The Flying Pekingese
Thursday, June 29th from 7 pm: Gallery MC
From the band: Swing-jazz band from Macedonia. The name means Flying Pekingese and it was chosen before the band even existed. One of the reasons for choosing the name is to break the ongoing tradition in jazz where you have a leader and the band carries his name and the number of musicians that are playing with him. This ongoing cliché somehow made today’s jazz groups sound predictive and killed the sound of a collective. Jazz became music for soloists and only that.
Listening to most of the groups on today’s jazz scene we realize that we are a not fully satisfied how the jazz evolved and our main goal is to right the wrongs as good as we can by learning the craft through the wisdom of old jazz (swing) music masters. But that doesn’t mean we are only paying tribute to the music and them. Our statement is that if everybody keeps playing the same songs (standards) they are admitting that the music is dead, that’s why “The Flying Pekingese” is a band with a huge repertoire of original compositions and we don’t intend to quit adding new originals to it. In charge of creating the band’s repertoire are Bojan Petkov (guitar) and Ivo Soldatovic (clarinet), but every song is rehearsed till it finds its own sound by the whole band: Petar Hristov (tenor saxophone), Kiril Tufekchievski (double bass), Slavcho Kocev (drums); and in that way the arrangements are made.
The reason we label ourselves as a swing band is because we don’t perceive it as a music genre, and we are open to all music genres. For us “swing” is a rhythmic expression. Every music can swing and that doesn’t depend of the music genre. Every musician, every person has his own “swing” and it is up to him to find a way to express it.
We have released two albums for Skopje Jazz Festival Records. Letecki pekinezeri (September 2011) and Dog Show (November 2014). Since our debut album, we have toured Balkans(Macedonia,Slovenia,Montenegro,Albania), Luxembourg and The United states of America (New York). At this moment we are working on recording our third album.
