The mom of a three-year-old son, Oh created and teaches quite a few classes for Apple’s BassGuru iPhone and iPad app. She can be a loyal environmentalist.
‘Musically harmful’: Fountain Collective’s avant-garde experimental jazz
‘Musically harmful’: Fountain Collective’s avant-garde experimental jazz
“Linda Could Han Oh is without doubt one of the best musicians enjoying the bass immediately possessing an attractive sound, lyricism, erudite harmonic sense and profound [sense of] time,” says Mark Dresser, one of many world’s foremost solo bass performers. “As effectively, she’s a gifted composer and collaborator.”
Trumpet innovator Steph Richards, a educating colleague of Dresser’s at UC San Diego, is equally enthused about Oh. “Linda is a singular, deeply artistic jazz grasp – stable as a rock, a heavy cat and delightful musician,” Richards says.
Oh has launched into a tour to advertise her most up-to-date album, final 12 months’s splendidly absorbing The Glass Hours.
Two of the musicians who carry out on the album – her pianist husband and Portuguese singer Sara Serpa – are on the street with Oh in her present band. The group additionally options saxophonist Greg Ward and drummer Mark Whitfield Jr.
Every brings the precision, finesse and freewheeling spirit that underpins Oh’s alternately spacious and knotty compositions.
“They’re all very giving and beneficiant folks, and they’re all very tenacious!” Oh says. She then fortunately sang the praises of every of her bandmates, individually.
With music that treads the road between improvisation and composition, something can occur and it’s at all times totally different
Generosity and tenacity are attributes that underpin Oh’s work, each as a constantly resourceful composer and as a commanding however flash-free participant on each acoustic and electrical bass.
Whether or not main her personal ensemble or performing as a member of bands headed by Metheny, Iyer and her different extensively celebrated collaborators, Oh at all times strives to serve the music.
She performs with a placing mixture of ability and craft, creativeness and energy, nuance and deeply felt emotion that makes even her most intricate compositions and her edgiest instrumental passages inviting.
“My aim is to be totally, 100 per cent, within the second,” the 39-year-old bassist says. “While you do this, you’re encouraging the listener to do the identical. And with music that treads the road between improvisation and composition, something can occur and it’s at all times totally different [in concert].
“It’s a very particular second that may by no means be re-created. So, being 100 per cent within the second is what I try to be. All of the stuff we do within the follow room is to get to that consolation stage to be on stage and prepared.”
Oh’s album The Glass Hours clocks in at round 75 minutes however doesn’t include a single extraneous be aware or inflection. Impressed by the fragility of life on an more and more fraught planet, its 10 items are by turns contemplative and charged, ethereal and dense, pensive and joyful.
How a Thai ‘poor child with a dream’ grew to become worldwide jazz man and writer
How a Thai ‘poor child with a dream’ grew to become worldwide jazz man and writer
“I attempt to not give too many directions, as a result of the musicians I’m enjoying with have a reasonably good instinct concerning the prospects,” Oh says. “Something that’s stated could be extra penetrating to the vitality of sure sections to assist the story of the track and its narrative.
“A lot of it’s written and constructed into the songs, With the improvisational sections, I genuinely have belief within the different musicians.”
It is not uncommon for bands to jot down, document and launch a brand new album, adopted by a tour to put it on the market. Oh reversed that strategy for The Glass Hours, working the music up on the stage along with her band at one in all New York’s most storied jazz golf equipment earlier than getting into the studio.
Oh’s debut album as a band chief, Entry, got here out in 2009. It was launched – as had been her subsequent two albums – beneath the identify Linda Oh. Beginning along with her third album, 2017’s Stroll Towards Wind, she has recorded and toured utilizing her full identify, Linda Could Han Oh.
“Could-han is my Chinese language identify and that’s what the identify I used to be born with,” Oh explains. “When my household immigrated from Malaysia to Australia, my mother and father thought – as a approach to assimilate – we should always all be given names that had been extra European and simpler to pronounce.
“I completely perceive their reasoning. I simply needed so as to add my Chinese language identify, which is huge a part of me, into my skilled identify.”
Oh was simply three years previous when her household moved to Perth, Australia. Her two older sisters, Could-chin and Could-sian, each performed piano. Inside a 12 months, so did she. On the age of 11, Oh took up clarinet and bassoon, the latter of which she performed within the jazz orchestra on the Western Australian Conservatory of Performing Arts.
“There’s one thing in that music that also resonates with me,” says Oh, who fondly remembers assembly Peppers’ bassist Flea in Los Angeles in 2013. She was touring on the time with saxophonist Joe Lovano and trumpeter Dave Douglas as a member of their band, Sound Prints.
“He stated: ‘The place are you from?’ I stated: ‘Australia.’ He stated: ‘Me, too.’ and I stated: ‘I do know; you had been born in Melbourne!’ Then he instructed me he was there to see [Shorter band member] Brian Blade – ‘the very best drummer on this planet’.”
In 2019, Oh grew to become an affiliate professor on the Berklee School of Music. Her in depth expertise as a bassist, composer, band chief and live performance and recording artist gives her college students with invaluable real-world classes.
I’m very lucky to have a group the place I really feel like having the ability to take your baby on the street – particularly as a lady musician – is getting a little bit simpler with sure issues
Oh cites her time because the bassist within the band of piano nice Geri Allen as pivotal in serving to her chart her inventive path.
“That was one thing Geri was all about within the time I spent along with her,” Oh says. “She would ask me: ‘Is that this one thing you wish to do and are critical about?’ – versus: ‘Is that this one thing you’re feeling you must do as a result of somebody [else] stated so?’
“Asking college students the questions that I do usually opens up their minds, within the sense they see different prospects they haven’t thought of. And it provides them extra incentive and assets to attract from additional down the street. As a result of folks will wish to play with them as a result of they play effectively and work effectively with different musicians.
“So, I encourage them to suppose out of the field.”
Oh and her husband are the mother and father of a younger son, Nilo. He has travelled with the couple on their live performance excursions of Europe and is with them for his or her present tour.
“He simply turned three and we determine that that is the time we are able to take him with us [on tour], earlier than he begins faculty,” Oh says. “In the intervening time, it’s labored out rather well. What I like concerning the music group is how different musician mother and father have helped us out. On the North Sea Jazz Pageant [in Holland], the spouse of our saxophonist, Greg Ward, taken care of our son.
“We’re fortunate we discover babysitters after we want them and that beneficiant folks assist out backstage at our live shows.
“I’m very lucky to have a group the place I really feel like having the ability to take your baby on the street – particularly as a lady musician – is getting a little bit simpler with sure issues. So, I’m hoping extra musician mother and father resolve to do that. It’s positively not simple, however I’m glad my son will get to see the world with us.”
