Smooth Groove Productions Blog: Jazz in The Georgian, June 1, 2013

On Saturday, June 1, jazz guitarist Milo Petersen was back at The Fairmont Olympic Hotel for Jazz in The Georgian. We had another great time playing lots of jazz standards. It's always an excellent "workout" when playing with Milo. Similar to working out at the gym, playing with Milo is an exercise in recalling many standards and jazz tunes as well as reading tunes that aren't familiar. When I get done playing a gig with Milo, I feel that tired feeling (a good tired feeling) like after just working and putting in some serious time on the weights or cardio machines.

Playing jazz is a never ending process of learning new songs and retaining those that you learned and making sure to keep playing so as to always remain sharp technically and artistically. The art of improvisation, which is the center of what the art of jazz is about, requires a constant vigilance of maintaining one's chops on a technical level, as well as finding ways to constantly expand one's repertoire of music and jazz vocabulary. Like going to the gym to work out one's muscles, playing jazz is no different in the sense of working out the "musical" muscles that are our brain, fingers, mouth, or voice.

We had some moments captured on video. Here are a couple tunes we played.

This first tune is a nice old standard by Jerome Kern called Yesterdays.

Yesterdays

This one is a Miles Davis tune called Four.

Four

Visit Milo's website to see where you can catch him playing with his group. Come out to Jazz in The Georgian to see Milo Petersen the next time here.

Please visit our YouTube channel to see and hear highlights of Jazz in The Georgian, and Smooth Groove Productions special events.

Jazz in The Georgian every Friday and Saturday nights, 6pm-10pm at The Fairmont Olympic Hotel, 411 University Street, Seattle, Washington 98101, 206-621-7889.