Avant-garde jazz musicians plough a lonely furrow. The audience for the music is small, and a wider public they would like to address regards it at best with suspicion and at worst with distaste.
Deep down, like anybody else, these players want to be loved, and every now and again the urge comes over one of them to play something everybody can recognise as a tune.
So it is with bassist and composer Peter Scherr, who has been busy in China in recent months, but returns as a leader to the Hong Kong scene this week in the company of two of Sydney's top jazz musicians, Simon Barker on drums and Matt McMahon on piano. The trio is called Jazz Folk, and Scherr is releasing an identically titled CD to coincide with the gigs.
'We'll be playing Thursday [December 14] at Dinamoe Hum on the first floor of 28 Elgin Street with an 8.30pm start, and on Friday and Saturday [December 16 and 17] at the Blue Door with a 10.30pm start,' says Scherr, who is also trying to organise other gigs for the trio. The association between the three goes back several years, but the first project on which they collaborated seriously was Scherr's Blue Album in 2003, one of his more accessible projects.
'I've been bringing them up here ever since then at least once a year to do something or other. Last autumn we did this thing as a trio for the first time and it was just really nice,' Scherr says.
'At that time I'd been doing a lot of really crazy music, and I really wanted to try something simpler, and more direct, and easier, so I transcribed some Nick Drake songs and a couple of Elliott Smith tunes and some simpler more melodic things that we had written. It really seemed to fit. We do these simple songs, but then the improvisation is more or less free,' he says.
