for those of us with academic jobs. Start up has been stressful to a degree and certainly an enormous amount of work. But things are looking good for the year. I plan to blog more regularly now.