Announcing Jason Ajemian & The High Life

RVAJazz and Scott Burton are pleased to present Jason Ajemian & The High Life at The Camel in Richmond, VA, on Saturday, April 17. They will be performing two sets following one set by Richmond-based band Coald Toast.

March 11, 2010; 6:00 AM • by Dean Christesen

photo by Day Still

RVAJazz and Scott Burton are pleased to present Jason Ajemian & The High Life at The Camel in Richmond, VA, on Saturday, April 17. They will be performing two sets following one set by Richmond-based band Coald Toast.

Bassist and singer Ajemian and his group The High Life walk the line between folky singer-songwriter ditties and free jazz meltdowns. The front man’s compositions are notated in an unconventional way, and the massive sheets of music read like a map draped from a music stand.

In the band’s own words:

Formed at the Harold Arts Residency in Ohio, Jason Ajemian pulls all of his previous conceptual musics together under a solid roof with The HIGH LIFE.

Ajemian creates scores in the architectural drafting program AutoCAD, which guide the musicians through spaces and hallways of musical structures. His blueprints dictate the flow and motion of a musical set, opening the performers up to visual and descriptive influences, while leading them through a diverse musical landscape consisting of Ajemian’s orchestrated poems, American folk forms, Native American chants, Canadian sea shanties, Orbison, jazz expressive motion and balladry — all filtered through the creative/improvised process in a unique communication of the moment.

My experience with The High Life dates way back to August 2009, when I opened up for the band in Washington, D.C. I was extremely impressed with the group’s sound. It’s hard enough not to be impressed that they can pull music out of the AutoCAD “scores”…they might as well be filled with hieroglyphics to someone who doesn’t know how to read it. The audience members’ conversations with the band after the set mostly revolved around the unorthodox music notation and how to read it, but the delight is ultimately the sounds the band makes and not the pages they read to make them.

Scott has known Ajemian for a little longer than I have. Visiting Chicago in 2004, he ran into drummer Frank Rosaly in a record store, who told him all the shows he needed to see that week. Scott ran into Ajemian at every show and eventually introduced himself. Ajemian (a native of Waynesboro, VA, interestingly enough) would play in Richmond a couple times after that, including once in 2006 at Ipanema with his duo including drummer Nori Tanaka. Around the same time, he played with his group Dragons 1976 with Aram Shelton and Tim Daisy at Europa, where Ajemian’s brother bartended.

Now based in Brooklyn along with the rest of The High Life, Ajemian and his group have been pretty active and are releasing a new album later in March on the Sundmagi label. The album’s release is accompanied by a huge month-long non-stop U.S. tour.

Along with his various groups he’s been in, Ajemian is also well known for doing things like transcribing a Black Sabbath song backwards and then orchestrating it for a large group. Extramusically, The High Life is a bunch of goofy dudes. They’ve created several short episodes on YouTube while on tour, like Episode 02 – Daddy Needs to Be Watered.

We can’t wait to share them with you next month.

The High Life is Jason Ajemian (bass, vocals), Jacob Wick (trumpet, vocals), Peter Hanson (saxophone, vocals), Owen Stewart-Robertson (guitar), and Marc Riordan (drums, vocals).

Jason Ajemian & The Highlife and Coald Toast will perform at The Camel on Saturday, April 17, 2010, at 8:30pm. $5, all ages. 1621 W. Broad St., Richmond, VA 23220. www.thecamel.org

March 11, 2010 6:00 AM 3