by Cynthia Close, Burlington Writers Workshop
Bassist and composer Linda Oh and her Sun Pictures Quartet perform in FlynnSpace on Monday, June 2 at 8 pm. GET TICKETS.
Compelling, obsessive, skating on the edge of urban life come immediately to mind when searching for ways to describe the music of bassist and composer Linda Oh. She, along with Ben Wendel, saxophone; Matt Stevens, guitar; and Rudy Royston on drums who form the Sun Pictures Quartet, are coming to the FlynnSpace on June 2 as part of Burlington’s Discover Jazz Festival.
My first encounter with jazz played live was in Berlin, Germany, a city where jazz is considered part of its DNA. Here in the U.S. jazz has been historically a more ghettoized experience, you had to go out and look for it. It was easy to miss, easy to ignore, and often thought of as existing in a rarified atmosphere appreciated by artists, intellectuals and those with particularly progressive political leanings.
Burlington’s Discover Jazz Festival provides a counterpunch to all of that, and if you are new to the scene, truly just “discovering jazz,” Linda Oh is a good place to start. She is a young and rising star having received the ASCAP Young Jazz Composer Award, an honorary mention at the 2009 Thelonious Monk Bass Competition, and the 2010 Bell Award for Young Australian Artist of the Year.
She blends her Chinese, Malaysian, and Australian background into a smooth stream that feeds her musical inspirations. I’m still very new to jazz and Oh throws me a lifeline in her riffs that hint of her love of rock and classical music. They thread their way through her compositions and help lead me into uncharted territory before I can resist.
Before coming to Burlington, Oh was nurtured by The Jazz Gallery, a non-profit international cultural center on Broadway in downtown Manhattan. Here, young jazz musicians get to hone their skills in free studio spaces and perform in front of a live audience 50 weeks a year. The Gallery has also commissioned work by Linda Oh as part of their artist’s residency series. On May 23 and 24 she performs at The Jazz Gallery with a different group, the Sirus Quartet.
Through the blog on her website (http://lindaohmusic.com) Oh provides some insight to her creative process. Most recently she mentions the influence of the genre of shuo chang (说唱- literally “speak sing”), which she discovered when she played at the Beijing Jazz Festival, last December.
You can get a taste of her music online or by sampling selections from any of her last three CD releases, the most recent being Sun Pictures, which came out last year. But all music is better when experienced live and I’m looking forward to hearing Linda Oh on June 2 in the intimate and close-up opportunity provided by the FlynnSpace.