The unexpected

A few words on the food at Banff - it's pretty good and there's tons of it. Hugh usually give a "Banff Bulge" spiel during the intro session. It's natural for jazz musicians to go ape over a heaping buffet table, especially for the young guys who usually buy KD by the case at home. Years ago, there was a dramatic improvement in the food quality not to accommodate the sophisticated palettes of jazzers, but for the conference crowd. There has been a serious increase in the percentage of corporate functions that are held here. At breakfast I noticed a place card reserving a table for the "Infectious Diseases 2006" boys - I tell you they are a wild bunch once they get a few beakers of booze under their belts.

Back to the food, any self-respecting jazz musician will descend on a buffet table of this quality like it's the last meal in his/her life. And then there's the "Dessert Island" as Hugh calls it, which always has 4 or 5 different rich desserts on it for lunch and dinner. So the Banff Bulge is a real threat. My tighter jeans are left in the drawer after week 1. The young guys in the orchestra, brass players in particular, are all walking around in a food-fuelled daze, but still regretting that they couldn't scoff down that third dessert.

The only group of people I've seen who are worse than this are jazz writers. I was at Larry Svirchev's place for a jazz writers' get-together during last year's jazz festival and once the food was put out, it was like watching a pack of rabid piranhas. I guess they don't even get the opportunities that musicians get. But I am digressing.

This year, the siren call of the buffet table is not as strong for me. I am trying only to eat meat during dinner, and go for lots of fruit and vegetables, basically a healthier diet to get me through these two weeks. I am getting about 7 hours worth of good sleep, so I should be doing OK. I might add the extra helping of dessert, but dammit, I earned it.

We started the day off with sectional rehearsals, which are always good to do. I actually thought Kent Sangster was pretty easy on us, but he's quite happy with the quality of the players here, so it's just detail work. I feel he'll crack down on us next week when Chucho's here.

I also did some work on my composition, but there's still lots to do. I need to get it finished this weekend for sure as we start on Monday with the orchestra doing our pieces.

In the afternoon, we had a full orchestra rehearsal. The band is really starting to gel. When the trombone section gets it really together, the sonic effect is quite astonishing. The way that the harmonics of brass instruments line up when everyone's in tune and really playing suddenly creates ten times the power, not necessarily loud, but the sound pressure is very tangible and we sax players can feel it in our backs, threatening to push our chairs across the floor. I must admit that it's a glorious sound, but don't tell any brass players that I said that.

Pieces have to come together very fast, and many of the pieces are already under my fingers, something that may take several weeks in the big bands that I play in back home. Time is one thing that we do not have in abundance during this program. However there are about three pieces that need some serious work and I need to practice the hell out of them, particularly the Love Supreme suite. I mean, it's Coltrane!!!!

So I felt mixed about my playing today, which is about typical at this point in the program.

I went to the extensive music library here and took out a couple of Steve Reich scores to study in detail how he writes for marimba. In the late '80s, I saw the percussion group Nexus perform his Six Marimbas in Halifax. This is an incredible piece, even more so now that I see the score. Basically each person plays a repeating pattern for a long time, and the combination of six layers of this creates phasing effects and the perception of notes being played that aren't really being played. The effect is very much like those optical illusions, where the eye gets a jumble of information and "sees" something that really isn't there.

I could sort of play each of the individual patterns of the piano and the overall sound is very much like I remember. If we only had a room with 6 pianos, I would try to get some people together to try to recreate that sound effect. The killer is that these patterns repeat endlessly, and some of the six parts only have 3 different patterns for the whole piece, so it is a major exercise in stamina for the performers. I would imagine that the whole aural illusion would be destroyed if these patterns weren't played perfectly in sync.

Anyways, it was a treat to study the score of this piece after so many years. I'm studying writing for marimba for my piece here and of course the Sound Room piece next month.

I had resolved to do some major work on my composition this evening but I got asked to go down to the recording studio for a session. It was with two other players, both of whom were in the composers' residency. Organizing it was a fellow Nova Scotian, trombonist Robin Jessome, now at UVic and my roommate Ken Hoffman. Robin had brought his trombone and some percussion, and Ken and I each brought a load of woodwinds and of course my bag of percussion.

So we went down to the studio and were surprised to see that the engineers had been setting up for surround sound recording, at least 10 mics in various positions. We were given free rein to improvise as we saw fit and the end we had recorded about 50 minutes worth of music. They were using some literally priceless recording mics. The sound quality was unbelieveable, picking up every nuance of our playing. We were asked to move around to make the most of the surround sound effect and the playback in the control room was pretty amazing. We had fun and at one point, I ran circles around the perimeter of the mics, playing like a madman.

It was also interesting to hear the three of us gel as a group, and by the last track, there was some pretty amazing stuff being recorded. There were times when we all played a series of multiphonics that I cued, with the resultant sound like a chorale of about 9 instruments, way cool. As participants in this program, we got this session for free in a studio that usually charges about $400 per hour.

The engineers, also participants in a Banff residency, were totally enjoying the experience. We hope to do it again next week, maybe with Marianne. She will be pea green with envy when she hears what went on tonight. She and I had taken a short stroll after supper and we had both vowed to spend the evening composing. We are both having a laugh at how we are influencing each other's composing styles.

So now it's after 1:00 am and I haven't practised a note or written anything all evening. I will run over some of the more difficult passages before I turn in tonight, but my head will be buzzing about the recording session. With Robin in Victoria and Ken in Edmonton, it's not out of the question that we couldn't continue this musical relationship in some fashion.

I'll be playing a concert of great music tomorrow night, including the VEJI arrangement of Love Supreme, and playing a Hard Rubber Orchestra piece with John Korsrud conducting, I recorded about a cd's worth of music tonight and made some great musical connections. Next week - my composition and then Chucho Valdes.

This is what Banff is all about for me. And the dessert isn't half bad either.