Linda Oh

02.02.12 | Linda Oh trio @ the Rubin Museum + Jazz Gallery Commission
I'm excited to be playing with my trio on March 3rd at the Rubin Museum of Art (50 West 17th Street New York, NY 10011) with Ambrose Akinmusire on trp and Tommy Crane on drums. It's a beautiful space and will be a completely acoustic concert. One of the best things about playing at the Rubin Museum is that it's a requirement to write a composition based on one of the pieces exhibited in the Museum.

Also in the works is a Jazz Gallery Commission I'm working on for April 20th and 21st featuring Greg Ward - alto/sop sax, Sam Harris - pno, Ted Poor - dr and the Sirius String Quartet.

10.11.10 | Just finished recording on Fabian Almazan's debut trio album with Henry Cole

10.10.10 | Linda Oh 2nd Prize at BASS 2010 Jazz competition - winner 2000 Euro

04.15.10 | Young Australian Jazz Artist of the Year
Lastest news:

Linda just received the Bell Award for Young Young Australian Jazz Artist of the Year - April 15th 2010

02.16.10 | "Entry"
Placed in Vijay Iyer's Top 10 of 2009

21st place in Village Voice Poll "Best of 2009"

02.16.10 | New 2010 European/US tour dates TBA

10.06.09 | Debut Album - Entry
Linda Oh will soon be touring and promoting her debut Album - Entry:

To be released OCT 6th
(release party @ the Jazz Gallery Oct 8th)

Available on CD Baby (physical) http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/LindaOhTrio

as well as digital download stores such as Itunes and Amazon.

(Contact with info if you would like to receive a reminder)

08.29.09 | Music Review NY times: Self-Generated Energy Fuels Go-for-Broke Improvisation (Aug 26 2009 - Ben Ratliff)
The jolts in Linda Oh’s songs arrive early and continue all the way through. A young Chinese-Malaysian bassist raised in Australia, Ms. Oh has been studying and playing around New York for a year and a bit. Unless you’re involved in jazz education, there’s little reason you’d know of her before now, but suddenly you should.

“Entry,” her first album — coming out in early October, through her own label — is music for trio: bass, trumpet and drums. Its pieces rely on vamps, interactive energy and strong melody. They are dry and lean and insistent music, with no hiding places; they borrow some structural and rhythmic notions from Dave Holland’s music of the last few decades and a phrase or two from old bebop, but as it barrels ahead, the music’s fearless energy seems self-generated. It’s not airlessly virtuosic; it’s smart and informed and hard working, full of real improvisation, the committed, hard-won, lumpy, nonmechanical, go-for-broke kind.

Her show at Le Poisson Rouge on Tuesday night — her 25th birthday — was her first performance playing this music. Onstage with her were two of the better young musicians in New York: the trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, who is on the album, and the drummer Tommy Crane, who is not. (The drummer on the album is Obed Calvaire, who will join her for a New York gig the week of the album’s release, as well as on a subsequent tour through Australia.)

Ms. Oh doesn’t waste time: the hard, gritty vamp in “Morning Sunset,” built of simple and ominous phrases and chords, made its case right away. The song “201” started with a fast curlicued bebop line, skidded into two bars of halting three-beat rhythm and quickly shifted into a loose, open, melodic bass solo, in which she seemed to be thinking like a horn player. And the long ballad melody of “Patterns,” played with passion by Mr. Akinmusire and harmonized by Ms. Oh, likewise found its almost liquid mood in a hurry.

Usually Mr. Crane played color and funk and details in and around the lines: combined, the bass-drum rhythm in these songs created thoughtful discrepancies, a choreography of feints and sliding suggestions. It all worked because they were both locked into the same groove; they just weren’t necessarily lining out its shape for you.

Midset she picked up her electric bass. Would this be where the showing off began? It was not. She played an instrumental dedicated to her sister, then a cover of Djavan’s folklike “Lambada de Serpente,” singing in Portuguese, with improvising inside vamps. (Ms. Oh has an unremarkable voice and a shaky hold on Portuguese, but she just went and did it, forthrightly.) Neither was jazz, particularly; they sounded like private sketches, investigations of melody. And even though she closed the set with a transforming version of a Red Hot Chili Peppers song — the midtempo “Soul to Squeeze”— this was not jazz trying to be rock. But, often, it rocked. There’s a difference.

08.14.09 | Lerterland: Jazz and the Young (by David Adler)
"if no young people are listening to jazz, why are so many young people playing it, all over the world? This morning at 7 a.m., when I do some of my best listening (thanks to the baby), I was nearly knocked out of my La-Z-Boy by bassist Linda Oh's forthcoming debut album Entry. Oh is Chinese-Malaysian, raised partly in Australia, came to New York only three years ago. Her story is the future of jazz, it seems to me."

--David Adler

04.24.09 | Dan Aran and Linda Oh by Michael Cassidy
On Thursday I walked, about 2 miles [about 3.3 km for all of you using an intelligent system], to Park Slope and saw the Dan Aran Group at the Tea Lounge. I am glad did, even though it was a work night and I could not stay for the second set. I get up 6:30 am.

They all played well; and Linda Oh was again great.
On several pieces they really jelled; feeding off of each other.
It is in those moments that I realize why I love jazz; I get a chance to disappear into music. On a composition by Mr. Aran dedicated to Arnie Lawrence the group made the walking worthwhile.

I love listening to Jimmy Garrison and John Coltrane on an LP or CD, but when you listen to live jazz or any live music it is so much more powerful.

I feel like I cheated them; we were asked for a $5 donation I gave $10 but…………..

How can we expect to have musicians when they can barely feed themselves?

They all have www pages; go read about them.

Nir Felder (guitar)
Art Hirahara (keys)
Linda Oh (bass)
Nick Hempton (saxophones)
Yonatan Voltzok (Trombone)
Dan Aran (drums)
Dan Aran has played with Omer Avital whose Asking No Permission I own and can recommend.

02.21.08 | Manhattan School of Music Jazz Orchestra: Linda Oh, Dave Liebman, Will Clark by Michael Cassidy
Last night I saw the Manhattan School of Music Jazz Orchestra at Zankel Hall in Carnegie Hall. The first half of the program was mostly Gil Evans and Miles Davis with a smattering of other composers/arrangers. The second half was Evans and Davis’s Arrangement of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess.

The original recording is with Miles Davis is something I have been listening to for years, this was one of the few times that I have listened to an orchestra play jazz. Its different; few solos not much improvisation. Dave Liebman did well and it was interesting to listen a non-trumpet play the lead. At a couple points he soared.

I suddenly realized that in my mind I was listening to a quartet: Lieberman on saxphone, the orchestra, Will Clark on drums and Linda Oh on double bass. Linda and Will were impressive. I was very impressed and moved with Oh’s playing; she has got a commanding sound, so much so that sometimes it was a duet. I would love to see her in a smaller setting, a trio or quartet, where she could let herself fly on long improvised solos.