This afternoon I was doing what I always do when I'm not doing something else: clicking around YouTube listening for fresh jazz revelations. Somehow I got to this strikingly intense solo from a pianist I hadn't heard of, and Googling around for the work of this "Robi Botus," discovered a band he was in led by an extraordinary musician. Mark Brown is a Toronto-based bass play with a sound fat enough to eat Ontario entire. He calls his band Rinsethealgorithm" (a MySpace link; check out especially the lyrical track "Like Sleepwalking With Headphones On," which has much better sound quality than the video). Which I learned from this interview comes from a bit of London DJ slang: "rinse" means doing something really well. Totally absorbing it in fluidity, I suppose. A very jazz-like ideal. Considering that an algorithm is a template for solving a problem, "rinsing the algorithm," to Brown's mind, means handling any problem really well. That he does.
Check out the whole interview: it's a perfect expressional of what I call the "jazzitude"—the mix of humility, open-mindedness, large-soulness, and improvisational five-sense mindfulness that you so often hear when jazz musicians describe what they're trying to do with their lives.
He explains that he spent a long time not listening to any bass players, just horn players and, especially, singers: "to learn the ornaments, the vibrato, anything that would help me to emote on my instrument." It shows. He rings out every note with a different articulation, like he's singing.
Rinsing the algorithm. Dig it.
