I've always said jazz is a full contact sport. You must engage your intellect, emotions, memory - your very soul - and your body. And as you get older, there are various challenges each of us has to face. Some struggle with nerves on stage, others with tendonitis or arthritis, while some lose their hearing. As I've neared my fifth decade of music, the biggest struggle has been with my ears, which cannot sustain clarinet or saxophone work as long as they used to. Years of playing in symphony orchestras and in loud jazz bands, combined with countless hours practicing in the altissimo register, has resulted in tinnitus, and forced me to limit my time on traditional acoustic instruments.
Necessity being the mother of invention, I weighed my options and bought an Akai EWI SOLO last summer. As one who had never worked in the realm of electric instruments before, everything about this experience was new. I fell in love with this powerful and expressive instrument immediately, though, and soon was out playing concerts.
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| Akai EWI SOLO - Eric Seddon collection |
Fast forward a year, and I've launched a new project - Eric Seddon's [FUSION] Trio. As one who grew up in the 1980s, with a profound love of jazz fusion, this need to play EWI has turned into a blessing in disguise, forcing me to expand into a realm of jazz that is quite possibly underserved and certainly deeply rewarding artistically. The immediacy with which jazz fusion speaks to our culture without the need for historical references is tantalizing. It's great to write and perform music that speaks to the people of today with an immediacy like no other.
We made our debut at The Treelawn in Cleveland a couple of weeks ago, and I'll keep everyone posted as to our whereabouts going forward.
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| Eric Seddon [FUSION] Trio debut at The Treelawn in Cleveland September 2026 |
You can follow us on Facebook and on X (Twitter) @FusionEWI
I'm not retiring from clarinet, nor from posting about the clarinet in jazz, but you can expect more content relating to jazz fusion and the EWI in addition to the writing you've read here for the last 14 years or so.
Excelsior!
