Song Room

Here's a shot of Alita and Stew mugging for the camera at rehearsal. It took a bit of work to get to this point.

For those of you who haven't hung on my every word since May, the Song Room is a series of in-home concerts that have been produced by David Pay, Tom Cone and Karen Matthews. They have taken place in Tom and Karen's lovely home near Nat Bailey Stadium. They decided to start this series in order to have a vehicle for the creation of original works, with the aim of expanding the Canadian library of songs. To this end, they have set an ingenious set of restrictions on the submissions. They must be an original work, with lyrics by a living Canadian writer, no more than three performers, no more than five minutes long, and with a maximum of one electric instrument. Furthermore, the songs must be based upon a preset thematic idea, one that is created at a meeting of the organizers and participating artists.

The house is usually packed to the rafters on performance night with a paying audience consisting of a broad base of people from the music, theatre, visual arts and writing community, as well as professionals and general lovers of cool events. The take at the door is evenly split between all of the performers, so they are reasonably rewarded for a five-minute performance. Plus the audience is requested to bring either a sweet or savoury food item, so the dining room and kitchen is piled with food. The audience is very supportive and the whole evening becomes quite a happening.

I played my first song room, #3 in the series last year, with ion Zoo. Carol, Clyde and I did an improvisation based upon a great text by Vernon writer John Lent. It went well, and afterwards I was invited to present a song of my own. Song room 4 was already filled up, so I agreed to participate in #5.

Stew Brinton and I had successfully collaborated on a couple of things in the past, my fave being a staging of a Godzilla comic that he and artist/drummer Gary Wildeman had created. It was a Godzilla meets Beach Blanket Bingo sort of affair, and I wrote the score for a large improvising ensemble: string quartet, brass quartet, sax section, surf rhythm section and a greek chorus of voices. It was pretty zany, and deserves to be remounted in future.

Going into Banff, I had wanted to created a group that would give a performance with a lot of emotional clout, and coming out of Banff, I really knew that that was my top priority. I had decided on the spot at song room #3 that I wanted to do a piece with two percussionists and voice. I wanted a mallet player with sufficient chops to carry the harmonic aspect of the piece, while I coloured the music with my rack of various bronze percussion instruments. And I wanted to have a singer who could deliver the full impact of Stew's lyrics, and be a new voice for song room listeners. I had Alita Dupray in mind from the start, and also Dominique Brunchmann on marimba, so I was thrilled when they agreed to be part of it.

As I have mentioned before in this blog, I'm a big believer in the good omens found in fortuitous coincidences. Simply put, I'm a bit superstitious. I look for good signs and the first one of these was when I learned that Dominique would be in Banff at the same time as me, but for a totally different event. We got together for a couple of hours in the percussion room there and both got totally jazzed up on the sound of the beautiful marimbas there. I got a lot of good ideas from that session, and kept a marimba or two in my practise studio for the whole time. I worked out a couple of my key motifs on the marimba, and also wrote a lot of mallet parts for my jazz orchestra piece so I could get more comfortable with writing for this instrument. Dominique was also able to arrange the loan of a big concert marimba for the gig from one of the Burnaby schools where she teaches. We were off to the races.

But I didn't finish the song in Banff as I had hoped. The whole series of events around Chucho overtook everything else, but the message gleaned from that was an absolute key in the creation of the song. Without a strong emotional core, with delivery straight from the heart, I had nothing. This was definitely uncharted territory for me.

Stew wrote some brilliant lyrics, and their form totally changed my original musical ideas. I realized that I had to write music that would be in character with the doomed people that he wrote about. His inspiration was a news item about two skeletons found in a New Orleans attic six months after Hurrican Katrina. DNA testing show that this was a woman and her granddaughter who drowned in the attic in each others' arms. Stew beautifully captured what their final time together may have been like. I needed to create something to deal with my own feelings about the national tragedy and disgrace that happened there. I have been thankful for John Doheny's missives that have kept readers of the Vancouverjazz.com website mindful of the continuing struggle down in New Orleans.

So Stew and I were on the same page from the start. Stew worked obsessively on his writing, sending draft after final draft, but surprisingly, in early May, he said he was done and had written all that could be written. And I agreed. Normally he'll continue to revise things until the last possible minute.

I came back to Vancouver with an incomplete composition and a very full schedule. The song room project hung over my head until about 10 days before the performance, when I finally was able to finish it. Then I had to deal with the logists of setting up rehearsals and coordinating things with Dave and Tom. One of their requirements was that all performers have a dress rehearsal at Tom's home in the days prior to the performance. They offer their input (very well-considered and appreciated on my part) and then they schedule the songs based upon how they think the program will best flow.

I'm not going to get into the gory details, but I was pretty well run ragged in the week leading up to the performance. I had vowed to do whatever it took to make the performance work out. I lost a lot of sleep worrying about how to pull it off. It also involved a ton of driving all over Vancouver and Burnaby in seemingly endless rush-hour traffic, as I was the only one of the four of us with a car, but in the end I was sure we had something pretty good to present.

One of my biggest logistical hurdles involved a significant change in instrumentation, one of the things that I had at the core of my concept. We realized that a concert marimba, about 7 feet long and 3 feet wide, would simply be too big for the tiny performance space, and couldn't even fit through the front door of Tom and Karen's house. Plus it's a very delicate and expensive instrument and would require a van to transport. In that last week, Dominique and I decided to go with a vibraphone, much more compact, but I feared its metallic sound would lack the sensual woodiness of a marimba and maybe not mesh with Alita's voice as well. It turned out to be another portentious choice.

The song room was being held on June 17th, a Saturday. I had our first rehearsal set up for Thursday, dress rehearsal at Tom's for Friday, and then I did a one-man sound check Saturday afternoon.

The Thursday rehearsal went well. It took some time for me to convey my concept of the piece, even though I had it fully scored out and with individual parts. It turned out that I pitched it too low for Alita to do a lot with it. Dominique just worked it through ascending keys until we found something that sat just right. We got it to a reasonable state after a couple of hours and then we all relaxed, as evidenced by the photo above.

That night I took my percussion rack over to Tom's to set up in advance of the dress rehearsal. Some other groups were doing their thing. One of the best things about the song room is that these guys really make us all feel valued about what we are doing, a nice change from the usual gig routine. They are very accomodating and encouraging, yet professional, coming from the theatre background.

It was then that another one of those coincidences popped up. Tom himself had written the lyrics for a piece of his conception, being performed on Saturday by composer Ben Wilson on drums and one of my favourite singers, Vivianne Houle. It concerned a conversation between a husband and wife (represented by drums and voice) of a guy whose insane wife locked him in an attic to die. Tom nearly flipped when I told him our piece was also about dying in an attic. Our piece had some other thematic connections to a number of the other pieces. The evening's theme was "absence" and quite a number of songs, ours included, had some religious references. Even the hiphop piece I heard rehearsed had a connection as they referred to the Golden Mean in the opening lines.

The Golden Mean (or Golden Ratio) is another way of expressing the Fibonnacci sequence, so near and dear to Hugh Fraser's heart. I had bought a piece of sheet brass to use as a thunder sheet specifically for this gig. As a nod to Hugh, I had it cut to precisely the Golden Ratio. It has an incredible sound, whether or not Fibonnacci had anything to do with it.

I took all of these coincidences as good signs and had faith that the gig would go well. While bringing Alita, Dominique and the vibes to the dress rehearsal, I told them about the attic connection. Dominique told us that the very vibraphone we were using had been found in an attic. THERE ARE NO COINCIDENCES!

Tom and Dave were very pleased with the piece in dress rehearsal. Alita and Dominique had given it a lot of thought overnight and it sounded pretty good on Friday. By this time I was very confident that we hadn't heard anything yet. Also the vibes sounded great, so I was happy to let go of the marimba concept.

On Saturday night, we were scheduled to start the second set, which gave us lots of setup time. Tom and Dave like to keep things moving with minimal breaks between songs. With the thunder sheet, my percussion rack grew to about 7 feet wide and over 6 feet high. It was a fairly eye-catching visual.

The place was overflowing with people, down the front steps. Stew introduced the piece with a short speech that explained the song and set the tone perfectly. As we started the tune, I could hear Alita do what she does best, which was to take a song to a whole new level in performance. Dominique and I fed off that and we gave a performance that exceeded my wildest expectations. There was a long pause after we finished, and then great applause. Alita and Dominique were facing the audience throughout and they saw some people crying. We got continuous compliments on it throughout the evening. Tom and Dave were absolutely knocked out with it and they continued to get great feedback about it for days afterward.

There were a few things that could have gone smoother, like me not dropping my sticks twice while changing them and worst of all, some brain-dead twit in the very front row left her cel phone on and of course it rang in the middle of the piece. If looks could maim, she would be spending her remaining days in a basket. Probably she's a very nice person, blah blah blah, but I have little patience for that sort of thing any more.

I had the great satisfaction of having pulled this project together, creating a vision for it, pulling just the right people together for it, and then having it exceed expectations. It would have been nothing without all of the contributions from Stew, Dominique and Alita. I am indebted to them for their efforts.

Most importantly for me, I felt that I was able to take the fundamental message from my Banff experience and create some music that was from an emotional part of my being and have it performed with huge heart. It now remains to be seen if the recording done that evening captured what we felt. Hopefully I will be able to continue down this path with my music.

With the Song Room in the books, the Jazz Festival was just a week away.