J.Q.’s first album “Airports” was released independently in April 2011, and is available in CD format from cdbaby.com and cduniverse, or in mp3 format from a number of sources including itunes and amazon. If you prefer buying music from sources other than these few, then do a search on your preferred site and it might just be available there too.
Visit the music page to listen to the first two tracks FREE right now.
I’m currently on tour with Danish jazz vocalist Sinne Eeg and an excellent band around the Southwest part of mainland China. We’ve been playing some fun venues, and enjoying a great turnout for a lot of the shows. The entire tour has been Guiyang (Guizhou province), Chongqing, Chengdu (Sichuan province), Kunming (Yunnan province), a quick jaunt over to Beijing for a show today, and then tomorrow we’ll head back to Lijiang in Yunnan province for the last 2 shows.
Things went great in Guiyang, and the shows were also great in Chongqing but then we were arrested after the second gig we played there. It was at a venue called Nuts Club, and the police came and took us away as soon as we finished our set. No handcuffs were involved, but it took 9 hours to interrogate everyone about whether we were getting paid for playing these clubs and all the other details. Finally they let us go at 8:30am after sitting all night in that station…it was a long and arduous night but all we had to do besides sit there for 9 hours was pay 1000 RMB fine each and sign and fingerprint lots of documents.
And now it’s all over the news in China! We’re infamous! I couldn’t find anything in English unfortunately, so you’ll have to use Google translate or something to read it if you don’t read Chinese.
This picture of my bandmates was taken about 6 hours into the long and boring night.
In case you haven’t heard, I’m putting on a concert at the First Presbyterian Church this Saturday, and I’m super excited about it. I’ve been spending most of my time in the last month or more getting ready for this, and the final preparations are coming together. The band sounds great, tickets are selling fast, and everything’s falling into place.
The details: show starts at 4pm on Saturday April 9. The address of First Pres is 208 Grant Ave, right across the street from the community convention center (used to be Sweeney). We will play 2 sets, finishing roughly at 6pm. Tickets are $12 presale, or $15 at the door. I don’t know if it will sell out, but just in case it does, arrive early to claim seats because they are not assigned seats and the room will not fit more than 250 people sitting. And that’s if we really pack into the pews! If it does fill up, we will offer standing room up to a reasonable point.
The band consists of John Rangel on organ (but not the church organ, he will be using amplified keyboard organs), Joel Fadness on drums, John Maestas on guitar, Kanoa Kaluhiwa on tenor saxophone, and myself on trumpet. We will be performing all original compositions of mine.
I’m also thrilled to have the band joined by the church’s illustrious organist Linda Raney for a tune, upon which she will be playing the Fisk organ that is ensconced in the sanctuary of the church. We played the tune in church on Sunday without the rest of the band, and playing it with the church organ was amazing. So I think once we add in the rest of the group it will be even more breathtaking.
This will also be a CD release concert because I am finally releasing recorded material from about 3 years ago recorded in Shanghai China, both live and in the studio. I’m extremely happy with how the CD has come out so I’ll be proud to finally offer that for sale to the public.
If you’d like to buy tickets, give me a call at 920-5490 or send me a message. I can’t accept credit cards, but cash or checks are fine, and if you want to reserve tickets now and pick them up at will call on the day of the concert, that’s fine too.
I look forward to seeing you then!
-JQ
