14 days in May

Diffusion

2008-04-16T22:44:00.000-07:00

Holy crap, I can't believe how long it's been since I've posted anything. Part of it is that I have cut back on my performing out of necessity. The new day gig is demanding and is worth the time and effort I am putting into it. Free jazz just doesn't pay all the bills, if you can believe that.

As well, there has been a disturbing trend in Vancouver where many of the places where I have played with Wanda and the boys have cut back to trios, duos, solos or no music at all. Quintet gigs are rare. So I haven't been playing a lot of straight up stuff.

Typically in these fallow periods, I go back to the proverbial woodshed and work on saxophone fundamentals. That is never a bad plan of action.

But this time, I have realized that I have done just the opposite of my usual pattern. I have been doing a whole range of diverse and sometimes new things in the time I have allocated for music.

One of the first was a duo gig at Stitching/Unstitching at Casa Del Artistas with Amsterdam-based drummer Robbert Van Hulzen. It was a classic hook and hit - we'd never met before and did not discuss what we were going to do before we hit the stage. We'd checked each other out online and had a sense of what we were going to be in for. Robbert is a very sensitive and musical drummer. We meshed very well and I was quite pleased with the result. Too bad we didn't have another chance to get together while he was here.

Another new grouping was an ad hoc ensemble with guitarist Craig Townsend, trumpeter Joe Rzemieniak and longtime Wanda bandmate Mark Bender on bass. It was Mark's first venture onto the "dark side" of free improv. Given the nature of the gig, we framed it by playing some standards in a very open form. The grouping was quite effective and we will definitely play together again.

Then there was the recent reanimation of Primord at the Cobalt. We did an arrangement of "Sister Ray" at a Fake Jazz Wednesday night that was dedicated solely to covers of Velvet Underground tunes. Tenor sax, two baris, drums and myself on bass sax. Another skronkfest, but a most effective one. Many thanks to Femke van Delft for getting the definitive photo of me playing The Beast.

I was fortunate to sit in for the best part of a set with the Coat Cooke trio a couple of weeks ago at The Cellar. Coat was sick as a dog ( and still recovering from that damn bug) and I offered to spell him off a bit. It's always great to play with Kenton and Clyde. And I felt that Coat and I meshed better than ever. It was one of those evenings that gave me an adrenalin rush, and it took a long time to get to sleep on a work night.

Brasilian music has continued its seductive pull. I am now exploring four separate styles in various configurations. I have the good fortune to start working with Ache Brasil's performing group, some of the foremost purveyors of samba in the city. It is refreshing for me to go into very non-linear rehearsals, then see the process these guys go through, then pull off a great performance. I have to park my musical judgements at the door, and just be open for anything. And I get to play a bit of flute.

Then there's capoeira music, another humbling experience. It's not uncommon for us gringos to have trouble playing percussion and singing at the same time. It's odd, considering that mankind has been doing that sort of thing from its very beginnings. Western society has eradicated that from its musical tradition, save for the likes of the late great Karen Carpenter. Learning complex songs in Portuguese by rote, especially where the emphasis is on rhythm, not tonality is a challenge. Then there's learning the berimbau, another very deep instrument, and one where you need a pinky of steel in order to play it for anything longer than a minute. Doing capoeira has me in the best physical shape of my life.

Bossa nova, often dismissed as American jazz by Brazilian traditionalists, is the most familiar style for me. I've been listening to some of the original bossa recordings done by Brazilian groups (as opposed to Americans) and the arrangements are sometimes really wild. Quite an eye-opener, especially when bossa can be watered down to elevator music in the wrong hands. I'm working in a trio format with Wanda and guitarist Jared Burrows for a couple of upcoming gigs.

Then there's the most seductive style for me, choro. Beautiful melodies, counterpoint guitars, elegant chord progressions, this is the precursor to bossa nova in Brasil. Maria Schneider turned me onto this music, and I'm thankful for that. Both on sax and pandeiro, I have years of exploration ahead of me. I've been working hard at improving my pandeiro technique and I feel that just lately, I've been making some headway. Liam MacDonald is not only the best pandeiroista in town, he's a great teacher. It doesn't hurt having recently gotten a beautiful handmade instrument from Brasil. A friend called it "o pandeiro magico", the magic pandeiro, and just like a fine saxophone, everything sounds better, and it's much easier to play. I hope to get my nerve up to start performing at some choro gigs by the summer.

As well, I've spent recent Saturday mornings doing the VOXY project, being organized by Carol Sawyer and Kate Hammett-Vaughan. Wildy successful, they have tapped into a heretofore unknown demand for large group vocal improvisation. Though I will never consider myself a singer of any merit, it's good to be using my voice on a regular basis, both with VOXY and in weekly capoeira rodas.

Speaking of wildy successful, ion Zoo had the privelege of playing at the most recent FUSE event at the Vancouver Art Gallery. There were over 3,000 people packed into the building on a Friday night, with more lined up around the block. We played a couple of sets to a revolving audience, with some interesting video projections. I felt that I had to "perform" more to this sort of crowd, to be be more animated. It didn't seem to detract from the group focus. There was music all over the building, and I wish I could have seen it all.

Then just last Monday, we had another good night at The Cellar and the group continued to develop and push at boundaries. The final improv of the night was more intense than anything we have previously done. The best news of all for ion Zoo is that we got a Canada Council recording grant for our next cd and are looking at going into the studio in the fall.

We also were featured in the most recent issue of the Capilano Review, a respected literary journal. Our initial performance of Taking Jude Out For Breakfast... was included on a cd compilation of recordings from the Song Room series. The theme of this issue of the Review was "collaboration". This came on the heels of getting a photo and some column space in a recent issue of Coda Magazine, so ion Zoo is getting some recognition.

Despite this, the group continues to be unsuccessful at getting a jazz festival gig, but not without tremendous effort by the programmers to fit us in, for which I am grateful. We are a tough group to slot, requiring a grand piano and a listening sort of room, and certainly not for the masses. Fortunately none of us bases one whit of self-esteem on whether or not we land a festival gig.

Wanda and the boys are fortunate again this year to have gotten a nice slot in the big show. If only we could land a few more regular gigs. We are finishing off the long-awaited cd at the end of the month. We have a rare quintet gig at The Heritage Grill this Thursday night.

And I'm getting calls out of the blue for a number of really varied one-off gigs.

Looking at everything I've listed here, it appears that I've been busier with music than I thought, but it certainly doesn't feel that way. In some ways, I much preferred it when Wanda was scoring at least two nights a week, but frankly I couldn't do that and also keep up the variety of things I doing now.

And I am in the woodshed, breaking a new tenor mouthpiece handmade by wizard Theo Wanne.

That's more than enough.

Evanescence

2008-02-10T09:18:00.000-08:00

I first met Evan Parker during the inaugural year of the Vancouver Creative Music Institute. Frankly, he was one of the two reasons I went for it. Between Evan and the brilliant George Lewis, I had a chance to work with some of the actual pioneers of improvised music, from both the American and European traditions. VCMI turned out to have a lot more benefits, but the opportunity to spend time with those two musicians was priceless.

I stayed no more than six feet away from Evan's right elbow during the time he was at VCMI. He had a demanding touring schedule and was not there for the entire duration of the program. He also was travelling with his wife and they have many friends here in BC. I asked him about getting together for a private lesson, but the time was not available. He had to fly to Toronto and Ottawa before returning briefly to Vancouver for a jazz fest gig.

The day before my birthday, my home phone rang. It was Evan. He was apologetic that we couldn't get together. We talked for about 30 minutes and he answered all of the questions that I had for him. I couldn't have asked for a better present.

This week, Evan was again in town, this time for the annual Time Flies series. Visit the Coastal Jazz & Blues website for more details. Last Wednesday, I attended a short workshop and did an evening performance with the Time Flies guest artists. The performance was not well attended, as it wasn't publicized to any great degree, but I was happy to be onstage with Evan again. We did a small ensemble piece with 3 tenor saxes and a conga player. Interesting, but not earth-shaking. I was satisfied nontheless.

During the workshop, the topic of groove came up. I jumped into the conversation and made a sweeping generalization (which I prefaced with a bit of a disclaimer) about the European and American approaches to time in improv, saying that Chicago-based improvisors would be more likely have a more groove-based approach. I knew Evan would bristle a bit at such a broad statement, and we had a few laughs about it later. I gave him an ion Zoo cd and I assured him that he would find me more European in my improv style.

The following evening, while I was eating supper, I got a call that Francois Houle was looking for a soprano sax for Evan to play during the Time Flies shows. Apparently, the one Frankie had arranged didn't turn up at the appointed time and place. I grabbed mine and dashed down to Ironworks. Evan was backstage, preparing to go on in a few minutes.

I handed him my horn and asked him to give it a try. He said it was very similar in age and feel to his one back home. He had a slightly bemused look as were talking. I wasn't sure why until Frankie came flying in at the last minute and thanked me for bringing it down. Then Evan understood. ""Oh, I'm supposed to play this tonight. I thought you just wanted me to check out your horn." So typical, ever gracious. I had to take off right away, unable to stay for any of the show. I didn't know how Evan would like my soprano, those horns being very finicky, and especially given Selmer's lack of consistency. Evan is also very particular about what he likes in a saxophone.

I made it down to the Saturday evening show. It was pretty great. The move in 2007 to Ironworks from The Western Front has done wonders for this series, and there was another full house. The music was really happening. Just before the finale, Evan came out and played his trademark tour-de-force soprano solo, 15 minutes of nonstop circular breathing, with cascading multiphonics and moving rhythmic patterns. He played more notes in that solo than I would play on my soprano in a year. I knew he would not have undertaken this solo if he wasn't comfortable with my horn.

I went backstage afterward and he handed my soprano to me. I caressed it and asked if it will have me back. (Only time will tell, but at least we're talking...) Evan and I joked that I'll sound like a European on it now, the groove having been played out of it. Groove or no groove, it was an honour for me to help him out.

Evan's back in June, again participating in VCMI, but this year his longtime associate Barry Guy will be there as well. Barry's approach to graphic scores has been a huge influence on my composition, and performing a remounting of his Witch Gong Game II/10 was a pivotal experience for me. So now I have to figure out how to work another VCMI into my schedule. Life is tough.

Viva Las Vegas

2008-01-27T19:03:00.000-08:00

This is part two of my adventure. Let me backtrack a touch.

Three Ring and I both disliked the seediness of The Strip on first sight, and our hotel in particular. We thought our travel agent had really blown it, booking us so far away from the convention. In retrospect, with 100,000 people attending that event alone, it was probably the closest she could get us.

We were immediately disappointed with the lacklustre casino in our hotel. We tried venturing a bit further afield hoping to find something more happening, but were hampered by our feet worn out from the convention and his bad back. Places like the MGM Grand and The Bellagio were more physically impressive, but just didn't grab us. The Paris Las Vegas was too phony for words. Planet Hollywood was more lively, drawing crowds mainly because of the skimpy outfits waitresses were forced to wear. A quick sit at the bar told the tale.

The Miss America 2008 pageant was going on there, but we walked in too late to see any of that crowd. Apparently they turned in early. All of the attractive women at the bar were pros, save for one. Three Ring has a gift for starting up conversations with strangers, an incredible asset at the trade show, and quite entertaining after hours. This particular young woman was celebrating her 21st birthday, legal age in Nevada. This was her first night at the bar in Vegas and she was getting blitzed. She told us she was a music student in South Carolina, a mezzo-soprano studying musical theatre and jazz. She had a nice singing voice. I remarked that she must like Sarah Vaughan, to which she replied "Who?". When Three Ring told her that I was a sax player, she asked how I liked Kenny G (not the last time I was asked that in Vegas). My answer effectively killed our conversation.

She introduced us to her mother, whose job apparently was keeping her eye on her inebriated daughter. We were benign, just a couple of guys having a drink, not looking to chase someone old enough to be our daughter. It was then I started looking around to see who else was there. There were only hookers and prospective johns at the bar, with pimps keeping an eye on them from a distance. We cleared out of there. No wonder the mother was on watch. I felt sad for them, celebrating a birthday that way. I later heard that the pimps cause trouble at that bar as they get drunk, let alone what happens when they follow their girls and their marks back to the hotel rooms.

This place was starting to disgust me.

The next evening we took a cab to Downtown, which was the original strip in the 60's. THIS was the Las Vegas of the movies and the Rat Pack. Gaudy, yes, but on a manageable scale. People were looking like they were enjoying themselves, at last. There was live street entertainment, including an accomplished smooth jazz saxist. He also told me jazz was dead in this town. We ate a fantastic Italian meal in the Golden Nugget, at a much more reasonable price than on The Strip. We enjoyed the light show over Fremont. Maybe not all was bad.

The next day was our last at the trade show, very productive. We had been told to go to the Rio hotel for the seafood buffet, so we went there for dinner. Apparently none of the cabbies knew (or cared to say) that the seafood buffet was closed for renovations. No worry, the regular buffet was great. And finally, we hit a place that had some life to it. The Rio has a nominal Brazilian theme. What this meant in reality was there was tropical decor and the showrooms had Brazilian names like Copacabana and Ipanema. And the waitresses had to wear thongs under short chiffon skirts. Sometimes they got up on tables and danced something that had no relation to samba.

Penn and Teller had an ongoing show there. Finally, something I wanted to see. I loved their book How to Play with Your Food. I do their "stick a fork in your eye" trick at inopportune times. Our timing didn't work out and we thought we would come back the next day. We decided to take a cab over to the Wynne. In the taxi lineup, Three Ring struck up a conversation with a young British couple. We shared a cab and it turned out he was an accomplished jazz drummer, playing with a lot of name musicians in England. I mentioned that I was looking forward to getting together again with Evan Parker in early February. Regrettably we went our separate ways once the ride ended, but the encounter had continued to buoy my spirits.

The Wynne is truly impressive and the Beautiful People were there in full force. Finally, we hit a place that matched the hype. There was big money here, without a doubt. Ahnuld Schwartzenegger had breezed through with his entourage just a few hours earlier. I liked this place, even though I was way out of my depth.

In the end, Three Ring and I pulled an all-nighter, appropriate for one's last night in Vegas. We eventually got back to our hotel room, arranged a late checkout time and crashed for a couple of hours sleep. We planned to pack after the nap, then scoot over to the airport. It annoyed us when a fire drill came on a couple of minutes later. The damn thing was very loud and persistent, even when we buried our heads under our pillows.

I got up to look if anyone outside was actually heeding the alarm. A few people had started walking out. They were pointing and staring up to the roof. I put my hand on the top of the window in order to look up. The window was hot and I could see smoke.

"Hey, this thing's for real. We're on fire!"

We got dressed as quickly as possible. I grabbed my horn and nothing else. Three Ring also left everything save for his cel phone and passport, leaving his heart and back medications in the bathroom. Passport?? I checked my pockets on the way down the fire escape. Wallet, cel phone - yes. Passport - no. I was stuck in Vegas.

The stairwell smelled of burning plastic, not too oppressive, but strong enough to focus one's attention acutely. People were generally orderly. A couple of assholes were blocking the stairway as they awkwardly tried to manoever all of their luggage downstairs. Three Ring cursed them out for their selfisheness, then grabbed the woman's bags and hauled them down at least five floors. Remember, he had a freshly broken vertbra in his lower back. He left me in his dust. Once he got the luggage outside, he went back upstairs a bit to help out an older woman in distress, again cursing out the selfish assholes as they passed.

He would not leave her. She had just had her knees replaced and was in considerable pain. She was separated from her family and was without her cel phone. She started having a panic attack as we moved across the street to the initial evacuation point. He stuck with her until a paramedic came by.

Then we ran into some people that we had met only the night before. The mother was quite elderly, frail and in a wheelchair. They had been on the 30th floor and the fire was just outside their window. They cleared out the moment the alarm sounded and were incredibly fortunate to catch the very last elevator going down to the lobby. All of her crucial medications were left behind in their room.

This family was from the projects in Chicago, supposedly on the trip of a lifetime. In all likelihood, they lost everything in their room, either from fire, toxic smoke or water. We never found out before we left. Three Ring and I basically stuck with them for the balance of our time in Vegas, giving whatever support we could.

I watched the facade on the top floor burn away. It was easy to see that it was all styrofoam, probably with a vinyl outer coat. Great chunks of burning foam fell to the ground, dripping fire. Some of it fell on cornices on lower floors, starting new fires. Beneath the foam was blackened concrete, and the fire burned no deeper. So as the fire burned outward horizontally, it died down in the centre of the building. I snapped a few shots on my cel phone.

Traffic around the hotel immediately became gridlocked. I was angered that I never saw any fire trucks, assuming that they were also stuck in traffic. Then I saw firefighters appear on the roof - they had approached the building from the opposite side. I watched in awe as these guys hung over the edge of the roof, manoevering high-pressure spray onto the fire on the facing sice of the building. Others worked through the fire on the adjoining floors, putting out flames from the inside.

Those guys are bloody heroes.

The hotel guests and staff got notice to move away from the initial holding area, directing us first to the neighbouring New York New York, then immediately across Las Vegas Blvd. to the MGM Grand. Hotel staff were posted at close intervals to guide us every step of the way. We cursed out a stupid person who was trying to hand out show promotion tickets to passing evacuees.

Once in the MGM Grand, they ushered all 4,000 of us through the staff hallways to the MGM Garden Arena, where all the big boxing matches are held. Very clever, I thought, keeping us out of the main casino area - better to move a large number of people, meanwhile not upsetting business in the casino. By the time we arrived in the arena, they already had free bottled water and coffee stations set up. Staff had been pulled in from all nine of MGM's properties, of which the Monte Carlo was one. They took our names, cel phone numbers and room numbers and showed us to sections of the area based upon the floor we were staying.

We were still with the Chicagoans, moving to our section. Another staffer asked if there were any medical requirements for evacuees. In a nice move, they brushed off a self-important guy who pushed to the front of the line to ask about his car (we figured him to be a lawyer worried about his beloved Beemer). They ignored him and talked to Three Ring and Mama about the medications they had left behind. Both had critical need of their medicine. The staff immediately asked us to follow them out of the arena. The guy in charge was a pit boss I had noticed at the MGM Grand, a well-dressed, very handsome guy. He was on top of things without a doubt. By this time, Three Ring had started jotting down name of the staffers, but we missed this guy's name. He had someone lead us back into the MGM Grand, then down a secure hallway. The next thing we knew we were checked into rooms in MGM's super-elite Signature Suites, rated the best such suites in the country. We had been put in the lap of luxury.

By this time, we had encountered at least a hundred MGM staffers, every one of them unfailingly polite and professional. Many apologized for our inconvenience as we passed. The manager at the Signature Suites did so as well as we went up to our superb rooms. These people were absolutely genuine in their concern, and it was getting overwhelming for us. Three Ring resolved to write MGM thanking as many staffers by name as possible, and make it company policy to stay at MGM properties whenever possible.

I chilled out in the room for the rest of the day. Three Ring marvelled at his continued travel misadventures, fearing his upcoming trips to Calgary and China. I am going to arrange a witch doctor or an exorcism or something.

We phoned relatives to say we were OK. We contacted our travel agent and US Airways immediately rescheduled our flight without any financial penalty.

We watched news coverage on CNN and we were astounded to see a couple of guests show up on the news complaining how poorly the evacuation was handled. One of them had been standing under the falling debris, shooting video, probably aiming to sell it to the media. Idiot. We figured they were angling for litigation. It was not our experience, or that of anyone around us. The CEO of MGM Hotels was interviewed. He apologized for the terrible inconvenience, then guaranteed the salaries of the staff for the next 30 days. In light of the sub prime mortgage scandal, he promised that no house payments would go unpaid. This was not the typical corporate American response to such an incident. Where was the evasion and double-speak?

We met up with the two Chicagoans for dinner. They wanted to go to Emeril's restaurant in the MGM Grand, even though Mama had left her teeth back at the Monte Carlo. Everyone from the servers to top management came out to apologize for our inconvenience. They comped the meal for us. We were starting to feel like celebrities, but were also humbled. It started sinking in that this fire could have been a major disaster - people could have died, particularly the ones we were dining with, with flames outside their window. But everyone was evacuated safely, with only a few minor injuries reported. Throughout the whole experience, Mama never once complained. She gave away the shawl that covered her wheelchair to a young family whose baby was getting cold in the outdoor holding area.

We got a few long looks walking back to our suites. Poor black people were not usually seen in such an exclusive hotel. I'm sure some of the guests were oblivious to the day's goings on. But the Chicagoans paid no mind. They had been treated with respect by everyone involved, and were thankful that we were there to keep them company in the aftermath.

Arriving back in the lobby, we learned that people staying in the lower floors of the Monte Carlo were about to be allowed to go back into their rooms to gather their belongings. The Chicagoans were not allowed, being roomed so close to the fire. They were warned there would be water, toxic smoke, maybe fire damage to everything in the room. Mama looked forward to getting a new set of teeth.

We were immediately loaded onto a waiting shuttle bus. The Chicagoans were dropped off at MGM's hospital facility so that Mama's medications could be replaced. We continued back to the Monte Carlo. Typically, Three Ring shouted to everyone on the bus. "Hey, did anyone here see those two fucking assholes on the news complaining about the evacuation? Did any of you have that happen to you?" No matter how many times he asked that through the night, the answer was always no.

We were held up slightly at the entrance to the Monte Carlo parking area. Security personnel were the last to learn that the guests were being allowed back in. Three Ring was about to go out and knock some heads when they got the word. We were among the first to reenter the hotel. The point person greeting the buses was clearly shaken and overwhelmed. Three Ring hugged her and told her what a fantastic job she was doing.

Hundreds of MGM employees were in the lobby, every one of them greeting us, most apologizing. We could only continually thank them for their superb efforts, as we had been doing all day. Security and damage claim forms were quickly processed at the check-in desks, and they ran down the recovery procedures for our possessions. We showed ID and room cards, then were escorted in fours up to our floor. There two staffers accompanied us to our room, one bellman and another woman who maintained the checklist for the procedure. It was her second week on the job for MGM.

Everything in our room was fine. We packed up and got out quickly, deeply impressed by the courtesy and professionalism of the staff. Three Ring took more names as we headed back to the Signature Suites.

One of the few hassles was when I called to reschedule our airport shuttle. I told the lady that obviously since we had been staying at the Monte Carlo, our afternoon shuttle had been cancelled. She started in on me for not calling them to cancel (while we were watching our hotel burn). She regained her perspective when Three Ring yelled from across the room "YOU FUCKING IDIOT, DIDN'T YOU WATCH THE FUCKING TV TODAY?" He has such a delicate way of putting things.

The next morning, we ate breakfast with the Chicagoans. They received word that they would not be allowed back to their room, or what was left of it, for at least another day. I suggested that they go to the front desk and get MGM to get them some new clothes, something I am sure they would oblige. We bade our farewells and left.

At the airport, US Airways had handled our flight change so quickly that I hadn't had time to get the old e-ticket out of my suitcase pocket. They comped our drinks on the flight. Three Ring took more names down.

And then we were home.

Two very conflicting impressions of my trip remain. The first was my initial revulsion to the seedy underbelly of Las Vegas. My photo of the hotel fire is quite symbolic. The facade was not real, it was a fake mix of styrofoam and a glitzy covering, a poor facsimile of reality. It did not take much to peel that back - the fire spread so quickly and totally obliterated the facade, leaving a blackened, smoky skeleton underneath, foul and dirty. Vegas is still like that - don't buy into the ad campaigns.

Conversely, the hundreds of people who assisted us showed us the very best that Las Vegas could offer, something that cannot be manufactured or merchandised. That is the lasting impression that I will keep in my heart.

What happens in Vegas goes on CNN

2008-01-27T10:43:00.000-08:00

Part one of two featuring the exploits of Three Ring and Yours Truly.

Last week I had the opportunity to go to Las Vegas for a trade show. There were a mere 100,000 attendees and it took us several days just to walk the entire show floor. My business associate, henceforth known as Three Ring, and I learned a great deal and came away from the show confident that our new venture will be successful.

Vegas has never been on my list of desired destinations, though I had a secondary incentive to go there. Selmer has recently set up five Selmer Pro Shops in the USA and all of them are on the East Coast except for Kessler Music in Vegas. They stock a full line of Selmer instruments and accessories.

I had phoned them in advance of my trip and I learned that they had a lot of Selmer's special series of sax necks. Getting a new neck for my bari made a huge difference. I highly recommend Phil Barone's line of bari necks. But for my tenor, I wanted to try out Selmer's sterling silver necks and their special booster neck that has interior spiral grooves designed to focus the air column inside the horn. Dave Kesseler told me that they had lots of choices in stock.

When I had a gap in my schedule, I grabbed my tenor from my hotel and hopped a cab to their shop, fairly far away from The Strip. They presented me with a Selmer alto case that had the interior modified to hold more than a dozen various necks. I had at them until the store closed. In the end, I was satisfied that the original neck for my horn was the best match. The sterling silver necks were good and had a brighter, somewhat thinner sound, not what I was looking for. The booster neck was a dud. So in the end, I bought nothing, which was fine with me. Nevertheless, one of the family members, Mark Kessler, insisted on driving me back to my hotel, something way above the call of duty. I was totally impressed with this offer and we had a very enjoyable drive back. This was the first time I had met a person in Vegas who showed a real quality of openness and generousity. It was not to be the last.

For more on Kessler Music and their Selmer Pro Shop, check out their website. They have my highest recommendation.

My initial impressions of The Strip in Vegas were not good. Everything is on a huge scale, all manufactured in a phony manner. Massive theme hotels. Smoke-filled casinos. Overpriced shows. Nothing was free, other than crappy drinks served in the casinos. The cheap buffet is non-existent these days.

There was a seedy sexual undercurrent everywhere. In a country where fundamentalist fanatics continue to spread their own special brand of oppression, this is a city where people come to let loose. Suburban housewives dress like tramps and become indistinguishable from the numerous hookers. Breast implants are the norm, with varying degrees of aesthetic success. Guys strutting around with whores or wannabe whores on their arms, smoking big dog-turd cigars, as if that made them special. Latinos standing on every available space on the sidewalk, handing out cards for an escort service (girls to your room in 20 minutes). They'd give the cards to kids, asking them to pass them to their dad. They'd snap the cards as you walk past, creating a growing irritation with each snap. There were huge video billboards promoting strip shows, newspaper boxes full of ads for escort services.

I could not see how they could have the gall to market this city as a family destination. How could I ever bring my daughter here? We spoke with lots of locals - cabbies, waitresses, hotel workers. They all said Las Vegas was not a good place to bring up a family.

That said, 6,000 people move to the city every month, now with a permanent population of more that 2 million. Millions more visit each month. Construction in Vegas puts Vancouver's Olympic boom to shame. There was a $7 billion development immediately beside our massive hotel, actually surrounding it on two sides. Construction went on round the clock, and they had built their own cement batching plant across the street to service its requirements.

Our hotel had a dismal interior, despite its huge faux-neoclassical exterior. The front doors were too small in comparison to the facade, betraying the low ceiling of the casino inside. It was not one of the happening places on the strip. The casino was usually pretty empty, with sullen gamblers affixed to their slots or blackjack tables. There were none of the Beautiful People that populate TV and movie depictions of this city. A creepy magician had a permanent show in the hotel. The food was overpriced and unsatisfying. The room that Three Ring and I shared was quite satisfactory - we simply disliked the rest of the hotel.

I won a tidy amount on just my third pull ever on a slot machine. Once I determined that there was no new tenor neck in my future, that was my gambling money. I don't think that it's a coincidence that spending a dollar or less on a slot is the only cheap thing on The Strip. They get you in the end. I broke even on the trip.

With everything going on, I figured I'd be able to hear some decent jazz on The Strip. I was wrong. I saw a piano/bass duo at a bar in The Bellagio. They told me that real jazz is long gone from Las Vegas. There was only one lone jazz club in town well off the beaten path. I never maded it there.

Three Ring and I made ever-expanding forays trying to find some place we would like. He couldn't get around too well, especially after walking the trade show for at least 6 hours each day. On his previous trip, in Mexico last Christmas, he fell down a hole and cracked a vertebra in his lower back. The trip before that, to the Maritimes in August, he had a heart attack. Hence the name Three Ring, as in Circus. Two weeks ago we had joked that he shouldn't take another trip.

Here's a shot I took of our hotel on what was supposed to have been our last day there. Our room is in the lower left hand corner.

Seriously.

I only had time to get dressed and grab one thing, my saxophone.

Conditional acceptance

2008-01-06T23:30:00.000-08:00

Re my New Years Day post, as my memory of gawdawful rehearsals begins to fade in a manner akin to forgetting the actual pain of a broken limb, a natural disaster, or being trapped in an elevator with the Kenny G muzak set on repeat.

Yes, I would do it again, on two conditions:

1.) I run the rehearsals.
2.) They get satin jumpsuits for the horn section. With wings. Or a cape. I like capes.

My trinity

2008-01-02T00:18:00.000-08:00

As 2007 drew to a close, I reflected on having a very good year, with the promise of 2008 being even better. Many things have fallen into place and some of my long-term efforts have begun to bear fruit.

It occurred to me that three people have been very important in my adult development as a musician, something that is on a very slow, but steady track.

The first is Kate Hammett-Vaughan, whom I have known since my first year of university, one of my oldest friends. Now that she is of a certain age, I should rather say ours is one of my longest friendships. She has inspired me many times over, and after we both moved to Vancouver just a couple of years apart, she opened my eyes to the possibilities of improvised music, both with her great trio Garbo's Hat and with the NOW Orchestra.

Next is Stan Karp, who is the most amazing teacher of the saxophone. He has given me the tools to become a much better player than I could have hoped. His dedication, enthusiasm, patience and support over the last dozen years is unmatched. I am being totally selfish when I say I hope he never stops teaching, and I'm sure many of his students would agree.

Finally there is Hugh Fraser, who gave me the confidence to step up and play with the big boys. He encouraged me to start composing again and enabled me to have my pieces performed and recorded by wonderful groups of the most amazing people. My most intense and life-changing musical experiences have been working with him and the guest artists he attracted, like Maria Schneider and Chucho Valdes.

I owe these three people everything and I feel compelled to make that acknowledgement public.

If there was a fourth person I could add to my triumvirate, my fifth Beatle as it were, it would be Coat Cooke. Especially over the last few years, working with him has afforded me many great opportunities, and certainly the ion Zoo cd would not have been released this year without his vision and support.

Now of course, nothing happens in a vacuum and there are many, many people who have been and continue to be important in my musical life. Particularly, there are my bandmates in my two main groups: Carol, Wanda, Lisa, Chris, Clyde, Mark and Tom. Without a doubt, there is my wife Clara, who endured dating me back in the prog rock years and has supported me right up to my latest New Years ordeal, has been an unwavering support. And the many musicians that I've worked with in Vancouver, Seattle and Banff. The list grows ever larger, spreading out to the big names in jazz and improvised music who inspire me, some of whom I have had the honour to work with in some manner.

The music I play does not occur in the isolation of a bedroom or a studio. It takes a very large community indeed. And lately I've been feeling very grateful. Maybe tomorow I'll get cynical again, but hopefully not.

What the hell was I thinking?

2008-01-01T11:24:00.000-08:00

As the year wound down, I found myself face to face with a second trip back to my days as a teenage musician.

When I was in grade 12, I got a call out of the blue from a guitarist who led a horn band. He asked me to come try out at a rehearsal. I had been recommended by a pro sax player whom I hardly knew.

At the time, I knew absolutely nothing about this type of music, being a prog rock type. That was a style of music notably deovoid of saxophones, with King Crimson as the occasional exception. But with horn bands, the big names were Chicago, Blood Sweat & Tears, Tower of Power, Earth Wind & Fire and thanks to cancon, Lighthouse. I had previously learned exactly one piece from the entire repetoire of these groups. Thanks to my extensive K-Tel collection, once I had gotten it into my head to learn the Lighthouse hit One Fine Day.

By pure coincidence, that was the piece that the band chose to audition me on and I played it from memory. So I was in. And in way over my head. Fortunately, they had great charts, all beautifully handwritten. I went out and bought a whole bunch of vinyl and got to work. And I had to go over to Halifax and join the musicians' union. I was thrilled and a bit intimidated, as I thought I would have to pass some sort of competency test. The only criterion was whether or not I had the joining fees, which the band leader had fronted me.

So in no time, I was playing all over the province, having a lot of fun with these guys. Their book was pretty heavy on Chicago tunes, which I really loved playing. The other two horn players were also high schoolers, as was the drummer, but they were some of the best young players in town. They pretty quickly figured out I was not. They replaced me as soon as they could, when I said that my mom was forcing me to miss a gig in order to attend my high school graduation. The band leader drove across town to fire me in person - it was a terrible feeling and I was pissed off at my mother for a long time.

As it turned out, my replacement, a much better funk player, didn't last long and I ended up playing off and on with these guys for about four years. We had a lot of laughs, doing all the stuff that a bunch of young guys do on the road. Many of the guys in the band went on to be fine career musicians.

Now to the present: by early December, I knew that I probably wouldn't have a New Years gig with Wanda and the boys, unusual but not unexpected given the current dearth of gigs in town. Our bassist took another gig and he asked me if I'd be interested in join him in doing a horn band gig. I knew some of the players, most of them good, but I had my doubts about the leader. Mark told me they would be doing a lot of Earth, Wind & Fire, so for the sake of nostalgia, and despite the pay not being too great, I said yes.

At this point, please refer back to the title of this blog entry.

This was a brand new band. The rhythm section had been rehearsing for a few weeks. The plan was for the horn section to come in on the last two rehearsals Dec 29 and 30, and the singers who had been rehearsing separately would join us on those nights.

(Note: After a couple of days, I've decided to go back and edit this post. Suffice it to say that the rehearsals leading up to the gig were the worst I've ever had. I needed to vent a bit, but I think it was dull reading.)

The final rehearsal came and we still had about five tunes that we had not played as a group. Again there were lots of surprises. Good times. By the end of the night, we still hadn't actually run the set in its entirety. But at least, I felt we wouldn't totally embarrass ourselves.

I had a good sign while getting ready for New Years Eve. I put on a pair of gig pants that I hadn't been able to fit for a long time, and found the pay from a gig years ago still in the pocket. I considered that cash as a raise for my efforts on the coming night.

As it turned out, it wasn't a bad gig at all. We weren't super tight, but given your typical New Years crowd, nobody noticed. A good rehearsal or two would have made all the difference.

I considered it a privelege just to play this great music again after 30 years.

So if the call comes again, will I do it?

Confessions of a teenage prog-rocker

2007-12-26T13:36:00.000-08:00

This is not the post that I'd intended to write today, but Oscar Peterson's recent passing triggered this memory. Why I'm compelled to make it public beats me, but it was the one time that I met him.

I was never into jazz as a kid. My folks were MOR listeners, Dad into the Ray Conniff Singers and the like, and my mom finding nirvana with Englebert Humperdinck and Tom Jones. We weren't allowed to have rock and roll records until I was in grade 9. The first lp we got was Abbey Road, an album I still listen to, unusually good taste in retrospect. From there, I listened to whatever was in with my friends at school. We had a pretty impressive collection of K-Tel records, but who didn't back then?

One day, one of my friends in music class brought in some "classical rock", namely Emerson, Lake and Palmer's Pictures at an Exhibition. I was hooked. This was something way beyond what I had been listening to and gave a purpose to the classical music I was studying in school. Soon I was into it whole hog: Genesis, Yes, King Crimson and a token American group, Gentle Giant. I'll confess it now - I was a teenage prog-rocker.

Everything is absolute when you're sixteen. ELP was the shit for me. Nobody was better. In my world, Keith Emerson was the best piano/organ/synth player on the planet (even better that that showboater Rick Wakeman - I mean, anyone could wear a gold cape!); Carl Palmer was the greatest thing ever to hold drumsticks (way better than Ringo); and nobody could sing like Greg Lake. OK, Chris Squire was better on bass (I loved his Rickerbacker 4001 sound), and his Yes bandmate Steve Howe was the ultimate guitarist (like, Jimmy Page totally sucked dog farts in comparison, no, dead dog farts.)

But the star was Keith Emerson. I loved his Moogs - what classic sounds. I dug the way he would get under his B3, lean it on top of him, reach over and still keep playing. Sometimes he'd light it on fire. For me, the big thing was his piano playing, even when he wasn't strapped into that grand piano that spun through the air. I especially loved his boogie woogie bits - I thought that's when he let go of his classical training and really let his hair down. He was God.

With two of my high school classmates, we formed a progressive rock group, my first real band. Paralandra was an interesting footnote in Nova Scotia's rock history, its only true prog band, with some minor measure of success. Kurt, our keyboard player, initially copied not only Emerson's keyboard setup, but had the same shag haircut.

Auditioning for university, one of my pieces was The Old Castle by Mussorgsky. They may have thought it was because it was one of the few compositions that had crept into classical sax repertoire, but I really chose it because of ELP.

My first-year roommate turned out to be a fine jazz drummer (now lost to Scientology somewhere in California, but that's another story). That first weekend at Acadia, he unwittingly changed my life when he played Kind of Blue, turning me on to Miles. He had a pretty good collection and he would put a different album on the record player every night, and we would doze off listening to all of this fantastic jazz. Someone would wake up in the middle of the night, probably due to that skipping sound at the end of the record, and turn the stereo off.

Bill had no tolerance for my prog-rock fetish, at least at first. Finally he let me put on something, and knowing I had only one chance, I picked the most awesome ever Carl Palmer drum solo from Brain Salad Surgery. That did him in - he was one of us. I was anxious to show him what an excellent jazz player Keith Emerson was. So I played him my favourite cut, but he was unimpressed, saying that Emerson was simply ripping off Oscar Peterson.

I was devasated. Even when he played lots of Oscar for me, I couldn't accept it. Sure, there was no question that Emerson was copying Oscar's style to the note, but c'mon, Keith Emerson was God.

Later that year, Oscar played a solo concert at Halifax's Rebecca Cohn Auditorium. Bill, Kurt and I had to go. It was my first true jazz concert. I was totally caught up in Oscar's magnificent stage presence, and worshipped that thundering left hand. I have no idea of what tunes he played, not having any real grasp of jazz repertoire at the time, but loved it anyway. He made me proud to be a Canadian. I allowed in my heart of hearts that maybe, just maybe, he was better than Keith Emerson.

Bill insisted that we wait outside the stage door to talk with him. We stopped Oscar as he came out by himself. Bill asked him about Ed Thigpen, and he graciously answered, probably the same answer the had given a thousand times before. "Ed Thigpen?" I recall asking myself, "Who cares about Ed Thigpen?" We needed to discuss something much more important.

I shook Oscar's hand, and was astounded by its size. It seemed to wrap around mine twice - I guess that's what's needed for a thirteenth reach. We hit him with our trump card. "What do you think about Keith Emerson?" He smiled and told us that he had just recently been in London and taped a TV show with Keith. We were awestruck - it must have been musical perfection.

He excused himself after a couple of minutes and left the theatre. We were ecstatic.

Now, all these years later, just before writing this post, with the help of YouTube, I finally saw this meeting of musical giants for the first time, for what it really was - a plain, old-fashioned ass-kicking of a self-indulgent rock star. And Oscar wasn't even getting warmed up in the three scant choruses he played, it was nothing fancy, his playing was just really deep. He had that same gracious look on his face as when we were speaking. I don't think he was being condescending or competitive, he appeared to be just enjoying life, happy to be making music.

He was a truly great man. He rocks.

Mea culpa

2007-12-18T13:47:00.000-08:00

I was chided last evening for not having posted anything in a long time. Guilty as charged.

Times have been busy indeed, and blogging slipped down the priority list. Then as significant events came and went, I felt things were just getting a bit too backlogged to write about them all. In the end, entropy won out.

I'll try to remedy that with a not-so-brief catchup and a resolution to be a bit more regular with my posting.

The NOW workshops that I have been hosting held a couple of surprises in the weeks just prior to the release of the ion Zoo cd.

Hugh Fraser crossed the great waters to do a workshop, using some themes that I was familiar with, but as usual he put a new twist on things. It was very interesting how quickly I recaptured that feeling of being at Banff with Hugh, and how deeply I was affected by recalling many of the experiences that I had up there. I felt very much in the flow of life for the following couple of weeks. I believe that Hugh is a carrier of that vibe and it recharged my creative batteries just spending a bit of time with him.

The following week, the workshop featured Christine Duncan, another longtime collaborator of Hugh's. Last summer, I had the idea of doing conduction just with singers, using the same techniques as I have done with instrumentalists, but I never developed that concept. Meanwhile, Christine was exploring the same concept in Toronto, and has come up with a system far better than I could ever have done. (If I'd only registered the idea, like "eco-density", I could have made a mint from her. Another opportunity lost...) Her workshop was fantastic, and the seven singers who have been regular participants were pretty stoked afterwards.

That evening, she was the featured performer at The Cellar, and working with db Boyko, another great singer, their performance was without a doubt one of the most moving of any of the Monday nights since their conception. There was a vocal duet between Christine (playing theremin) and db (on tuned wine glasses) that was pure magic, improvisation at its absolute finest. Christine also asked a number of people to sit in, most of them very significant in the history of the improvised music scene in this city, Gregg Simpson, Ralph Eppel, Paul Plimley, Brad Muirhead, to name just a few. I was totally honoured to be asked to sit in for a couple of pieces.

Later that week the NOW Orchestra playing their 30th anniversary concert with guest artist Amina Claudine Meyers. It was one of their best shows in recent years, with the standout piece being composed by Ron Samworth.

The following Monday saw the cd release party for ion Zoo at The Cellar. All in all, it was quite successful. I wish all of the people who said they were going to go actually made the effort to do so, but that is life. Nonetheless, the performance actually answered a question that I had as to the future direction of the group. After having listened endlessly to the cd through the production process, I was wondering how the group would continue to evolve. And we certainly did, with the cd symbolically giving us even more confidence to boldly dive into the improvisatory abyss.

Damn, that last sentence is pretty clunky. I'll try to explain. Although we really don't have to prove anything to anybody (other than ourselves), having released a cd in the way we have lends a sense of legitimency to our efforts. We are getting good unsolicited feedback on the disc and it reinforces that we are on the right track as a group, still staying true to the original concept behind the formation of the group, exploring song form in an improvised setting. So the feeling at the cd release was similar to being Sally Field at the Oscars. Musicians want to be liked for their efforts. And thanks to Femke van Delft for the photos that night!

I also felt much more confident playing percussion for the group, to the point where I may leave my horns at home for a gig in the coming year. It was also an insight for me to hear how seamlessly Clyde or Lisa or even Carol will switch to a percussive style of improvising when I picked up a horn, instinctively picking up on that element of the music.

Next up were three performances by Bugs Black Blood, at The Cellar, 1067 and The Western Front. The large ensemble's playing far exceeded my original expectations. In particular, I thought Carol Sawyer and the drummer in ion Zoo's original lineup, Joel Lower, gave consistent standout performances. I was also priveleged to lead the group through two of my compositions: Axes, my first ever large ensemble composition for the Hugh Fraser Jazz Orchestra Workshop in 2003, and Out of the Box, which I wrote for VCMI in 2005. I had not been able to perform Axes in Vancouver previous to this, so it was a treat to have some time to let the piece develop through several performances. It was also great to see Coat Cooke, who pulled this project together, having fun leading the group and taking us through some wild conductions.

What else? Early in December, we had the performance that culminates the fall improv workshop series. This was the first year that I hosted virtually all of the workshops and we had a consistent core of fifteen musicians who did the final show. The particpants are asked to create the pieces for the performance, and they did a fine job in the dress rehearsal workshop, pulling everything together as smoothly as I have ever seen in the dozen years that I've been associated with these workshops.

From year to year you never know what sort of musicians will attend the workshops, and what instruments will be there. This year we were distinguished by having a fairly experienced group (as opposed to the majority being rank beginners), a really strong vocal contingent of seven female singers, and the near total absence of a rhythm section. We had two guitarists, and a guy who got the most out of a single floor tom. One of the sax players also doubled on percussion. So groove was out, with no drum kit, bass or piano, but they chose other improvisatory paths. The concert was a very good one, again the group exceeded my expectations. A multimedia piece written by Margot Butler was particularly effective, but I was happy with everyone's efforts.

I had a number of other gigs along the way, like another skronkfest at The Cobalt and a few nice ones with Wanda and the boys. So typical of what's going on here in Vancouver, but not unique to this city, there seems to be a dearth of straight up jazz gigs available right now. (Disclaimer: I know that there are lots of players who continue to keep busy, but quite a number of first-call guys are telling me that things are unusually slow.) It's been tough for someone like Wanda, who doesn't have many performing opportunities outside of her group. And it's a shame that group isn't busier now. I think that during this past year we have developed into a band that really entertains and can get a crowd into the music. Wanda has always had a knack for that and the rest of us are just catching up to her.

Here's to more great gigs for everyone in the new year.

The Lacquer Theory

2007-10-30T16:36:00.000-07:00

Ever wonder why some players have saxophones that remain shiny and bright, and other guys have horns that are all dull and worn looking?

OK, all the non-sax nerds have just hit the back button on their browsers. This leaves only my fellow sax weenies, so read on.

Many of the good players I know have vintage saxes that look like shit. But these guys can play the snot out of them, so who cares? Of course I am not referring to any of those new horns with the faux-antique finish, or gold or silver plated horns. They don't count.

Long ago, I conceived of The Lacquer Theory. Simply put, the good players have put in so much time on their horns that the lacquer is vibrated off. The cruddier looking the sax, the better the player. Some guys claim it's the acidity in their skin, or some other cause, but I'm sticking with my theory. I know some guys who have acid-dipped their sax to get that antique look - that's cheating.

In the last couple of years, I've been fortunate enough to spend a bit of time with some great improvising musicians like Evan Parker and John Butcher, gleaning whatever I can. It takes a great while for me to assimilate even a bit of what I've learned from them. Lately, I feel my soprano playing is really getting there.

Today, I noticed that horn has "the cancer". Lacquer is disappearing throughout its entire length and off the keys too. A little green gunk is building up around the pearls. Sure, it's been 30 years since I bought it new, but I am discounting age as the prime factor. I'm only looking at evidence that supports my theories, not actual facts. They just get in the way - ask the Bush adminstration.

As far as I'm concerned, it's proof positive in my books.

Another concept of mine is the Perry Proximity Postulate. When I was younger, I figured that if you lurked close enough to PJ at his gigs, you would simply get better through osmosis. Woodshedding was not required. The proof for this one has been a bit more elusive.

Others in the works:

The Axe Axiom - if it's not a Selmer, it's crap
The Tequila Theorem - the more you drink, the better I sound
The Hype Hypothesis - the bigger the talk in the music store, the lamer the player

one down, one to go

2007-10-16T19:46:00.000-07:00

Today I gave the final go-ahead to the cd pressing company, and in time for our cd launch event, ion Zoo will have its first cd out for public consumption. Distributed by Cellar Live, this is the first release on the new NOW Orchestra Records label. Our launch party is November 19th at where else, but The Cellar.

I have to say that I am quite humbled to have this opportunity. There are so many great musicians and fine recordings in the Cellar Live roster, I am indeed honoured to be associated with this label. And Cory deserves a big shout out for supporting this offshoot of the label. This musical style may not be to his personal taste, but he's been very supportive of this project. Who knows, maybe it'll be a hit in Uzbekestan, or one of those stans.

The act of recording of the cd was quite unremarkable, because everything went so smoothly. A whole different set of aesthetics comes into play with totally improvised music, very different from straight-ahead jazz. Yet, many of the same finely-developed musical skills are required to make the performance effective and engaging, and we have rehearsed and gigged for years to get to that point as a group.

People have described good improvisation as composition speeded up. (John Korsrud calls the process of composition "improvisation slowed down".) We feel that we are pretty good at spontaneously composing in performance, so the performance itself usually feels like very little work. The act of making music becomes more and more effortless.

In contrast, it feels like like a lot of effort has been put into the production of the cd post-recording. Certainly Raymon Torchinsky did an excellent job with the initial recording. Though he's way too modest to admit it, he's really good at it. Carol and I spent many enjoyable hours at Chris Gestrin's place mixing it down, and really appreciated Chris's many contributions to the process. Another guy with ears like a bat, that Chris. He simply hears stuff many people don't. If he was similarly talented in the wine or perfume business, he'd be a "nose". So I guess he's an "ear".

It took some time to get all the proper arrangements to be set up between NOW, The Cellar and our group, being the guinea pigs for all future artists on this series of recordings. I don't think there were any particular conflicts, it just was not the top priority on anyone's list, so things dragged out.

The graphic design was a challenge. The new label is to have a consistent look as a unified series of releases. This was where more concensus was required, to negotiate a balance between the designer, NOW and us as the creative artists. We had a good number of photos of the band to work with, but not single great band shot. Carol and I both have a certain amount of skill behind a camera, but we know better than to try to shoot ourselves during a performance. Eventually we came up with enough shots for the cd, electing to go with an abstract image on the cover. This whole process felt like work to me. Group entropy set in more than once, and it was good that there was always someone willing to move things ahead.

In the end, the design company, Vanilla Five, came up with something that everyone could get behind. If they are good enough to work for Frank Gehry, then they're more than good enough for us.

The work's not over, as now we move into the distribution phase and ensuring that it gets into the right hands.

So the effortless improv stands in contrast to the work required to put an actual cd on the shelves, a medium that may become obsolete in the near future. But we plow ahead, regardless.

That leaves the other cd, by Wanda and the boys, to finish off. Recording costs got out of hand and the budgeted funds got spent all too quickly. We're optomistic that we can finalize the remainder of the financing in the next couple of weeks, and then get it mastered, licensed and pressed by year's end. That would be a nice Christmas present for the band.

It's interesting to reflect on the similarities and differences of the two projects. Going into the studio versus one take live off the floor, each way has a totally different creative process coming into play. Both have been invaluable experiences.

Bassless ruminations

2007-10-04T20:11:00.000-07:00

What a welcome change to play an improv gig at a place with a nice large stage, a Steinway, and with sound, light and stage crew. Someone even carried my gear for me out to the car afterwards, not a small undertaking.

The theatre out at Simon Fraser had everything we needed, though I guess they could have thrown in some catering, at least some red M&Ms. The only hitch was that our bassist had an obligation to be approximately 300 feet due north of us at the exact time of our gig. The fall convocation was going on and Dr. Clyde Reed of the SFU Economics Dept. was called upon by the university president to host a visiting luminary from the world of economics. He's a friend of Clyde's and was going to be recieving an honorary PhD, his umpteenth such honour. Clyde could not say no to this duty, so we went bassless.

But we did not suffer, as we were most pleased to have Peggy Lee fill in on cello, which she did most wonderfully. We had to play only one 45-minute set, which turned out to be three improvs, and before we knew it, we were done. I was just getting warmed up.

My only previous experience playing with Peggy was many years ago at a NOW workshop, where we did a duet. I was in awe of playing with such a fine musician and a bit giddy in hearing how well a tenor sax and a cello went together. Today I was certainly much more at ease, and felt we only scratched the surface of this particular configuration. That said, I missed having Clyde with us as well, as there is a lot to be said for the value of having years of playing together.

We were well received, but I've gotta say, my biggest thrill was having the band up on the marquee outside the theatre. Who does marquees anymore? You can see the convocation going on in the background.

Apparently the concert was free.

Downstairs Monday nights

2007-09-29T17:13:00.000-07:00

The Monday night series at The Cellar continues to get better and better. I've already mentioned the opening night with the Gord Grdina Trio.

Next up was the Aeroplane Trio. JP Carter is one of my favourite trumpeters in town, the antithesis of a stereotypical swaggering big band lead player. I've often seen him play with very introspective extended technique, and with Aeroplane, he has a chance to demonstrate a greater breadth of his range, not to mention a bone-dry wit. Russell Sholberg simply gets better every time I hear him, which has been fairly frequently lately. And Skye Brooks is totally solid on drums, unpredictable and supportive.

I've taken a fair number of pictures of these guys in the past, but I am particularly partial to this one of Skye.

Last week was the evening for Stefan Smulovitz and Viviane Houle. They have been working together as a duo for a few years now and it definitely shows. Viviane has always been a captivating singer, continuously refining her unique and very personal approach. They premiered an improvised song cycle, and I was suprised to find out after the fact that she had not let Stefan as much as look at the text, let alone rehearse it, until just before they performed. Could have fooled me, and it did, as I was sure that they had worked out a few sections in advance. That's just a real indication as to how close there musical and personal connections are, and it's certainly how free improvisation can be really elevated. Both of them have the confidence and faith in each other to leap into the abyss and know that the other will be there to support them.

I have to mention that I was really impressed with Stefan's continued evolution with his Kenaxis software, which he developed for laptop. In the wrong hands, and usually at the wrong volume, a laptop can totally usurp a musical performance with a barrage of samples and cliched processing - if I hear one more piece end with a sampled loop being speeded up and shifted higher in pitch, I will puke. Not to fear with Stefan at the controls though - he was always the height of sensitivity and musicality. I would go as far to say that he proved that in the proper hands, a Kenaxis-driven laptop in no longer technology, it is a musical instrument.

Next up, the inimitable Lisa Miller with her group edgeeffect. There is a greater compositional component than with our collaboration in ion Zoo. With Ron Samorth, Jeremy Berkman and Jesse Zubot on the bandstand, more great music can be expected this coming Monday evening.

For more info visit the NOW website.

Gongs and wayward girls: heavy metal redux

2007-09-16T22:12:00.000-07:00

As exciting as the local improv scene is looking, our neighbours, er, neighbors to the south have us trumped in one department. They have a series that is being presented in one hell of a venue. Well, maybe hell is not the best choice of words, but then again...

Last night I played at Seattle's Good Shepherd Centre, er, Center in the Wallingford area. It's located in a former Catholic school for wayward young women, with the performance space located in what was previously the chapel. There are stained glass windows on two sides, a 28-foot high ceiling, and with a beautiful hardwood floor. Performance features include a slightly raised stage area, white backdrop, theatrical lighting and lots of pro PA equipment. And a 9' concert grand piano. And a beautiful natural sound in the room.

Since last January, 10 nights a month, Nonsequitur has been presenting new and improvised music. Seattle area musicians have embraced this space and it is now fully booked 9 months in advance.

I was invited down to play with Dean Moore, reprising the evening we did in May at 1067. Joining us was Sha'ari Garfinkle, also of Seattle, who also has an extensive and very impressive collection of gongs. In all, we had over 30 true gongs, plus dozens of bells, chimes and cymbals. Paiste should have been sponsoring the evening - we had so much of their gear. I don't have any of their gongs, all of mine being Chinese styles from Wuhan, but I do have over a dozen of Paiste's special percussive cymbals, ranging from 13" down to 4" in diameter. Dean and Sha'ari own Paiste gongs up to 40" across. Yet for all of the dozens of instruments onstage, the three of us only had one instrument in common, a 6" Paiste bell chime, and even those were pitched differently. In other words, there was a tremendous range of different metal percussion, set up in a large U shape around the audience.

We used this spatial arrangement to our advantage, the three of us moving around all of the racks, constantly shifting the sound around the audience. Many later reported having profound listening experiences. The great acoustics of the room permitted us to really explore the possibilities of the collected instruments.

We played two improvised sets, both with preplanned arcs. In the first, we were more frenetic and we introduced a few other instruments to give variety to the timbres. After about 20 minutes, I played an extended soprano sax solo, with Dean on a hand drum, then Sha'ari replaced me on a Native American flute. The other non-metal instrument I had was my pandeiro, but even with that, I played it in non-traditional ways, using rosined bamboo skewers to produce cuica-like moans out of it.

In the second set, Sha'ari drew upon her profession as a music therapist, guiding the audience through meditation and healing sound. Dean and I are not practitioners of this aspect of gong music, but were happy enough to participate in the process. Some of the audience were definitely into this sort of therapy and were quite moved by the music we created. Or maybe it was just the gut-shaking rumbles from Dean's massive Balinese gong.

Previous to the gig, we discussed some strategies for improvising, just making sure our varied approaches to the instruments would be OK with each other. And we were also OK with allowing each other to respectfully play each other's instruments. These gong guys can become pretty protective of their stuff.

Sha'ari is into the healing sound and Dean approaches it as a drummer who respects the tradition of gong music, both of them tending towards more beautiful consonant sounds, building up washes of overtones starting from the deep fundamental tones of the big gongs. I come at it as the free improviser, sometimes supporting the musical choices, sometimes subverting things. That may mean that I would choose to make sounds that were more "ugly", more random, more frenetic, yet still striving to be musical choices. Often that meant I would do these sorts of things at a considerably lesser volume than the other two.

The result was an interpenetration of sounds, exactly the sort of thing we did in the Vancouver New Music John Cage show last year. I was making deliberate choices to create a richer and more complex group sound. I felt at times that the other two players would pick up on what I did, and then they would change their playing accordingly. Examples of that would be simply rubbing my palm in circles on the pandeiro, or lightly tinkling my pin chimes, while Dean and Sha'ari were creating big washes on the gongs.

Given the great acoustics of the room, the audience was hearing many of these things, and afterward, I got several comments about how my playing in this manner added depth to that sound.

And yes I will gladly admit to whacking the bejeezus out some of my stuff, if that's what was called for in the moment. I now have a very large thin china type cymbal that has a ton of different dark trashy sounds in it, whether bowing, scraping or striking it, the harder the better. And it was very cool to play some of these very large or hard-to-get instruments that we all had collected.

In the end, it was a very satisfying show for audience and musicians alike. Definitely, there will be more performances for this group.

Before going back to Dean's for the night, I went over to check out my old pal Paul Rucker, who was part of an installation art show, not too far away, as the crow flies, from our gig. I, on the other hand, got lost and got stuck on Hwy.99 all the way downtown to Safeco Field, before I could turn around. He was at a place called the Bridge Motel, in Fremont, just off Aurora. It's Seattle's answer to our Downtown East Side. The Bridge Motel is about to be demolished, and for one night, artists and scenesters took over every room of the building. Paul had set a laser-controlled video piece playing in his assigned room, the same room where on the previous day, a meth addict had given birth. Maybe she could have benefited from the Good Shepherd Centre, had it still been in its original incarnation. I looked down - there was a crack pipe on the rug. Upstairs, another artist had ripped the ceiling and roof off of his room, in order to have some sort of campfire singalong, symbolic of something that escaped me.

I never saw it in full swing, getting there just at midnight as the organizers were shutting it down at the scheduled time. Good thing, as it was starting to get out of hand with hundreds of people swarming over every inch of the motel.

I was just able to help Paul load out, and we made plans to play together again in the near future. He's currently commissioned to do 50 solo cello performances during the course of year, all improvised, often playing at schools and other places where the concept of free improvisation is fairly unknown. He's being really well received, which doesn't surprise me at all, knowing his musical talents and generosity of spirit. We attended Banff together, and it was the definitive turning point in his musical life.

I drove home today, worrying (needlessly, as it turned out) about getting hassled by Customs about bringing my instruments back over the line. Yet again, I was bridling at the stupidity of governments, particularly the current US Administration, for putting up such hostile barriers to the growth of ties between the artistic communities in Seattle and Vancouver. There is no rational reason why there should not be free movement of artists between these cities, reaching all the way down to Portland, and beyond. This whole area, Cascadia or whatever you want to call it (I like "Canadian Southwest"), has the potential for being one of the great world centres for creative music, yet is stifled in the name of Freedom. Go figure.

It ain't over yet

2007-08-27T10:09:00.000-07:00

People have been bemoaning the lack of a real summer here in Vancouver. Since I have no short term memory, once we get a half decent day, the summer seems pretty good to me. I am not one of those fatalists (though I am married to one) who sees one tree where the leaves have turned colour and immediately declares that summer is over. No, a cool evening breeze is just that, not the onset of winter. For me, summer ends sometime in October, then Gore-Tex season starts.

I made a deliberate choice a couple of months ago not to take on any new musical projects, and as a direct result, the last couple of months have been relatively light gigwise. Therefore I haven't been inclined to blog anything.

What I have been doing is practising - what a concept. It's the first casuality when I get busy with gigs because I usually practise in the evening. So it's been really great to just live with some things for a while. I've been working out of a couple of classical books (de la Sonorité -Moyse and 48 Famous Studies - Ferling) along with good ol' Top Tones, as well as a couple of Brazilian choros, then a bit of Bird and some blues to finish. This sort of approach is great for building tone and gaining greater control overall. I wish I had the time to get really deep into practice. I could get lost in the minutiae. Every nuance could be cut in half yet again. Time, time, time...

The most exciting musical moment of the summer was somewhat unexpected. I was accompanying my daughter on her summer camping trip in the Okanagan with Aché Brasil. It was the one hot weekend of July - high 30's for sure. Late one afternoon when most people were at the lake, I heard some snare drumming coming from across the campsite. Mestre Eclison de Jesus was showing a student some samba rhythms. I went over to listen and they invited me to join in, and I did as best I could on my pandeiro. More people joined in and the rhythms started getting deeper, and the music seemed to draw the people back from the lake. Then somebody started dancing and the samba kicked into high gear and everyone got into it. It felt like we were part of a street parade in Brasil.

After a while, I just couldn't keep up on pandeiro as my hands tired out. I switched over to a large double shaker, figuring I might be able to last longer, and the rhythms are the simplest. But after another hour, my arm felt like it was going to fall off. I couldn't come close to matching the endurance of these capoeiristas. I need to find some musical Viagra.

It went on with dozens of people dancing samba in the heat of the early evening and didn't let up until about 10:30 when the camp warden told us it was time to wind it down. They switched over to playing capoeira angola very quietly, with capoeira movements that were very slow and low to the ground, sort of the butoh version of this normally frenetic and athletic martial art, all illuminated by a single lantern on the floor. Capoeira angola is more about control and finesse, and how these people had the considerable strength needed to do it after all that dancing beats me.

With the heat, the dancing, the capoeira, the colour and the relentless rhythms, it was like a miniature trip to Brasil. And it had all been unplanned, growing organically from a few snare drum figures several hours earlier. It was totally cool to be part of it.

Too bad I didn't have my camera with me that evening - I probably couldn't have lifted it by the end of the samba. Here's a shot of the capoeira roda earlier in the day.

After that camp was done, we travelled down to Naramata to visit with some friends. I tried to talk Clara into stopping in at more that a few wineries, just for a taste, you know, but she has this thing about not getting pie-eyed at tasting rooms with kids in the car. Go figure. Oh, well, we will just have to score some gigs at some of those wineries...

Feeling more festive

2007-07-03T14:13:00.000-07:00

Until last Saturday, I saw very little of the jazz festival. Earlier in the week, most of what I did catch didn't turn my crank all that much, regardless of the reputation of the performers. And there were qualifications on the things I did like. As a ferinstance, family commitments kept me from staying for the whole of the very engaging Chadbourne/Lovens show at the Front.

I enjoyed Kate Hammett-Vaughan's gig at O'Doul's, but even that was marred by a mediocre sound system. There was some lovely vocal duetting between Kate and bassist Adam Thomas that deserved to be better heard.

What's the deal with that? One would think that at least during the festival, they could put in a decent PA. There was a nice piano upgrade courtesy of Mike Allen, but when you can't clearly hear the singing, even if you're sitting 10 feet away, it's a disappointment. And O'Doul's is always too noisy. The only way to counter the constant chatter is to have a clean, clear sound system. Is that asking for too much?

Coming off the roller coaster ride that was Friday evening, I finally had some time to catch some music at the Roundhouse, after I took Marianne down to Tsawwassen to catch the ferry to Victoria for her gig that night.

I walked into Festival Hall not knowing who was on. After hearing just a few notes, I knew one of the tenor players had to be George Garzone. Andrew Rathburn is a very talented sax player and has to be commended for the confidence in bringing his mentor along on tour. Garzone must live on another planet - his total conceptual approach to the horn was incredible. More than manual dexterity, this was the whole package. Between these two guys, there was some seriously heavy playing.

Zipping over to Vinny Golia's workshop, I was very stimulated by listening to his approach to playing multiple winds.

I had to race over to 1067 to pack up and load out the rest of my gear. Still shaken about the previous evening's wild swings, I had elected to split the loading out over two days. Then, it was back to catch Garzone and Rathburn's workshop. The banter between these two was entertaining, and there was some very significant information being served up about how to play the saxophone, some very advanced concepts. Garzone figured it was something anyone could pick up as long as they practised their asses off the the next 10-15 years.

From there Bruce Freedman and I went over to the Cultch to see the ICP Orchestra. After one set, the consensus was that it was not rocking our worlds. I wanted to hear more of Tobias Delius, which I could do on Sunday. Garzone had blown away the both of us for the day.

I was back at Festival Hall the next afternoon in time to catch Marianne's set. It sounded great and was well received, and all of her cds quickly sold out at the merch table. I was really happy to reconnect with my Banff buddy from last year, Jon Stewart. He sounded great with Marianne. Kelby McNayr was fantastic on drums, with a light, inventive touch. It could only have been better had it been in a slightly more intimate venue.

As that was wrapping up, Lisa Miller was garnering attention outside, hobbling around on crutches. Fortunately she had been wearing some pretty skookum boots when the car ran her down. Turned on its side, the boot sole had actually supported most of the weight of the car. So instead of a broken foot, or even a sprain, there was damage to her foot, but nowhere as bad as it could have been. It was her pedalling foot, but she thought she could make it through her gig well enough later that evening.

After doing a few errands, I had a chance to hang with Vinny over at Clyde's place before his gig that evening. It was very cool and conversation turned to the late Bill Green, who was the master multi-woodwind player in LA, and mentor to Stan Karp. All of the LA guys seem to have a Bill Green story.

I had to make a difficult choice about what show to catch. Lisa was at The Roundhouse, Rathburn/Garzone at Iroworks, or Vinny at The Cultch. I drove him over for the sound check and that sealed the deal. We heard the Indigo Trio do their sound check and they were killing. I had the pleasure of working with Nicole Mitchell at VCMI a few years back, and this time she was fronting a killer group, with Harrison Bankhead on bass and Hamid Drake drumming. So the Cultch it was, and I planned to finish off the night at Performance Works with the Kate Hammett-Vaughan Quintet. Perfect.

Vinny's set was most interesting. I've always been a fan of his playing, but the real suprise was bassist Ken Filiano playing on a bass borrowed from Clyde. This guy was absolutely rivetting, so musical, such chops, always surprising and supporting. In my opinion, this was not the case for the drummer. Of the people I spoke with afterwards, half loved him and half hated him. I thought his playing lacked transparency. It was so dense that it didn't let any of the rest of the music come through. I felt it forced Vinny to continually match that density, and Bobby Bradford just seemed to pull back from it all.

In stark contrast, Hamid Drake was absolutely awesome, living up to his reputation. Despite being a constant whirlwind over the kit with unbounded power, he was able to play in such a way that there was lots of room for the bass and flute. These three gave us a full-on dose of Chicago-style energy, grabbing the crowd by the throat and not letting up for the whole evening. Nicole was fantastic, getting more from her flutes than anyone I have ever heard. The bass was absolutely relentless, despite some sound glitches early on. These guys kicked ass, kicking long and hard. They did not let go until after 11:00pm, perhaps a bit long, but a most satisfying pummelling nonetheless. After I said my goodbyes to Nicole, it was too late to get over to Granville Island, much to my disappointment.

Plan B was to go to Ironworks to see Tobias Delius, and he was a treat. His tenor sound can fill a room, even when he's playing quietly. The band was crazy and great, perfect for the wrapup of the festival. Marianne worked the room like a fiend. On her crutches, Lisa was testament to the fact that no mere carload of yahoos was going to spoil her evening. I managed to drag Marianne away sometime after 2:00.

The next morning we had a brunch for everyone in the house plus Marianne's band, just before they split for Montreal. As a birthday present for me, I could not have asked for anything more than to have everyone around the table.

The festival was done for another year, and though I may have seen less acts than in previous years, I managed to catch the right ones.

extremes at 1067

2007-07-03T11:45:00.000-07:00

Marianne Trudel arrived at the airport Friday afternoon and the whirlwind began. In the midst of a national tour with her group, she has a talent at packing so much into her day that I can't keep up with her for too long. After a short rest at my place, she was off to the festival, catching up with people she hadn't seen in a year.

My main concern was preparing for the evening's ion Zoo gig at 1067. As per usual, I opted to go heavy rather than light. In addition to tenor sax and bass clarinet, I had to bring along our full sound system plus my full percussion setup. Despite arriving extra early at the venue, it took a couple of hours to clean up the stage area and then set everything up.

One thing that I was very sure of was that even though they had never previously performed together, Marianne and Lisa would be a great pairing. I have joked that 1067's pianos are in such bad shap that they are pre-prepared. Lisa and Marianne took quite a lot of time deciding how to alter each piano, then insert various objects between and on top of the strings, different ways of striking the strings, and talking strategies as to how to approach the modded pianos.

We had decided to play one extended set, starting off with just the two pianists. Other people would join in, as Bob Brookmeyer would put it, when it became inevitable. From the first notes, they established an immediate rapport and played a long time before I got the twitches and had to join in. The piece continued to evolve as Clyde and Carol came onstage. People would choose to lay out for extended periods and the music grew in a very natural way. It reached a very emotional peak, and then just as inevitably, it ended. A single improv lasted for an hour and half.

We all knew that something special had taken place, and the people in the audience (a reasonably good-sized crowd) all seemed to confirm our feelings. Our special thanks go to Blythe Polreis for handling the door and bar duties, and to Bruce Freedman who most unexpectedly show up with his .wav file recorder. I have yet to listen to it - setting aside another hour and a half to give it a careful listening is not something you do during festival time.

Everyone was feeling deeply moved, and we packed up feeling very satisfied with the evening's music. My thoughts centered on how to get this lineup recorded, and how we could ever set up a dual piano concert in future. To find a proper venue with two grand pianos, with permission to prepare them, is going to be a challenge indeed. And I thought it was hard enough selling Coastal on our standard lineup! No matter, the important thing was the fantastic music that was created that evening. From an emotional viewpoint, it was certainly on a level that surpassed the improv that I had seen during the Festival. We all had that buzz that comes from really connecting and creating something very significant.

As I was packing up, we heard a cry from the alley. We rushed out to see Lisa laying in the alley in great pain. As she was loading her Rhodes into Clyde's car, a carload of Granville St. yahoos drove by and hit her, stopping their expensive car on top of her foot. After some frantic discussion, they finally moved off her foot. The driver got out to check her out, and we got outside in time to see him jump back in the car and take off.

2007-06-24T23:37:00.000-07:00

What a friggin day

Weatherwise, I swear this was the screwiest day I have seen in ages.

I watched the forecasts all week long, torturing myself about the prospects for a decent day for our gig at Victory Square. The forecast varied day by day, station by station. As with any typical Vancouver day with unsettled weather, there was no predicting exactly what would happen.

It soon became apparent that there was no getting out of the forecast of rain for Sunday. I decided on a course of action. It could rain like hell in the morning, then clear up by noontime. Everyone would be happy. That was the best plan I could muster.

Saturday night we played a private function, not one of our best outings. I was beat when I got home. My daughter had one of those nights where she crawled into our bed in the middle of the night, meaning nobody got a decent night's sleep. I had two separate dreams about playing a jazz festival gig with guys I used play with 30 years ago, having arguments with the piano players onstage, the dreams ending with them walking off midset. Not a restful night at all and morning came way too soon.

The rain was coming down so hard around 7:00am that it woke me up. Not to worry - it cleared up by noon. My evil master plan was working to perfection.

Throughout the morning, I had a slight melancholy feeling, partially due to lack of sleep, but also thinking about Banff. The Maria Schneider concert would have been last night, and by this time, everyone would be leaving, going back to the real world. The magic would be over for another year, all too soon.

From my practice room window, I can look out the window over Georgia Strait almost all the way down to Victoria. At noon, the blue sky was starting to come out overhead, but I didn't want to acknowledge the black cloud blowing up the Strait from the southwest. At 1:00, we had to do some shopping in Richmond and when we left the store, it was pissing again. By the time we got back home, a 5-minute drive, it was nice again, with the sun peeking out.

I called Coat as soon as he got offstage from his Coat Cooke Trio gig, to see how it was at Victory Square. He said the rain had come out partway through his set, but about a third of the people stuck it out. They all split as soon as the music was over, but came back for the next act.

I spent the next hour getting ready for the gig, ignoring the next black cloud racing up the Strait. At 4:00, there was no ignoring it.

The cloud was huge and directly overhead when I heard the first crack of lightning. fuck

Then the hail started. About the size of peas, the ground in our neighbourhood was suddenly entirely white. double fuck

Then the deluge began, and there was a small river running down our street. fuckety fuck fuck

I figured the gig was toast. The rain was was so intense, I thought there would be no way anyone would stay in Gastown. But I had to go down, at least to show my face and justify getting paid. My mood was about as black as the cloud lingering overhead. There was no promise of a break, looking out to the southwest.

We all piled into the car, my family being game enough to tag along, rain still coming down in buckets. Partway downtown, Cassandra spotted a break in the clouds off to the west. As we crossed the Cambie St. bridge, the rain started easing up. A couple more minutes to Victory Square, and it was tolerable. It was a dramatic change over the course of the 20 minutes it took to get from home to the gig.

As we started our set, it was down to a very light drizzle, and then the sun came out bit by bit. It was a very neat effect, being inside the tent, seeing the rain backlit by the emerging sunlight. Then suddenly, we needed sunglasses. The warmth from the change in weather was most welcome as my horns were very cold starting off, which made them a bit finicky as far as the tuning.

The set itself was one of our best ever, and even Leaf, which has been so problematic for us, sounded great. A sizeable audience somehow materialized, and were very enthusiastic. Wanda was on top of her game and did a great job entertaining the crowd. Our pianist, the estimable Mr. Crisp It, played his ass off, what ass he has left. Mark was solid on bass, and we've really been spoiled to have had Tom on drums as often as we have in the last month. We really didn't want to stop at the appointed time, but we were given the sign and that was that.

The picture here belies all of the meterological drama of the preceeding hours. In the end, it was all well worth it. What a friggin day.

2007-06-21T09:52:00.000-07:00

On the Eve

With the jazz festival about to get underway, I have a unusual sense of ambivalence. Yes, I am really stoked about my Gastown gig on Sunday, 6:00pm at Victory Square with The Wanda Nowicki Group, if you must know. Fresh off our time in the studio, the band has never sounded better.

But nonetheless, I am not as excited about the rest of the Festival as I usually get. There are not any must-see shows on my list this time round. Maybe I should catch Sonny Rollins, but last time he was here at The Commodore, it was was a very disappointing gig for me, and though the circumstances now are very different, I just can't bring myself to pony up for him.

I usually have a ritual of going through the program with a pen and a highlighter and marking down everything that I want to see, a lot of out of town acts, but also a lot of the local acts. I really believe that it is important to come and support my fellow musicians when their talents are being showcased. Often it's proof (as if anyone really needs it) that we have world-class talent right here.

Although the list is very long, two examples immediately spring to mind. The first was seeing the Brad Turner Quartet open for Patricia Barber at The Centre. Their sound quality was absolutely exquisite, just like the music - I felt like I was sitting inside Dylan's kit, and I mean that in a good way. Then Patricia Barber had her own sound guy take over, and the sound turned to mush. (The folks at Rocky Mountain should be commended for the job they do year after year.) The other example was with the London Composer's Orchestra at the Cultch, the vanguard of London's improvising scene. It came time for Peggy Lee do her thing, and the guys just stopped and gawked. Not that Peggy was trying to prove anything. It was simply a deeply musical moment.

Every year, there are dozens of examples of how great the scene is here in Vancouver. I get a charge seeing my friends and acquaintances doing so well. And I know that there could be at least twice as many examples of it, if the festival was able to accomodate all of the great players in town.

And no, this is not a whine about me not getting more gigs this year. I am always thankful for what I get, if I do get any. I don't base my entire self worth on what I get or don't get.

Rather, I think that this year, I just have other priorities. The cd project with Wanda is in its final stages and it needs attention to move it to completion. Ditto for ion Zoo. I am very pleased with my playing on Wanda's cd, and I've always been critical of my jazz playing. The ion Zoo disc shows my other side, and I typically I am much more satisfied with my free playing.

I'm not connected in any way to VCMI this year, so that may also be a factor. I sponsored VCMI nights for the last two years at 1067, sort of an intro night for the participants to get together and hang on the night before the program starts. 1067 was booked up very early this year - I'm hopeful it will be the after-hours hang for the improv crowd during the festival.

But the main thing that's eating at me is a promise to myself that I broke.

I started this blog a year ago in May, when I attended the Hugh Fraser Jazz Orchestra Workshop in Banff. It has always been a memoir of my creative process. Originally meant just to run two weeks, I was encouraged to keep on blogging, which I have enjoyed.

The four HFJO workshops that I've attended have deeply changed and influenced my life as any steady reader would already know, and none more than the first one. I am still incorporating the lessons that I learned from Hugh and Maria Schneider. Having the rare opportunity to play her music and work with her changed everything for me. I have always vowed to do whatever it takes to be there again if she came back to Banff.

Chucho Valdez was originally scheduled to be the guest artist this year, but after the application deadline, word got out that Maria would be back. At Hugh's invitation, I had been planning to drive up to Banff to watch the proceedings and hang with Chucho and the orchestra for a day or two. No problem, I would do the same with Maria, and have the chance to thank her in person for being such a catalyst in my life. Then things got busy, the cd projects took longer than expected, and family and financial priorities gave me a reality check. There would be no drive to Banff this year.

Two weeks ago, Eli Bennett wrote me to ask what to expect up there. I've been a big fan of this young player and would have loved to have had the chance to spend some time up there with him. Then I started thinking about the people who return each year for the workshop, some who have become good friends of mine, some who have become musical collaborators. The opportunities missed. Just to see Maria lead the orchestra with her glorious music...

Instead, I've just been playing her cds all the time and moping a bit. I've had a fantasy about playing pandeiro with the orchestra while they performed her Choro Dancadao. She was the person who turned me on to this marvellous instrument.

I guess that dream will just have to wait.

2007-05-31T10:11:00.000-07:00

Heavy metal and other debris

I put blogging on the back shelf for a few weeks. There was just too much going on. So, here's a bit of catch-up. Helsinki 8 had one of its infrequent gigs, this one being at the SFU School for Contemporary Arts grad show. It was in what once was the American Can factory, down on the Vancouver waterfront, a very cool building. We played a couple of fairly atmospheric sets, with a bassoonist sitting in for Soressa, one of our singers. It was sort of off-putting that one of the grad students had done a visual installation using the face of our guitarist Pessi, an image about 12 feet high. Pessi is already larger than life, standing about 6'7" or so, but this was BIG. At least we didn't have to play in front of it. The audience feedback was that my stab at conduction was the best received, so maybe we need to focus on more structured material.

The following night I played a duet set with Seattle percussionist Dean Moore at 1067. I thought I was over the top with my percussion collection, but Dean trumps me. He brought about four times what I have on my rack, with a number of very nice large Paiste gongs. Interestingly, in our combined assemblage of brass percussion, we had exactly one of the same item, a UFIP burma bell. Yet they sounded totally different.

Dean plays much more in the tradition of what I consider to be gong music, building up series after series of overtones from a beautiful deep fundamental tone. It's very reflective and somewhat sleep-inducing. It's not that it's boring, but the music is very meditative and has a powerful somnolent effect on people.

He played a couple of extended solo pieces, then we joined forces for the second set. I saw it as my role to be the destabilizing force, to create more tension and release. Sometimes we hooked up in very beautiful ways. Other times, I sought to find harsher sounds, or even random sounds. Once I threw a small chain at the rack, happy to let it create whatever sounds it wanted to. It bounced off of my stuff and ended up making a cool sound on one of Dean's gongs. So I came at this with a free improv aesthetic, and it seemed to work with Dean's approach. We're looking at doing a project in September in Seattle with a third percussionist in a cool new performance space, said to have really nice acoustics.

My only disappointment was that there was a very small turnout on the night. The previous night's attendance was similarly light. We chalked it up to being the Victoria Day long weekend. I resolved not to book 1067 on long weekends in future. Then I looked at my next booking there. It's going to be a fantastic night with Montreal's Marianne Trudel joining ion Zoo. Any steady reader of my blog knows how very highly I think of Marianne as a dear friend and a superlative pianist. She and Lisa Miller are going to start off with a piano duet set, two hugely talented musicians. The date - June 29, on the Canada Day long weekend. D'oh!!!

Next up was ion Zoo at The Cellar. Again, it was proof that this is a very fine group indeed, one that I consider myself most fortunate to be part of. I must admit that I was disappointed that this group did not land a spot in the upcoming jazz festival. I do realize that it's a difficult one to program, considering that we need a quiet and intimate venue plus a grand piano. As I pointed out in the jazz forum, there were at most a dozen slots available for local improvisors. A lot of good groups and musicians got shut out entirely. CJBS has gone a long way to creating and sustaining a strong improv scene here in Vancouver, yet can only offer a small number of spots in their festival. I guess we're in the same boat as all of the other various styles of jazz.

I'd hoped to get some useable shots for our upcoming cd cover, but the lighting at The Cellar was minimal. It was impossible to get a group shot in performance, particularly with the light on Lisa being minimal. I continue to morph into a Ross Taggart lookalike. Too bad that didn't include his chops...

Fortunately, sometime during his wedding preparations (congrats!!!), Cory has since gotten more of the stage lighting working. I got much better photos of The Fiddlers during their fine evening last Monday. There's only a few more Monday nights left in the current NOW series before the jazz festival starts. They are certainly worth checking out.

The balance of my musical time has been spent working on the Wanda Nowicki Group cd project. Rather than the DIY productions we have done in the past (I am sick of burning cds and printing up all of the labels and covers), we are going the full-blown release route, using a commercial pressing company, getting a graphic designer, etc. Getting all of the licensing done has been a pain, though as a composer I am totally supportive of making sure artists get their fair share for their efforts. By plugging away it a bit at a time every day, we are making progress, and it is beginning to feel less overwhelming.

Wanda have even come up with a title for the cd, always a challenging proposition. And she has found a graphic designer. We had a meeting with her and I think she has some exciting ideas.

I did a few hours of percussion tracks in the studio last night and I hope my efforts will enhance the cd. I wish I had the ability of guys like Pepe Danza or Jack Duncan to make the percussion sound really exciting at times, but face it, they are professional percussionists and it's a sideline for me. My aim is to enhance the music and I think by and large I accomplished that.

On one track, Leaf, I tried a different approach, laying down multiple tracks of various percussive sounds. Played back all together, they sound horrid. My hope is by eliminating 90% of them, just the tasty bits will be left. Leaf has been the piece that has been the trial for most of us, and I have growing confidence that it is coming together. Jeanette Lindstrom has asked me to send her a copy of it when we're done - now, that makes me nervous. She is just so great with her original material, it's a bit daunting to send her our version of it.

Tonight we're back at Riverside, hopefully for the last session before we start mixing and mastering.

2007-05-13T17:58:00.000-07:00

ion Zoo at the Cellar May 14, 8:30pm

be there

info

2007-05-11T14:39:00.000-07:00

Kvetch

There are times when I wish my life was simpler.

I recently got some grief from someone on the vancouverjazz forum, basically suggesting I was selling out for playing some straight-ahead jazz in the upcoming Vancouver Jazz Festival. I am pretty sure that he was trying to get a rise out of me and I wasn't going to go for it.

I've always believed that playing a wider number of musical styles enhances my development as musician, regardless of what my basic musical preference may be. Any reader of this blog for the last year would know that I've done a fairly broad range of things in that time.

There are moments, though, when I wonder if I would make more progress if I simply focussed on one instrument, one style. I would probably benefit by doing that, but I'm not sure I'd be happy. I certainly don't want to limit myself, but maybe I should be saying no more frequently to various offers to play on projects.

Maybe it's just everything going on right now. I have a gig tonight at 1067, the first set with Primord, lots of bass sax skronk, then the next set on clarinets. Monday at The Cellar, I'm really excited to be back with ion Zoo with at least 3 saxes, bass clarinet and percussion. Then next week I have a percussion duet set at 1067 (there's going to be a pile of gongs and bells and cymbals!). And a Helsinki 8 gig at SFU. And all the while, I'm finishing off the cd project with Wanda, at least three more studio sessions. Not to mention all of the artwork and paperwork required to move ahead that project and the ion Zoo release.

On reading this over, this is not really so bad. Sure, I have the rest of my life and all those other responsibilities to deal with, but there are many, many people juggling a lot more balls, particulary full-time musicians. People with serious health or personal problems. Accountants.

OK, I'll stop whining. Come to think of it, I'm doing exactly what I want to be doing. Hey, things are looking pretty good!

2007-05-03T22:47:00.000-07:00

Down by the Riverside

I finally managed to haul out my camera to get some pictures of Wanda and the boys at Riverside, on what was the third evening of our current recording project.

This was the night where we recorded a couple of the most challenging tunes. It was a lot of work, and I'm still not sure that we won't need another night with all of us to get some better takes. A lot can be done with the odd judicious fix, and expert mixing and mastering, something that Rick and Dwayne are great at. So I will hold back on my judgment on the results so far.

As ever, I am rarely satisfied with my own playing in the studio. I am my own worst critic, and I will probably ask for a retake or two, for my sake. One of the things that was different last night was that I stood in the control room while laying down the tracks with the band. I knew that there was a certain amount of leakage on the previous nights when I played in the main room with the rest of them. I agreed with Dwayne that it may be best to isolate me in order to have a cleaner sound with the bass and piano. Drums were already in a booth, so it was the control booth for me.

An unexpected experience for me was when we did Hi-Fly, where the rhythm section was grooving really nicely. When we rehearsed in my living room, we were all together in a fairly cozy room and I could really feel the groove in my gut, standing between the bass and drums.

I had no problems with the other tunes we did last night, and with the isolation being so effective, I had to rely on the headphone mix. I had an Aebersold moment, feeling like I wasn't playing live with a band, just playing along with some disembodied music over the phones. I can't recall having a similar experience before. I was also OK for the previous tunes, but on Hi-Fly, I wanted to feel that visceral groove thing going on.

I felt my bari solo in that tune was not up to par with the energy that the rest of the band was putting out. I want to be as good as possible because it's going to be a a standout track on the cd. I wish I were a first take good sort of player, but that just ain't the case.

We were very pleased to have Tom Foster back with us on drums for the night. He has been our drummer of choice since our last recording project together, and he is our go-to guy whenever we have gigs at places where we can utilize a drummer. The next time will be at the Jazz Festival, June 24 at Victory Square, to put in a shameless plug. As I mentioned, a couple of the tunes were pretty challenging and it was a hell of a lot easier with Tom in the driver's seat.

One of those tunes was Jeanette Lindstrom's Leaf, which sounds deceptively easy on her cd. You may recall that I mentioned doing a lift of this tune a couple of months back and being surprised to find out that it was mostly in 5/4. It just flows so nicely. I don't know if we quite got that same flow, but it will sound pretty darn good.

Last week, Jeanette sent me her original chart for it. There were some chords on my transcription that were different, but very close in sound. We decided to go with my chords. Jeanette asked me to send her our version when we finished. I don't know about that - that's a bit scary. Her entire cd is so damn impeccable and her singing is absolutely great. You can hear what I mean when she returns to town for Festival Vancouver in August.

We did try two takes with acoustic piano and two with Rhodes. The inimitable Mr. Cliff Piffling was most anxious to get his mitts on the Rhodes. It sounded pretty good, but so did the piano. Somebody will have to make a choice.

Mark was as solid as ever on bass, always bringing his A game when we play. And when you're at a studio run by Rick Kilburn, you know the bass is going to have to sound good. I think this is the fifth project we've done at Riverside so everyone is pretty relaxed about things.

Wanda did great, and took care of us with some nice snacks and beer. She had a challenge with the timing in Leaf. There are 4 single bars of 6/4 sprinkled through the tune, just to keep everyone of their toes. It certainly kept us alert.

With the bulk of the recording done, next week Wanda and I will head back to Riverside for the final touches, then the mixing and mastering.

2007-04-27T10:18:00.000-07:00

Primordial ooze

My daughter has been down with that bug for the last three days and I have been the primary caregiver during the daytime. When my wife gets home from work, we do a quick hand-off, then I am out and about.

Last Wednesday was memorable. Within minutes of the hand-off, I was on the way to Riverside for more work on the cd. On the way down, we listened to Abby Lincoln's take on Live for Life, with an arrangement that I wasn't particularly fond of. It started as a ballad and went to a latin feel midway through, but it wasn't entirely convincing, with the horns sounding a touch cheesy for my taste.

We had worked out a very spare arrangement for our version, mostly a piano/vocal duet. Unfortunately, our pianist, one Mr. Clint Porous, had the Lincoln arrangement stuck in his head and could not get away from the fromage-laden latin feel. The first couple of takes really didn't work, so we rejigged the whole thing there on the spot. The final take was even more stripped-down and far more effective. I wanted my tenor solo to come as a surprise, with nothing leading up to it, and then not to play again until the last chord. It took Rick Kilburn to point out that it was evocative of the John Coltrane/Johnny Hartmann cd, one of my favourites. I am very loathe to even mention Trane in any way with regard to my playing, because we are so very distant from each other on the jazz food chain. Nonetheless, I had to agree with Rick that there was an undeniable influence, totally unconscious on my part. Well, it's more flattering than finding comparisons between me and Boots Randolph.

We picked the good tracks from the previous session and got a rough mix of them so we could give them a listen. We also entertained ourselves with trying to get some lame quotes to help promo the cd. "They were all in the same room that night." - Rick Kilburn

We had to cut the session short as I had a 9:30 call at the The Cobalt. Walking through the doors for the first time in 21 years, I was struck by how small it was. The only thing I could remember from my gin-soaked previous visit was an electric blue room with a lit stage with stripper poles in the centre. All that remained of that was the circular housing for the lights on the ceiling, now unused and covered in spray paint. Piles of empties, likely left over from that same visit, were strewn about.

The carpet onstage was sticky and full of unidentifiable stains. The delicate tang of piss and stale beer wafted out of the men's can, which was just to my right.

That triggered a couple of olfactory memories.

The Basin St. bar, where I spent time chatting with a working girl about our families, while my business trip partner was out in the back alley, leaning up against a dumpster, getting blown by the bartender. He was an Australian, living in New Guinea, on his first ever trip to North America. We were visiting various coffee importers in the USA, the centers being San Francisco, New York and finally New Orleans. (They thought that new Seattle company may have an impact on the trade. Were they called Starbucks?) I could write a lengthy piece on our trip, but that will have to be another time. Suffice it to say that he was desperate to make it with an American woman before going home, and was driving me nuts about it. I passed up going to hear some real music on our one free night in New Orleans just to be able to shut him up. On his last night in the US, he considered it money well spent to be out in that alley.

The roadside redneck cowboy bar in Rocky Creek, Idaho. I was travelling with Clara and my brother and his wife, a Martha Stewart protegee. They needed an emergency pee break, so we pulled into the only place for miles around. That same putrid stench was wafting out the front door of the bar, but it didn't deter two women with bursting bladders. I advocated simply letting loose on the floor, just like the locals, judging from the smell. This joint's claim to fame was its upcoming annual Testicle Festival, a prairie oyster eating contest. Being married to a black woman, I figured I was pretty lucky to get out of there without being force-fed one of my own nards.

We were in Idaho the exact time that there was a famous standoff and shootout in Hayden Lake and white supremacists were flocking to the area to support their brethren. How charming. I always felt the way to keep these guys in check was to have a rule that you had to be able to spell the word "supremacist" before you could become one.

How easily I digress. The Cobalt has that same fragrant charm, with just about every available surface covered in graffiti and grindcore posters. The rest has been sprayed with beer and god knows what else.

Primord is as unique a lineup as I've ever been involved with. Two bari saxes, tenor sax (no bassoon that night, dammit), two guys playing half a drum kit, and me on The Beast. It was bloody loud and I'm glad that I had brought earplugs. That had a very interesting effect for me as I played by feel as much as by what I could hear. Low instruments have a very marked resonance back into the body of the player, made even more noticeable by the earplugs.

I admit that I do not practice The Beast on a regular basis. I only have call to use it a few times every year. I used to play it regularly with ion Zoo, but I prefer to limit myself now. My bass sax is from the 1920's and has an antiquated key layout. Certain notes are just plain funky and require alternate fingerings. Keys heights are significantly greater that other saxophones, making speed a challenge. And you have to be ready with a surplus of air support to get it to speak well. But it has a huge range of tonal possibilities and I can see why some improvisers choose to specialize on it.

When it came time for me to blow, I put as much energy as possible into it and tried to go for the unexpected. Adrian Rollini (1920's king of the bass sax), it wasn't. It seemed to be well-received, as was the band.

There is something meaningful to me about playing at a venue where so much music has been made by countless bands, often with people no less dedicated (often totally, maybe fatally committed) to the pursuit of their art. There is an undeniable significance to this place. When I first came to Vancouver, I missed out on going to places like The Cave, The Smiling Buddha and Rohan's before they closed. I am actually proud to add the Cobalt to the Commodore and the Chan Centre as places where I've performed.

2007-04-20T10:47:00.000-07:00

Back in the saddle

This past Wednesday, I had a spring in my step that has been missing for the last month. I've talked to so many friends that also endured a lack of energy for a number of weeks as they dealt with that cold bug that's been going around. People have said that this year has been much worse than usual and I have to agree. I'm blaming it on global warming.

It was fairly timely as I've started getting active again. Last weekend was another Bugs Black Blood gig, this time at 1067. I considered it a victory that I didn't cough up a lung or two after the gig, for the first time in over three weeks. The group played its best that night and there was a decent crowd, with the beer selling out just at the end of the night. That's always a good thing.

Yesterday was a busy one. I had a rehearsal for a gig next week at The Cobalt. Aptly named Primord, this group features 2 bari saxes, one tenor sax/bassoon, me on bass sax, and my personal favourite, 2 guys playing half a drum kit between them. One of the things we are doing is an Iggy Pop/David Bowie tune, Tonight. There's a pretty high skronk factor. Gotta love it.

I've been to the Cobalt exactly twice in my life. The first time was in 1986 for my stag party, at the end of a very long night of double gin and tonics. I have a fleeting visual image, but no clue of how long we stayed there or what we did. I do know that we went home shortly after that and that I passed out embracing the toilet. My bride-to-be did what all supportive partners would do - put a pillow under my head, then took a picture which she gave to my alleged best friend and ringleader on the night.

The last time was earlier this year. We had a homestay student from Belfast with us for a few months and she enjoyed hanging out there with her mates. She would only have a few drinks each night, so she was a teatotaller by Irish standards. One night, somebody put something in her second beer and she was wasted. I got a call from her friends at 3:00 am to come down and pick her up. She was passed out, slumped on a chair on the sidewalk outside the front door. Nobody ever found out how it happened. Fortunately nothing worse transpired and her friends took care of her once they realized that she was in trouble.

I've not been to the Fake Jazz Wednesdays yet, so this should be fun. It's where free improv meets metal and noise. Perfect for the Cobalt.

Shortly after the Primord rehearsal, it was a fairly substantial stylistic shift as I was off to Riverside's new studio location to do the first session for the new cd project with Wanda and the boys. The plan for the first night was to lay down a number of the tunes that we have played at almost every gig we have ever done. All fairly straight forward, we may have five good takes in the can. We didn't spend much time listening to playback, so we'll have to wait for the rough mixes to be done.

I took my camera along, but didn't have a chance to take it out of the bag. We were pretty intent on getting as much recorded as possible. We were working with the same engineer as we've done with all of our sessions there, so things were very relaxed.

The Monday night series is back at The Cellar next week after a two-week hiatus. Featuring the Ben Wilson Quintet and nada, it promises to be a very good night. The dress code is "Tennis, Anyone?".

2007-03-30T11:48:00.000-07:00

Bugs Black Blood

For the last week, I've been suffering from that bug that has been making the rounds and I'm getting bloody tired of it.

I didn't notice the early warning signs last Friday when I was playing with Wa and the boys at Seb's. I was having some difficulty playing some fairly familiar tunes, just mentally navigating the changes. From there, I raced over to 1067 to play until the wee hours.

The next morning I awoke with a very ominous sore throat and within a couple of hours, I was down for the count. I took it as easy as possible over the weekend, but I didn't want to miss playing the Cellar on Monday with a new large ensemble, Bugs Black Blood. We had a final rehearsal on Sunday night that I coughed my way through, then had a very tough night. On Monday, it was almost a coin toss as to whether or not to play, but I felt a touch better, at least until I reached The Cellar. Despite being warmly dressed, I got a severe case of the chills and just could not warm up all night.

I spent most of the night just sitting in my chair onstage as it was the warmest spot there when the stage lights were on. I was slightly less animated than Kenny Wheeler when he's not playing, in other words, catatonic. I just played my parts, stood and gave it for my solos, and otherwise just tried to get through the night without chucking.

I think things ended up OK, though my energy was seriously waning in the second set. The recording will tell the tale, for sure.

Anyways, I had to be there as the theme of the night was wigs. A bunch of people in the band and the audience wore goofy wigs. Never one to miss a chance to make a fool of myself, I opted for something much more elegant - the Austin Powers-style chest rug. There was a brief masochistic moment at the end of the night when I ripped the luxurious thatch off, with the glue ensuring that I lost what little chest hair I actually possessed.

That instance of self-mutilation done, I beat it for home as quickly as possible and had another very sleepless night.

There was only one time that I can recall being sicker onstage at a gig. It was many years ago and I was called to play a dance band gig in Chilliwack. The only reason I took it was because Dave Quarin was playing lead alto. He was the first guy in Vancouver I took lessons from and I'd never before had a chance to play a gig with him.

Mistake #1: I didn't own my own tux back then, and I borrowed a real nice one from a friend. It was a Christian Dior that he had bought in Paris. It looked great, it was just a inch or so too small in the waist and chest and two inches too long in the arms. (My friend has the build of a spider monkey.)

Mistake #2: I was running late so I didn't take a change of clothes

Mistake #3: I carpooled with some of the guys. Normally OK, but these were oldtimers who were the hardcore dance band types. The conversation was fairly limited to the various intrigues of the other bands on the circuit and about ricky-ticky arrangements. Dave must have gone up in another car - at least we could have had a fun conversation. It was a Friday evening gig, so the traffic was pretty bad. It made for a long drive.

Mistake #4: This was the killer. I wolfed down a very large meal before I left - Indian food. Rubina Tandoori was one of the best in the city, but it just wasn't sitting right.

By the time we hit the stage in Chilliwack, I had Stage One New Delhi Belly. As we played the first set, I started turning green. I hung on as long as I could, not wanting to look unprofessional in front of Dave (way too late for that!). But well before the set ended, I had to bolt right in the middle of a tune, and with my bulging eyes and cheeks, it was pretty evident to all what was happening.

Gentle readers, I will refrain from any detailed description of what followed, lest it put you all off of Indian food for the near future. I just remember feeling the incongruity of being so colourfully and violently ill while wearing a fine French tuxedo, which didn't escape unsullied.

I wobbled back onstage, only to dash off again. After a long break, I was able to play the remaining sets. As the elderly dancers would spin by, a number of grandmotherly types would ask "How you doing now, dear?" or offer advice.

The long drive home was punctuated by at least one bolting from the car. In all a miserable night. Dave wasn't inclined to hang out with a guy who was spending some serious face time with a public toilet - go figure. I don't even recall the pay being that great.

Maybe The Cellar wasn't so bad after all.

2007-03-15T10:30:00.000-07:00

Futures: Microscores / October Trio + 1

It was a bit strange going to The Cellar two nights in a row without my camera. There have been a few times in the last six months when I arrive somewhere to see a gig and realize that I've left the camera home. Quite often those were the nights when there was something worthwhile going on.

For Tuesday night, it would have been inappropriate running around snapping off shots. Producer David Pay has set up things so that food and bar service are suspended during the performance in order for the room to be as quiet as possible. Typical of Dave's ventures, the room was pretty well full. People know that his events are of a high calibre and they turn out in good numbers. Having a full house in a room like The Cellar adds a great vibe to the performance.

Jessica Catron and Johnny Chang are to be commended for their dedication to The Microscore project. They now have over 260 pieces of no more than 30 seconds in length and will add to that total this coming weekend in Seattle. I loved the breadth of compositional techniques, going from whimsical to conceptual to extremely densely and carefully scored. Distilling the extended techniques for string instruments that are incorporated in all of these pieces could be the basis for a definitive book on this subject.

Ten Vancouver composers, myself included, had the priveledge to add to their growing repertoire. Nine of us were there. I thought Dave should have dipped into his life savings to fly Kelly Churko in from Tokyo, but apparently Dave didn't see it that way. Something about balancing budgets, I guess.

I appointed myself shop steward for the composers in order to bargain a nice fat royalty package for us, as Jessica and Johnny will be playing some of our pieces again. Dave and I are deadlocked between one drop and one glass of wine. He is one hardass negotiator. Either way, I feel I have a future as a negotiator for the NHLPA.

47 microscores were performed, bookended by four longer compositions by James Tenney. I was happy with how mine went. It was the second microscore on the program. I did think they rushed it a touch, maybe 29 seconds. Next time I will attach a $5 bill to my score. That should get me up to at least 34 seconds.

For the most part, I thought the evening was a success. Most of the audience liked it, but not everyone. I was too focussed on the stage to pay attention to some people who were making a bit of noise. It never fails to amaze me that people don't clue in to the fact that when everyone else in the room is being absolutely quiet, they should be doing the same. Apparently this was The Makeout Couple. Not only were they making out, but this guy was groping his much younger date, and they were making some noise almost as if they wanted everyone to see what they were doing. I guess contemporary string duets were making them hot, sufficiently so that they left on the first break.

I hope that this project continues for some time and that they (Johnny and Jessica, not the Makeout Couple) return to Vancouver sometime in the future with a mountain of scores. As for the MC, get a hotel room.

The MC were nowhere to be seen last night when the October Trio hit the stage. Eli Bennet filled in most capably until Evan Arntzen arrived fashionably late early in the second set. These two guys have a great rapport and play well together. They have a lot of fun onstage yet aren't above giving each other the occasional ass-kick, which motivates each of them to dig in a bit more. Eli raised the stakes with the last tune of the night. The group is playing an obligatory Monk tune each night now and Eli called the fiendish Four in One, which he had prepared. Evan had never seen it before and wisely opted out of playing the head right off the top. He comported himself admirably in the solos and did quite well taking the head out. Eli nailed it, and I could easily imagine Evan already plotting what to pull for the next meeting.

Seeing these two together broght to mind Cam Ryga's recent interview on www.vancouverjazz.com, about his history with Ross Taggart. I hope I've been witnessing the genesis of a similar musical friendship.

And I can't close off without mentioning Josh Cole and Dan Gaucher. The October Trio has played fairly steadily over the last couple of years and it shows. These guys were showing real depth as players and as composers. I've had limited chances to hear Dan drum, but this was certainly his best outing in my experience. I've previously heard Josh play only Christmas music when we did last years's Singing Christmas Tree together. He's got a future the other 11 months of the year.

These four guys are part of the future of jazz in this city. We are in good hands.

2007-03-12T22:10:00.000-07:00

Confessions of a dangerous kind

At times, I can be a musical whore. Other times, merely a tramp.

Another busy weekend - Saturday saw me in two back-to-back gigs of the sort that I rarely play any more. First off was a wedding gig with a standard quartet. I can't remember the last time I played a straight-ahead situation with a full rhythm section. The groom had seen us gigging with Wa and liked our instrumental stuff. The reception itself was a good baptist affair, dry as a popcorn fart, but the groom wanted jazz and that's what he got. I was calling standards that I easily haven't played in at least 5 years and it was a refreshing change, and we had a nice young drummer on the job. Our pianist, Chuck Porea, always plays better on a real grand piano and this church hall had a nice one. No food for the band though.

From there I raced over to the local German club for a polka gig. The things I do for money. But the thing is that they really take care of you. I walked in the door and the leader had a schnitzel the size of my face waiting for me. Typically German, he'd figured out the time it would take me to arrive from the previous gig and had ordered up the food to be served up at just the right time. And even though he knows I don't drink at gigs, there were repeated offers of free beer. Everything was set up, charts in order, sound was set up nicely, even a new light for my music stand. At the end of the night, my chops were starting to go from 5 hours of steady playing. Then he paid me fairly well for the job. It really shows that European appreciation of musicians.

Another perfect example is at the local Austrian club. Right beside the stage door is one of the prime parking spots, with a sign that reads "THIS SPACE RESERVED FOR MUSICIANS". Where do you see that sort of thing nowadays? Ever?

So I end up doing a few polka gigs a year. I'm OK with it. For the last few, the dress code has just been all black. It's been a while since they've gone full dress.

There have never been, nor will there ever be, any pictures of me in lederhosen. It's my one stipulation with these guys.

I will fess up to having done drag once and only once, for a good friend's party where the strict dress code was evening gowns for everyone. The reason why is a long story. I asked a longtime friend of mine who's a drag performer to have his way with me, as it were. He looked me up and down and announced that I was a size 14. When he was done, I looked liked my mother had mugged Juliette. I stood about 7 feet tall from bottom of stiletto to top of wig (a reasonable standard for drag queens and NBA centers). There were photos, but nothing ever made it online. Even if it did, I could live with it. OK, I'll show you a well-turned ankle that may or may not belong to me, but nothing more. I promise. My favourite personal touch was a temporary ankle tatoo copying one of Kate Hammett-Vaughan's tats. (Some claim Kate is one of the city's finest queens.) I had a great back story as all good drag queens must. My name was Dixie Lexia, a failed country singer on yet another comeback.

All of that being said, pictures of me in lederhosen are verboten. Even a musical whore has some scruples, however flimsy they may be. But I must admit that the first time I put on the lederhosen, they felt warmly supple and inviting...

But I digress.

Sunday night saw me in rehearsal with a new large ensemble called Bugs Black Blood. I considered this the cure for the previous evening's dalliances as it was back to the more familiar territory of new and improvised music. We struggled with a score composed by one of the band members. I would guess it would be his first piece for such a group. It could have been more clearly notated and presented. We had to talk at length about different improvisational tactics that changed almost bar by bar. It became a group exercise in head-scratching and Coat did an excellent job in drawing the music out of it as he figured out how to conduct it. This sort of situation can bog a rehearsal down. I lost my temper when a brass player asked a question about a bar that we had just spent several minutes discussing, obviously not having paid a shred of attention to what we had just been saying. And he still didn't get it when I walked over and wrote it out on his part.

There is a general lowering of IQ in a room when things get derailed in this manner. I now have much less patience for this sort of thing, something I will have to work on. Coat showed a remarkable amout of patience and professionalism standing in front of the band working things out. I'm sure that in his shoes, I would have just asked the composer to take it home and fix it before laying such a thing on the band. As it was, he and I had a very productive talk on the way home about how to present complex conceptual pieces.

It was educational for me in a few ways. It showed me how not to present a composition. I also learned ways as a conductor to mine such a piece for the musicality hidden inside it. The bottom line is that it will be a good piece to perform, it's just taking way too long for the band to get a handle on it. I also had the insight that in my desire to write something that can be quickly understood and played (like a grid score), that when I write, sometimes I am willing to sacrifice a certain amount of complexity or detail. That's a good thing to keep in mind and address when composing.

Speaking of that, one of my compositions is being premiered tomorrow night at The Cellar. This is part of something called The Microscores Project. This is definitely the shortest thing I've ever written. As LA-based musicians Jessica Catron (cello) and Johnny Chang (violin) tour, they ask local composers to write a 30-second piece as a contribution to the project. Ten Vancouver composers have contributed and now the project has over 225 minatures in its collection. For details, see www.musiconmain.ca.

Wednesday night at The Cellar is also a must-see in my books. The artist of the month is The October Trio, one of the great young groups in this city that is garnering national attention. Saxist Evan Arntzen can't make the first set, so Eli Bennett is subbing in, then the two of them tear it up for the remainder of the night. As I documented a couple of weeks back, I saw their first-ever meeting onstage, and it was absolutely fantastic. Bassist Josh Cole and drummer Dan Gaucher round out the group, fine musicians both. For more, see http://cellarjazz.com/.

While I'm on the topic of The Cellar, last Monday was an interesting one. String trio LSB 21 continues to coalesce into a fine group. These guys just keep getting better every time I hear them. They've asked a number of local composers to write something for them. I've been stalled in writing a graphic score - the guts are there, I just have to take the time to lay it all out and assemble it. It'll be a full colour deal with images and notation, lots of fun to do but time-consuming. I really need a deadline to get off my ass, but these guys are way too nice to impose one on me.

The second group was The Microscopic. They had the most world music sound of any group we have ever included in the NOW Monday night programming. Neelamjit Dhillon plays tabla, Meredith Bates on violin, Alvaro Rojas on strat, and Aaron Joyce on Hawaiian guitar. It was all very well played and Neel's tabla playing really draws your attention. But just like VICO at the Cultch the week previously, the element of risk was way too low for my taste. There were some group improvisations, but they were pretty contained. This group will do really well in other circles - world, roots and folk - but in the paradigm of the NOW series, they were far too conservative.

Monday the 19th promises to be back to form. Stefan Smulovitz and Viviane Houle do a duo set and the Saul Berson Trio rounds out the bill. Joining Saul will be Gord Grdina and Paul Blaney, all of them top players in this city. I have high expectations. www.noworchestra.com has the details.

Now, back to transcribing a little shoeplattle ...

2007-03-05T09:54:00.000-08:00

Of Silicone and Cialis

The middle of last week saw the return of Wa and the boys to a place I call the Yaletown Breastaurant. Now in its second incarnation, this place seems to be very indicative of a new pneumatic esthetic that seems to be in abundance in this part of the city. Every time we've played there, women seem to be bursting out of their tops. Even those of Asian heritage often are unnaturally curvaceous. For sure, in my next life, I'm coming back as a cosmetic surgeon and I'm setting up practice right at the corner of Davie and Mainland. The flip side of this phenomenon is that the men upon whose arms these women are found are often a decade older, usually more.

At our Valentines day gig at this establishment, our pianist, one Mr. Cross Pitter, was delighted to find a Cialis package in the men's washroom. He was devastated to find it empty, but we were thankful as had there been something in the box, it may have resulted in the keyboard being precariously tilted for the remainder of the gig. We amused ourselve to imagine the scene that would have occurred had we bothered to announce over the PA, "Would the ower of a lost box of Cialis come up to the stage?" and see all these guys checking their pockets. Dudes saying to themselves, "Whew, not me, I'm a Viagra man."

As we were taking down our gear at the end of that gig, Wa was accosted by a woman who wanted us have her friend sit in with us. Evidently he had a lounge gig or something in Europe and was certainly wealthy, and perhaps not too used to being told no. His friend certainly wasn't taking no for answer. She wanted to pay us to set up again and seemed oblivious to the fact that we were scurrying like rats to get packed up and the hell out of there. She just continued to use her enormous Teutonic chest to push her point home. Wa, ever the diplomat, was protesting that we couldn't do him justice without a proper arrangement of Just a Gigolo (seriously) in his key. At which point this gal said, "Come on, I used to live in Los Angeles. I know how they do it. Just count 1, 2, 3, 4 and go." We went.

The Breastauant really liked our group and had offered Wa a steady weekly gig, which we were happy to take. Unfortunately, and very typically, they hadn't really thought this thing through. They wanted to go with live music three nights a week, but never bothered to properly promote it (no advertising whatsoever) or to give it any time to build up an reputation as a live music venue. As a band, we do promote our gigs to our e-mail lists, but we cannot be counted upon to fill the place immediately. We certainly do fill places like Seb's every time, but it takes a while to build an audience.

Less than a month in, the Breastaurant decided to can the music. I wasn't surprised, but I was disappointed nonetheless. I really saw this place as great source material for this blog, along the lines of The Hotel Pianist. Oh well, it'll give us more time (but less money) to focus on our recording project.

2007-03-05T09:45:00.000-08:00

And then at The Cellar

I've decided to split up my last post as it was too rambling. And I'll add some pictures.

The last few Monday nights at the Cellar have been uniformly entertaining. As this series progresses, the bar continually gets reset to a higher level. I'll have to see what I can do about that when I return with the Bari Blizzard next month.

<- Cat Toren, Russell Sholberg and Dan Gaucher

Cat Toren's In Magnolia continues to grow as a group and they show more confidence moving from the scored material into improv, then back. Their evening was opened by Attention Diamond Shoppers, consisting of Rachel Wadham and Lee Hutzalak playing a combination of found materials and altered instruments with a high degree of musical sensitivity. They held court on a table in the middle of the room which they covered with a piece of pink fun fur. In lesser-skilled hands, this would have been a train wreck, but on this night, it was mesmerizing. And when both groups joined together for an extended improv, the delicacy and spatial placement of sounds around the room created something that I could guarantee had never been been heard before within the confines of The Cellar.

Rachel and Lee under Cory's watchful eye ->

My one regret was that both Rachel and In Magnolia bassist Russel Sholberg both had musical saws but never played them at the same time. I was dying for a cutting contest.

<- edgeffect

The following week saw another fine double-bill. Lisa Miller's edgeffect had the talents of Francois Houle, Jeremy Berkman, Stefan Smulovitz and guest guitarist Gordon Fitzell. Lisa's fine compositions mined a taut emotional territory and these talented musicians had a focussed energy about them.

The second set was another first for the NOW series, a group that had as its focus spoken, or sometimes semi-spoken word. cleftpallet featured Jonathan Wilke, Darren Williams, Nikki Reimer and Dave Chokroun. They applied the principles of slam poetry to music and some rules of improvised music to their texts. They were challenging, clever and often quite funny, but never resorted to schtick.

Last week was the return of Coat Cooke's new electric outfit, newly-named The Fiddlers. With Tommy Babin on electric bass, guitarist Chad MacQuarrie, drummer Skye Brooks and JP Carter on trumpet and electronics, Coat and the boys got into some deep groove. It was aided and abetted by Coat's compositional skills, which lifted the group above merely chugging over some twisted riff, something which bores me to tears. These guys are forming into a fairly badass unit.

Next up on March 5 is LSB 21 and The Microscopic. Check out www.noworchestra.com for details.

2007-03-03T16:11:00.000-08:00

Relativity

I've had my head down somewhat since the Kiwanis festival ended, though when I say it ended, that's technically not true. The balance of the festival continues on through April, with the concert band segment starting up on Monday.

I am no fan of concert band music. Never liked it when I played it as a kid, and it hasn't grown on me with the passage of time. Saxophone parts are uniformly dreary, usually doubling another instrument, save for the odd "jazzy" outburst that could only swing if the arranger was hung by the neck from a tree.

I've been told that it's that way in concert band because saxophones get so much of the spotlight in stage band. The only repertoire that I heard and liked in this genre was played by the Pacific Symphonic Wind Ensemble, and arguably a professional outfit of that calibre was playing music that transcended the traditional fare of retooled light classics and Broadway medlies. Not that I could be proven wrong, but I really don't have the inclination to expand my tastes in this particlar direction.

I only harp on this because I feel pressured to continue volunteering a considerable amount of my time for the balance of the Festival. But aside from a few minor shifts of door-tending, I'm sticking to jazz.

Which brings me up to this current weekend, another busy one. Last night was the first evening of the NOW Orchestra/VICO collaboration at The Cultch. I'm working behind the scenes for NOW as the production manager. Essentially my duties are to liase between all of the various aspects of the event - Cultch staff, sound and recording engineers, stage manager, the volunteers at the front of house, etc. Typically Coat did all of this stuff himself, and drove himself to distraction rather than focussing on the music he was supposed to be creating that evening. Ron Samworth did the same in his time as artistic co-director of NOW.

I used to see them running in circles before the show, and often the music would suffer. I got involved as a way for them to concentrate on doing what they were really there to do, to make music.

This is an interesting event as both groups aim to blur boundaries as far a challenging conventions for large ensembles. Concert band this ain't. I believe that VICO comes from a much more staid academic approach, as opposed to NOW's bohemian jazzers. Of course, this is a dumb generalization as they both have highly talented musicians, some of whom have played in both groups. I do see less of an element of risk in VICO's performances, as opposed to some of NOW's more adventuresome outings. This is not lessening one group in favour of the other, just a matter of style. I just happen to like risk.

The initial show went well, a very good thing indeed, given the complexity of some of the compositions and also the tech aspect of micing and recording a raft of exotic instruments in a live concert situation. Other than a bit of persistent feedback from Gord Grdina's oud mic in the first number, things flowed quite nicely. I'm expecting an even better performance tonight.

As soon as the Cultch show ended, I hightailed it over to 1067, where I was playing with the Robin Jessome Creative Ensemble. Robin and I met last year at Banff and we hit it off. He was in the composition program in UVic and his experience at Banff inspired him to set up his own improvising ensemble, exactly as Paul Rucker did two years previously. Last night was the first show and it featured a number of Robin's compositions plus one of my own. He also wanted me to do some conduction.

The members of the group were an even split of Victoria and Vancouver folks, all good musicians, many relative newcomers to improvised music. They were GGG as Dan Savage would put it. In the end I lead at least 4 conductions, and I was quite stretched to make them as varied as possible, without having the benefit of much prior rehearsal. Without that, they weren't familiar with many of the hand signals that could be used, or without much of the necessary group discussion of the processes involved in large ensemble improvisation.

During one of the last conductions, midstream, I had the idea of setting Darren and Jonathan (of the abovementioned cleftpallet) off on a verbal rant. This put them on the spot and they initially stumbled for a moment, then went off on a hilarious tangent. They broke everyone in the room up, especially the band. I just sat down for a few minutes and let them go.

Robin wanted me to top this off with one final conduction. I decided we had to end pretty, so I had everyone play a snippet of a different standard ballad, but only when I pointed at them, sort of a perverted Charles Ives affair. Robin started off with that old Chuck Mangione nugget, another good laugh, but then everybody got on board with the ballad thing and it ended quite nicely indeed.

The evening was very raw and full of risk, given that some of these guys had their free improv deflowering that night. Their musicianship showed through and made for a good performance. I have to say I enjoyed myself very thoroughly. I got to blow my head off in one chart which had a screaming tenor solo from start to finish, something I would never, ever consider doing. And I did a lot of conducting on the night, something that left me buzzing for a couple of hours, at the expense of a good night's sleep. This is something that I certainly want to do more of, be it with this group, or a large ensemble of my own.

It definitely was the most stimulating of my musical experiences of the last few weeks. I was so far from my high school days of concert band drudgery, creating music that the conductors of those groups literally could not have conceived. It certainly would have shocked them to the core. But who am I to say that they could not have been equally as jazzed up about leading their band through some symphonic overture and having a great performance?

It's all relative.

2007-02-20T22:16:00.000-08:00

Kiwanis Jazz Festival 07

Well, it's Tuesday evening, the festival's finished and I am bagged. It has been very busy for the last few days. My brain capsized late this afternoon and I've been running on autopilot ever since.

A bit of background: The Kiwanis Music Festival is the largest series of annual student music festivals across the country. Starting in Toronto in the 1920s, it takes place in more than a dozen cities across the country. In this city in 1964, The Kiwanis Club of Vancouver took over the operation of a student festival that had been run by The Knights of Pythias. I mention this because the building the Knights had constructed as their lodge is now The Western Front. Today the Vancouver Kiwanis Music Festival has over 10,000 annual entrants, with seperate sub-festivals for jazz, concert band, choral and finally individual classical music categories. It's a huge event funded by the Kiwanis club and it gets little or no recognition in the media. Good news doesn't sell newspapers. Maybe we need an adjudicator to club a baby seal or something.

I'm mainly involved with the jazz segment. I am the titular chair of the event, but really there is a small committee that does the bulk of the work. Brenda Sleightholme is the administrator and Ken Osterreicher and Michelle Workman are the teacher coordinators from Argyle and Sutherland respectively. John Sharp superbly handles the tech details. We work in conjunction with Cap College, where we get great support from their administration and faculty. We have feature performances by Nitecap, their vocal jazz group , and also from the A Band. Tom Lee Music is a corporate sponsor and each year they are very generous in supplying keyboards, guitar and bass amps, also Taye drum kits for our main stage, warmup rooms and clinic rooms. Coastal Jazz & Blues sponsors a noontime presentation by a prominent local musician, or someone they may have in town for one of their events.

One the main functions of my duties is to ensure that things run on time. If things start getting behind schedule, adjudicators can burn out, teachers get impatient and our costs may start to rise if room rentals and tech crew run into overtime.

In this regard, we did very well, moreso today when we actually squeezed an extra band into the morning schedule. By moving one band on stage the moment the previous group vacated it, we were able to utilize the collective gaps in our 25-minute rotation. We were back to our original schedule remarkably fast. In all we had 11 vocal jazz groups, 40 stage bands and 1 combo entered in the festival, comprised of one elementary school and the rest either junior or senior high schoolers.

When I first got involved with Kiwanis in 1995, the festival was a fairly dry affair. The MC was retired high school principal (acutally very charming and funny at other times) who kept the youth firmly planted in their auditorium seats and well-shooshed. The adjudicators were more academics with music education credentials rather than working musicians. I became the MC the following year and the first thing I did was lighten up the atmosphere. Jazz is cool. Jazz is fun. It's full of self deprecating humour and practical jokes. Over the years I developed a repertoire jazz jokes, aimed at maligning as many different instruments as possible. "What's the difference between a chainsaw and a baritone sax? The exhaust." That sort of thing.

It's hard for some categories, like jazz singers, to find jokes that can be told in public to high school kids. I'm sure many of them know worse ones, but the teachers would flip out if I told them. There's too many trombone jokes. And then there's a definite lack of piano jokes, just a few. A couple of the best of those are in the unmentionable category, like the one that finishes off "Do you know there's a hole in your pants and your balls are hanging out?" "Know it? I wrote it!" Cam Ryga is a great one for walking by me as I am onstage and telling me the absolutely foulest joke, basically daring me to repeat it on mic. Anyways, I keep it relatively clean. Kids love to hate my jokes, then pester me for more. It keeps things rolling between schools and while the adjudicators are doing their thing.

As well, I harangue them to get out and support live music, keep playing after high school, and basically to make music part of their lives.

On the whole, I'd have to say this year's edition was a success. The changes we have made in the past year worked out well. We always find aspects to tighten up and refine, and this year is no different.

It was the general concensus that the overall quality of all of the participants this year, even the beginner bands, has risen in comparison with previous years. We did not have any achingly bad groups. I've got to give the teachers all the credit. Despite mounting external pressures, they continue to improve the quality of music education. They bring kids who are willing to learn and the teachers themselves seemed to be soaking up the information presented by our facilitators. Frankly, it's hard not to spend time in a room with guys like Hugh Fraser and not feel their infectuous energy. And they in turn get a boost from working with young musicians.

We always put on an evening showcase performance. In the past it's been the likes of VEJI, the Brad Turner Quartet and the Hugh Fraser Quintet. This year it was the NADEN band from CFB Esquimault. The fact that the Canadian Navy has several excellent bands across the country is largely unknown in Vancouver. It's more remarkable because these guys play over 200 gigs a year. They are full-time working musicians. We had them perform two years ago and three of our adjudicators, Cam Ryga, Brad Turner and Hugh Fraser sat in for a few numbers and shot the band into the stratosphere, truly a memorable show. The put on a solid performance for us this past Monday evening, very mainstream and most capably played.

But there was no question what was the highlight of the festival for many of us, and certainly for me. It was the A Band's one-hour set Tuesday noontime. They opened and closed with Thad Jones Mel Lewis Band charts, already more contemporary than anything we had heard the previous evening, and included pieces by Dave Holland and Maria Schneider. It was very exciting and the overflowing crowd was extremely enthusiastic.

And in that performance was one of those moments that keeps me involved in the festival year after year. They had a high school student sub in on one of the tenor sax chairs. Director Réjean Marois had the eminently good musical instincts to feature the two tenor players trading off solos over an extended time. For the third time in three years, we got to hear real excitement, what the real potential of a big band is, when it really gets going and then the soloists stand up and blow their asses off. This time it was Evan Arntzen and Eli Bennett matching each other phrase for phase, showing yet again that they both are the real deal. I don't know if they've ever played toe to toe before, but the two of them were clearly having a great time onstage together. It was thrilling to see and hear.

Evan and Eli light it up with the A Band

It was one of those performances that will leave an indelible mark on many who saw the show. I hope it really inspired the kids in the audience and judging from the raucous ovation at the end, it did. My one regret was that Stan Karp, mentor to both of these fine young musicians, wasn't there to see it.

2007-02-18T08:45:00.000-08:00

Happy Birthday Stan!

Stan Karp has influenced an entire generation of saxophone players in this city, maybe two. There would be a very lengthy list of people, from the rawest young talent to established veterans on the scene, who have spent a little or a lot of time with him. Some of the latter would include Cory Weeds, Jon Bentley and Chad Makela. The young lions would have to include Evan Arntzen, Jamie Campbell, Tyler Summers and Eli Bennett. A full list would be a pretty big undertaking.

I've known guys who've moved to Vancouver just to study with Stan, also guys who insist on staying here when their careers may be better served to move somewhere else, again just to stay with Stan.

Stan is a bit of an enigma. Only a handful of people have ever seen him gig, despite the fact that he is a fantastic player. He's funny. He's cool. He's a gifted teacher, having learned from the very best - Bill Green, Buddy Collette, Joe Henderson. It was Joe that told him that he should teach and that's the path that he chose. I am convinced he could write the definitive book on how to play saxophone.

In over 10 years, I can't say that I've seen him give me a "bad" lesson, not when he had pneumonia, not when he had congestive heart failure. If the lessons were bad, it was not on his part, but mine. And on reflection, all of those ones were some of my most valuable. He never gives less than his very best if you walk through the door willing to learn and work at it. During some of my most important lessons, we never played a note.

Stan has a way of saying things that will stay with you forever. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of the saxophone. He is very intuitive with his teaching method, often zeroing in on what needs to be worked on, almost before you walk in the door. He constantly explores new angles, new avenues, new philosophies towards playing. He loves his students deeply. And he can outplay any of them.

He's turning 60 in a couple of weeks, and it was a major undertaking to pull of a surprise party. He thought he was coming to a gig by Eli Bennett, fresh back from his performances at the Grammy awards. Instead, there was a roomful of his longtime friends and students. He prides himself in always being in the know, but ringleaders Jenna and Bob got him this time.

Jerry Cooke put together a fine little R&B band. Jerry was sounding mighty fine, and was a deliberate choice because he wasn't ever a student of Stan's. The evening was meant to be fun (it was), not a jam session. The only other player to bring a horn was Eli, and everyone wanted to hear him. He played with a maturity way beyond his years and has come light years under Stan's guidance. He's a sweet guy and a great player at age 17.

Without a doubt, the most talked-about gift was a new horn from Sandro and the boys at Massullo Music. A KEYLESS SAXOPHONE! This is one strange-looking beast. No doubt Stan will be playing Donna Lee on it in a month, and will have developed a whole new teaching methodology within two.

Even though Stan's retiring this year from teaching at Cap College, he intends to be around for a long time, continuing to inspire, educate and love his students. I'm sure there were plenty more guys who couldn't make it last night because they were out gigging. We all love Stan. Certainly anyone who has been reading my blog will know my admiration for this guy. Things would most definitely have unfolded very differently had I not started studying with him back in October 1996. I can't imagine that I would have had many of the experiences that I've been writing here for the last nine months. I owe much of it to him.

2007-02-11T15:14:00.000-08:00

Song Room 6

The Song Room has rules.

<- Marguerite Witvoet

For the performers: The song must be an original composition, no more than 5 minutes in length. There can be no more than 3 performers, including the singer. The lyrics must be from a living Canadian writer. The theme of the evening is predetermined, and the song must have some relevance to that theme. There is a required dress rehearsal a couple of days prior and usually a sound check on the day of the show. Composers cannot participate in two consecutive Song Rooms.

For the audience: The cover charge is $10 plus a favourite food item, either savoury or sweet. There must be absolute silence during the performance. Engage the performers in conversation afterwards.

For the presenters: Open your home to up to a hundred people. Set up a meeting of the previous compsers and writers to determine a theme. Decide on six new composers. Organize rehearsals and performances to the minute. Make performers and audience feel welcome and a valued part of the process. Document the performances with a decent recording. Pay the performers 100% of the door proceeds. Make it a must-see happening. Repeat twice yearly.

Tom, David and Karen ->

Karen Matthews, Tom Cone and David Pay conceived of this series to promote the development of a library of new Canadian songs. To date they have premiered 65 new compositions involving over a hundred musicians. The musical disciplines range from contemporary classical to free improv, hip hop, folk and rock. Most of the performers are extremely accomplished, some are absolutely raw.

Since I composed The Deluge in collaboration with Stew Brinton, Alita Dupray and Dominique Brunchmann for Song Room 5, I couldn't participate again this time as a composer. I was happy to be an audience member for a change. And when I showed up with my trusty camera, I was pressed into being the official photographer for the evening.

This evening's theme was "indiscretion", a concept put forth by Stew at the Song Room 5 post-mortem.

The program opened up with a burlesque-style piece by Marguerite Witvoet in a sensual duet with her accordion named "Titano". Apparently this was quite a stretch from her more usual staid performances. It was a hoot.

Soressa Gardner and Karma Sohn ->

Next up was Soressa Gardner in your basic Gidget get-up, accompanied by accordion and cuica. Again it was fairly high in the camp factor. The text was based on letters to a fictional advice columnist, a cross between Dear Abbey and Dan Savage.

<- Kathryn Cernauskas and Heather Pawsey

The more "serious" content came from composer Leslie Uyeda and writer Brenda Brooks. They had stunning soprano Heather Pawsey sing about indescretion accompanied by cello and flute/bass flute. The piece was beautifully composed, with a degree of difficulty added by a last-minute substitution of cellists.

By this point in the program, it was getting pretty clear that the common conception of what constituted indescretion could be boiled down to "Men are pigs."

Tony Wilson, Billy Little and presenter Tom Cone ->

After a short break came a duet between the always-great Tony Wilson and distinguished poet Billy Little. He was in poor health and really could not sing, but nevertheless gave a very moving performance. He announced that his indiscretion would be attempting to sing. A born American, he had written a very blunt dissection of The Star Spangled Banner's lyrics entitled "We are Sick of War". I'm a little fuzzy on the details on this one as it was a last-minute addition and not in the written program.

<- Shanto, Carol and Rajinderpal

Carol Sawyer followed with a composition of hers with text by Rajinderpal Pal. The piece was based on director Krzyzstof Kieslowski's Dekalog, a ten-episode TV series, with each installment having been based upon one of the 10 Commandments. Carol called her piece Decalog 3, and it was certainly the most emotionally harrowing performance of the evening. Rajinderpal read his text while Carol and Shanto Bhattacharya on cello improvised on the emotional content of the words.

Kori Miyanishi, Leah Abramson and Shiho Mizumoto ->

The evening finished off with an Appalachian-style song played on two fiddles, he twist being that the the lyrical concept was a "murder-suicide hymn". Writer Leah Abramson and fiddler Kori Miyanishi sang in taut harmony. It was a very effective piece as the open tunings had a very primal effect.

As varied as the styles were, the songs all held together in a coherent set. It was a very satisfying night. The post-performance hang and nosh were equally as satisfying and by the end it was far too late to consider heading over to Ironworks or 1067. There was still talk about how effective our performance of The Deluge had been at the previous Song Room, and suggestions that I consider another collaboration with Alita for the next one.

Stew and I discussed it this morning and we were both of the opinion that we first need to know the theme for the June Song Room. That will lead to some concept for the text. We can then decide which singer would be the best to interpret it. With all of the great singers that we know in town, that's like letting a kid loose in a candy shop.

2007-02-10T14:38:00.000-08:00

Time Flies

<- Eyvind Kang - got my camera back!

I made it down to Ironworks for the last 2 sets of Friday night's performance. Time Flies is an annual series of concerts produced by Coastal Jazz and Blues wherein a number of notable improvisors from various locations around the world are brought together with some of Vancouver's finest. Over the course of three nights they are randomly selected to play in a number of small groupings. If there are any more rules than that, I'm not aware of them. For more, check out the CJBS website.

This format can have some unexpectedly surprising results but also runs the risk of becoming mundane if the musicians don't click. Risk is the key word. If the musicians play it safe, the results end up sounding safe. Going too far in the other direction risks wankery, so it's a delicate balance that is presented to an ever more discerning audience.

The major development for this year's event was the change of venue from the Western Front to Ironworks, certainly a great move in terms of atmosphere and intimacy. More than one person noted this was the coolest place in town, regrettably gaining that distinction due to the City's myopic closure of l'Espace. The performers and audience certainly seemed to react well to the new location.

<- Cor, Phil, Torsten

Afterwards, it was the general concensus that this has been the best Time Flies in recent years. The musicianship was uniformly outstanding. Local participants Peggy Lee and Torsten Muller certainly did not have to prove that they belonged with this group of highly-esteemed imports.

Cor, Peggy ->

Peggy in particular, seemed to own the stage as she has done in every outing of hers that I've ever seen. (I recall watching the London Composers Orchestra watch her open-mouthed while she soloed a couple years back.) Torsten was endlessly creative. Everyone else was similarly firing on all cylinders. Best of all, they connected together very deeply. They seemed to feed off the vibe in the room and the appreciation coming from the audience.

Having met most of the performers at Wednesday's workshops, and there were a good number of workshop participants present last night, I felt like we were rooting for our friends up there onstage. Everyone delivered. I had been at the workshops run by Eyvind Kang, John Butcher and Cor Fuhler and each of them were excellent.

I hadn't met Phil Minton as he spent Wednesday running a Feral Choir workshop at the Carnegie Centre. He was totally amazing. There were times when there were sounds emanating from the stage and we couldn't figure out who it was, only to determine it was Phil by watching small movements of his mouth. Again, it was a great example of how the human voice is versatile beyond belief, and how it can draw the audience into an improvisation.

Eyvind, Phil, John, Hasse Poulsen, Peggy ->

I know I'm lapsing into superlatives and not really describing what they did, but that is certainly part of the ephemeral nature of an improvised performance. Individually they were great, collectively they were greater. I can say no more.

Tonight the Song Room! Probably afterwards, I'll scoot down to Ironworks again for the final Time Flies set.

And since I have recovered from my cold, I'm also feeling much better about the Wednesday night performances. Again VCMI has proven to be a valuable experience for me.

2007-02-08T22:36:00.000-08:00

According to the experts

Apparently the singular of the word timpani is "kettle drum". Neither my Groves Dictionary or the Harvard Dictionary makes any distinction between one or a number of drums, but they did both point out that there was no "y" in the spelling, other than in incorrect common usage. Google didn't help, though I didn't persist with it for too long.

I guess I should have asked Giorgio yesterday.

Interestingly in the Harvard, I looked up "improvisation". There were about 8 inches of text, all devoted to historical references from the 17th century and leading up to the evolution of the cadenza. Only the very last sentence stated "An interesting revival of improvisation is in the jam session of contemporary jazz." So much for my chosen musical path.

This was only the second edition of this book, now over 30 years old. Hopefully it's been updated. To be fair, it did devote several pages to "jazz", coming up about a decade short of Ken Burns' summary.

I used to have an old music dictionary with a very disdainful, condescending and downright racist dismissal of jazz in it. I must have thrown it out.

The singular for timpani must be timpano, which as any film and food lover would remember was the object of Stanley Tucci's desire in the great film Big Night. It was an elaborate pasta dish in the shape of a drum, the ultimate achievement of Italian cuisine. That movie and Moonstruck made me want to be Italian, at least for a night. Goodfellas, not so much.

2007-02-08T11:23:00.000-08:00

VCMI meets Time Flies

Wednesday was a full day indeed. I've been fighting the onset of a cold, and by the end of the day, I was dead tired. It was quite satisfying and the parts that weren't satisfying were informative. There's always something positive to be learned when situations don't work out as expected.

The day was structured in typical Vancouver Creative Music Institute fashion. There were a series of simultaneous workshops that went on throughout the day. You had to make choices, sometimes quite arbitrary, as which one to attend and which to miss. The workshops were led by the performers in this weekend's Time Flies series at Ironworks, and participants were VCMI alumni and VCC music students.

The first one of the day was a no-brainer, at least as far as the actual choice. Once we got into the room with Eyvind Kang, our brains were fully engaged. This was an easy decision for me because Eyvind played on Bill Frisell's Quartet album, one of my all-time desert island picks. He immediately launched us into a very philosophical and compelling discussion about improvised music, punctuated with short group improvisations. He continually encouraged us to go deeper into the music. Later in the day, the two of us talked about the challenges in strengthening the connections between the creative music communities in Seattle and Vancouver.

Next up for me was a larger ensemble situation co-led by John Butcher and Giorgio Magnanensi. I must admit that I am not really familiar with John's saxophone playing, but have read glowing reviews of some his previous performances here. I found him to be a very personable, down-to-earth sort of guy. Part of the workshop was given over to a conduction by Giorgio, something I've done many times and often enjoyed.

This time I was annoyed by some of the VCC students who were attending the workshop. The essence to conduction is keeping your eyes on the conductor at all times and following his every gesture. Another essential skill in improv is to pick your times to lay out and when to play, and then only do so with deliberate intention. So it started to get to me that some of these students just didn't get it. They kept their heads down, never followed a gesture and basically played nonstop for 20 minutes. I've seen this before with young players, and it's only with musical maturity and experience that they develop sharp improv skills. I guess I'm getting old and cranky because it was getting under my skin.

The third workshop was led by by Cor Fuhler from Holland. Though his English was excellent, I don't think we got his main point, and as a group we were unable to distinguish between making a gesture and making a more deliberate musical statement, save for doing it more loudly. For me, the best part about this exercise was that I played bass clarinet along with a couple of other much better players, Karen Davidson and Mike Dowler. I haven't had my bass clarinet out of the case since the ion Zoo gig in December, so it was gratifying to connect with them.

My feelings about outcome of the evening's performance were mixed.

The program was divided into two sets, the first being various groupings of VCMI alumni, each with a 6-minute slot. These groupings had been left up to the participants to arrange well in advance of this date. I had asked Jeff Younger and Russel Sholberg to do a trio thing. We've never really played together before in a small ensemble, but I have seen them both play quite often and I knew we'd be a good fit.

We were scheduled to go on first. So it was guitar, bass and me on soprano sax, aided by tympani. This was an idea I got from trumpeter Gord Allen during our time at VCMI in 2005. He played his trumpet into a floor tom to great effect. There was a large tympani onstage yesterday, so I commandeered it and played into it. It was a terrific effect, especially when playing the bottom notes of my horn and using the tympani head to totally or partially block the airflow, which created fantastic overtones, combining with the resonance of the drum. I thought it was an effective trio performance, and it was short and sweet.

("Tympani" is obviously plural - what's the singular? Tympano? Tympanum? Gotta check my Grove's.)

None of the groups that followed kept to the 6-minute guideline. A couple of them ran closer to 15 minutes, often with people choosing to ignore obvious timely endings. Rather, they just kept blowing. Every performance had something going for it, but my enjoyment was tempered by a growing annoyance at their inability to self-regulate. As a result the first set ran quite a bit over time and not surprisingly, we lost a fair bit of audience over the intermission.

The second set was a series of 15-minute performances comprising of the people involved in each of the workshops during the day. Again, every performance had something going for it and I was interested in seeing the results of the workshops that I didn't attend. Our performance for the Cor Fuhler workshop clearly reflected that we hadn't really got the message. It got bloody loud and ear-piercing at one point. I doubt that was the gist of the workshop.

Near the end of the night came the group from Eyvind's workshop, which I was really looking forward to. I thought things were going fairly well and I liked my playing. We came to an ending. But it didn't end. A VCC student who had sat in on the workshop had invited himself onstage for the piece. I was under the impression this was supposed to be a performance by VCMI alumni only, not the students. He decided it was time to feature himself on piano and so we lurched through a couple of more false endings while he continued to play. There was a bit of eyeball-rolling by some the rest of the people onstage.

Yes, I am getting old and grumpy. It probably wasn't all that bad. And maybe my low energy due to my cold didn't help. But I certainly have less tolerance for that sort of thing nowadays.

As I type this, I can't help but have more respect for teachers who work with these young musicians every year, full of unbridled enthusiasm. I just don't have the patience for it .

2007-02-06T10:20:00.000-08:00

Green light effect

I miss my camera. I started having problems with it just after ion Zoo played The Cellar in December. A friend of Carol's who is a professional photographer was there and he offerred to take a few shots of us. He also changed all of the basic settings on the camera and afterwards, I couldn't get it back to the way I was used to having it. Then it took longer and longer for the camera to switch into ready mode when I turned it on.

There is an LED indicator that blinks as the camera starts up and reads the memory card, usually just a few seconds. In a short time, this was the only thing the camera would do, just blink. So I took it to the Nikon repair depot, quite near to my home. I was told it was the dreaded "green light effect", a design flaw with this model of camera, and that the whole metering system would have to be replaced. As I was listening to the prognosis, I couldn't help but notice the posted repair rates, which appeared to start with a $300 minimum. I was very relieved to hear that this was a factory recall and it would be done at no charge.

That was almost a month ago, and I am anxious to get it back. I've missed shooting a few of the Monday night series at The Cellar. There have been some really great sets lately and a couple of times I've seen some situations that would have made for great photos.

Last night I really enjoyed Sketches, comprising of Gord Grdina, Dan Gaucher and Neal Dhillon. I was digging Neal's control of his horn, his time and soft tone, very unusual in freer improv situations. Normally this is where sax players really let their tone open upn - certainly I'm one of those who pushes it to extremes and continually working on getting an even wider range of sounds out of the horn. Neal chooses to work in a very limited tonal palette, more in the Lee Konitz range, and really digs into the possibilities. And since he is also a highly accomplished tabla player, his sense of time and rhythm is impeccable. He and Gord and Dan navigated effortlessly through some deadly wicked time signatures. Neal dressed quite sharply and I wish I could have gotten a good photo of him.

I really like it when music is in a so-called odd (to whom?) time signature and it all sounds very organic, as opposed to a bunch of guys as much as shouting "Hey we're cool, we're playing in 13!" That sort of stuff quickly bores me.

During my first year at Banff, Maria Schnieder presented a few pieces in uncommon time signatures, an arrangement of Giant Step in 5/4. It was fast and really hard, an earlier arrangement of hers. I was happy that we decided not to perform that one. Rather, we did Hang Gliding, which is one of the most sublime pieces I've ever played, which just happened to be in 11. One of my first entries of this blog details my experience with that piece. It was one of the major turning points of my life.

By coincidence, yesterday I finished doing a lift of a Jeannette Lindstrom song called Leaf, with her blessing. On Sunday, I was surprised to find out that it was in 5/4 with the odd bar of 6 thrown in for effect. I've listened to the tune dozens of times, but I hadn't picked up on the time, as it all sounded very natural. I've liked the lyrics to this song, the fact that she wrote in here in BC and its mention of Robson St.

I've really enjoyed listening to Jeanette's In the Middle of this Riddle cd since I saw her a couple of times at last year's Jazz Festival. I just liked the sometimes startling clear tone of her voice, been interested in her deliberate choices of diction, English being a second language for her, and particularly liked Staffan Svensson's always understated and interesting trumpet playing.

So it's with a bit of regret that I had to change gears and start listening critically to this song, figuring out all of the bits that made it sound so good. It's like figuring out a magic trick, and having that experience of wonder surgically removed.

We're going to rehearse it tonight with the Wanda Nowicki Group. If we can make the song flow, we'll keep it, maybe record it. If we make it sound like we're thumping our chests about playing in 5, then I'll yank it. And god help anyone who pounds out that Take Five lick tonight. Years back we did a wedding where the groom requested that tune. I wrote an arrangement in 6, just to see if anyone was actually listening.

Tomorrow, a full plate of VCMI!

2007-01-29T13:35:00.000-08:00

Dash it all

I was channel surfing a little while ago and briefly watched the most ridiculous piece of dialogue. It was a black and white British wartime-era melodrama, with two officers having a smoke in the Officers' Mess. Before I changed the channel again, the conversation went something like this:

"You know, Nigel, before all of this mess, I was an organist and a pretty good one, I daresay. I used to play organ at the cinema, but I always wanted to be a concert organist."

The other replied, "My dear boy, there are two types of people in this world, those who play organ at the cinema, and those who play Bach."

Tarantino it wasn't.

Later on, this stilted exchange got me thinking. I have the opportunity this year to play in many different groups and situations, more than ever before, and in a slew of differing styles. I could take on a lot of composing projects. Though few of them would be particularly lucrative (not a prime motivator in my musical life), most would be rewarding from a creative perspective, and I would definitely enjoy myself. I could have a chance to play many different instruments, and learn and improve on most of them.

On the other hand, I have a voice in my head (one of many) telling me to stick to one instrument, one style, and to really get proficient in that before having the audacity to take so much on. This is eminently sensible, yet also a convenient way to cop out, because one can never be simply "good enough", given the depth and tradition of jazz. Serious practice habits can easily breed perfectionist tendencies. Perfectionism gets in the way of success, always undermining it.

Some months ago I described myself as a musical generalist, a jack of all trades, master of none. I'm currently revisiting that concept, precisely because I now have all of these varied opportunities that I have been deliberately seeking out.

Coupled with that is my desire to increase my financial stability, which may entail a dayjob change in the near future. Uncertainty of what that may bring is making me think I shouldn't take so much on at this time. In fact, I've given a lot of thought as to how many of my current projects I'd be willing to give up, and which are non-negotiable. Could I pare it down to two? I could, with a great measure of regret for the others. One? I don't want to put myself in a position where I'd have to make such a choice. None? No way.

The next few weeks will be interesting as I work through all of this, hopefully finding some clarity along the way.

2007-01-17T09:53:00.000-08:00

À propos of absolutely nothing musical...

I live in a joe lunchbucket neighbourhood in South Van. My daughter's school is a small, wonderful French immersion school. Everyone involved there knows it's a special place, something confirmed by former teachers I've run into who wish they were back there. It's a bit too far for us to walk every day, and involves crossing Knight Street, dicey at the best of times. When weather permits, we bike to and from school.

One of the kids at school occasionally gets driven to school in a Hummer. A bloody Hummer to get to elementary school! Christ on a pogo stick, is that really necessary, even if you're crossing Knight Street?

2007-01-14T22:16:00.000-08:00

Michael Brecker RIP

I've been pretty bummed out about hearing about his passing yesterday. I had to check it out several ways on the net just to make sure that it wasn't another malicious rumor. CBC reported it this morning, so that's official enough for me. But I still went to his website to see the absolute proof.

I've visited a terminal leukemia patient in the hospital. It's one hell of a way to go. I wouldn't wish it on anybody.

He'd been sick for two and a half years, and I hadn't heard anything for a while. The previous news I'd heard was that the experimental therapy had gone well and he was home practising. That was quite a few months ago, and just last week I thought about contacting Terry Deane for an update.

About a year ago I spent some time giving thought as to what constitutes a contemporary saxophone sound. There are so many styles and so many great players out there that I admire. Given my tastes that run to the avante garde, the field is even more wide open.

But for what I consider to be the mainstream, nobody embodied the contemporary tenor sax better than Mike Brecker. That he was a technichal master of the instrument is undeniable. He may well be the most influential saxophone player since Trane.

In the various student music festivals I've been involved with, I saw the emerging young lions announcing their arrival by playing (or trying to play) "that Brecker shit", not Bird, not Trane. It seemed to be to be the new benchmark.

I first heard him in the mid-seventies with The Brecker Brothers. As he started on his solo career ten years later, I bought his records. I didn't snap up everything that he released. At times the density and complexity of what he did overwhelmed me. Dexter was more my style for a number of years.

But one could not ignore the breadth of his work. Sometimes I preferred his work as a sideman, or an album where he didn't write all of the tunes. The McCoy Tyner cd Infinity remains one of my faves.

We added a couple of his tunes to our set lists, Midnight Voyage and El Nino, the former truly deserving to be considered a standard. I'd never play my Brecker shit with these tunes because frankly, I don't have any.

I bought a book of his transcriptions about a dozen years ago. I don't have a lot of books of transcriptions and the only one I've ever played cover to cover (with a nice slow metronome) was the Charlie Parker Omnibook. I had one of Dexter's (I could get the notes but never really get the feel) and one of Trane's (simply an exercise in humility). Brecker's book fell into the latter category. I pull those books out maybe once a year and they act as a benchmark. I generally find that I can play a bit more of the transcriptions, but the vast majority is beyond my grasp. That's really OK with me. I don't set out to try to imitate these guys, just to learn a bit more each time. I opened it up for about half an hour last night.

The thing about the Brecker transcription book is that it seems to be a vehicle for the enviable abilities of Carl Coan, the transcriber, who has gone to great lengths to notate what Brecker did in some of his solos. I really don't think that Mike really was planning on playing four groups of sixteeenth notes with a 13:2 ratio, or pickup notes of tenthtuplets or whatever. This is somebody elses scarily detailed interpretation of what he heard Brecker do. It makes it easy for an uninitiated player to miss the essence of Brecker's abilities, his command of the time, deep understanding of form and chord structure and the ability to impose shapes of notes, his own idiosyncratic lines, over the changes, regardless of what the changes were, yet they always sounded right.

And how many Guardala mouthpieces were sold to guys trying to emulate that unique sound? This of course fits into the category of "What reeds should I use to sound like Charlie Parker?"

I have often been of the opinion that Brecker's technical brilliance overpowered the emotional content of his playing. However in recent years, I felt that he was working on incorporating that more into his music. His last show here, at Cap College, was thrilling. That disease would probably have already been eating at his bone marrow.

Reading that he wrapped up his final recording project just two weeks ago, it will be most interesting to hear what he sounded like, with mortality clearly staring him in the eye.

2007-01-10T20:46:00.000-08:00

Terminatrix

Last night my daughter came down with a mild version on the bug that Brian Nation has dubbed The Terminator. She didn't sleep well through the night, consequently neither did I. Then she was up early in the morning with the heaves - ahh, the joys of fatherhood.

I'm not so good at pulling those all-nighters as I used to be, so by late afternoon I was beat. I was stumbling to the bedroom for a nap and happened to look out the window. The outside light was pink due to the combination of a bit of a sunset effect and the street lights coming on. In my dazed state, I was sure I was looking at fresh cherry blossoms in the tree outside our bedroom window. Springtime already!

What a rube. Especially since I had been out earlier in the afternoon.

For any non-Vancouverites reading this, it was six inches of powder snow.

2007-01-04T22:32:00.000-08:00

Cross that one off...

This goal setting voodoo really does work! This evening I got an e-mail from Maria Schneider. Really. She doesn't want me in her band, nothing so trivial, she wants my financial contribution to her new cd project. I'm just happy her website marketing system remembered my name. Maybe a little quid pro quo would be in order. Perhaps I'll get my computer to ask her computer to fund my cd project.

2006-12-30T11:00:00.000-08:00

Resolution

For me, New Years Resolutions are promises to yourself meant to be broken, consequently I no longer make them. In 2006, the only Resolution that mattered to me was at Banff when I had the privilege of performing Hugh Fraser's arrangement of Part 2 of Love Supreme.

I am a believer in the use of goal-setting techniques in order to advance my progress as a musician. At the start of every year, I make lists of the various projects in which I am involved and then detail what I would like to see happen in the coming year. I also take a look at my ever-expanding collection of instruments and list what needs tweaking, repairing, replacing, whatever. Nothing is too trivial.

Everything ends up on a single sheet of paper, which I refer to several times during the year. I cross things off the list as they are done. I amuse myself at seeing what was important to me in January, but no longer relevant in July. Some things never get crossed off - too big, too small. Some things require a lot of TME (time, money or energy), others, sometimes surprisingly, just happen without effort. In the end, most of the individual listed items don't really matter, rather it's more important whether or not I've made progress in the year.

I start out by reading the previous year's list one last time. I am usually pleasantly surprised with how much I have accomplished. Generally, the ones that aren't crossed off don't cause much regret. I can either carry them over or dump them. I also have space to add the good things that did happen, even if they weren't on the list.

There are times when I am plagued by artistic sef-doubt and feel that I am stuck in a rut. Looking over the list reminds me just how much I've done.

It's important to have some ridiculously large things on the list, say "Get the call from Maria Schneider to sub in". That one is not really on my list, but maybe it should be. The odds of that happening are so minute as to be incalculable, but just having that in writing allows for the possiblility of other big things to happen. And they do.

It's essential to be very clear, sometimes the more detailed, the better. I might write a separate page on something very important, say if I were to be in the hunt for a new tenor sax, which thankfully I am not. A lack of detail may cause unexpected results. Last year I wrote down "new clarinet" to replace the loaner I've had for a few years. By the fall, I had to return the loaner and I did get a very nice clarinet on eBay, an alto clarinet. D'oh! Gotta be more specific on that one.

Ideally there should be more of the "being" and "doing" sort of goals, rather than the "having". That sets up a better state of mind for good things to happen, rather than the mere accumulation of more stuff.

There are actually very specific and detailed goal-setting systems out there, ones that require daily writing and recitals of lists and so on, but that's really too much work for me. I know people who do that and have amazing results. People into the personal development movement like to quote Emerson (Ralph Waldo, not Keith): "Once you have made a decision, the universe will conspire to make it happen." A quick Google search on that quote got a lot of hits on self-help sites, very few on scholarly Emerson sites, so it may be paraphrased or misattributed, or completely fabricated. Nevertheless, personal experience proves that it works for me. It may be a little bit woo-woo for some, but I'll take it.

I prefer one of Stan Karp's memorable sayings, which I believe came from his mentor Bill Green. "People often overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten." I interpret that as taking the path to slow and steady growth. My goal-setting technique is just one more tool to use in making that journey.

Note: I always feel like I'm writing this blog in a vacuum. It comes as a pleasant surprise when someone comments on a post, so I welcome any feedback. And if there is anyone hanging on every word that I write - get a life! - I neglected to hit the "publish post" button back on Dec 12th and now there is another entry in its proper place.

2006-12-14T09:17:00.000-08:00

Le fin de l'Espace

Late last evening I got a call to go down to l'Espace.

As many people know who read the vancouverjazz.com forum or the local papers, the city just closed down one of Vancouver's most unique and beautiful performance spaces. I received numerous requests for an on-line letter writing campaign to save this one-of-a-kind venue, but it was all for naught.

I first discovered the place several years ago when Viviane Houle started a short-lived Salon series, featuring songs by a wide stylistic range of local singers. The moment I walked in the door, I was in another place, certainly not Vancouver. Maybe Montréal, maybe Paris. The place was too damn cool, all this exposed brickwork and a giddy eclectic decor that was just so right. A lot of people spoke French, whether they could or not, and the wine and food flowed out of the kitchen area, and the music was transcendent.

As I understand it, Régis Painchaud and a friend discovered this place under the Granville St. bridge about 10 years ago. It was an early 20th century garage, probably one of the first places in the city where cars could be worked on. It was abandoned, full of ratshit and syringes and they were contracted to salvage building materials before the city demolished it. It was owned by the city, but rather than destroy it, these two realized the potential of this building and covertly renovated it.

By the time I discovered it, it was quietly being operated as a performance venue, a frequent film location, and a place to hold private receptions, including the COPE election-night party when Larry Campbell got elected as mayor. It stuck in the craw of of the beaurcrats at city hall that they had been outflanked. Régis had powerful political allies, particularly in Jim Green. They had a concept that the whole area around the l'Espace building could be converted to an artistic hub for the city. There was an ongoing battle between the politicos and the pencil-pushers to keep this place open.

I was involved with presenting a NOW Orchestra show there exactly three years ago when the city shut l'espace down. It was 5:00 the day of the show when Coat called me to tell me the gig was off. We all went down there for a drink as the musicians showed up for Coat to pay them for not playing. Régis had already been entered in negotiations with the city to do what was necessary to make the place legit. These talks dragged on for years and he was always optimistic that common sense would prevail. During this time, a very limited number events were allowed to happen.

When the NPA's Sam Sullivan stole the last civic election, the writing was on the wall. Any pet project of Jim Green's was doomed and the pencil-necks at the permits department saw their opportunity to move. They set conditions for Régis that could never be met, and no amount of public appeal would stop them.

I got down there at 11:00 pm, just an hour before the doors were to be locked forever. The first person I saw inside was a security guard sent by the city to ensure the deed was done. Régis was there, bone-tired but as gracious as ever, also Viviane Houle and Stefan Smulovitz. Régis had a few items left that he thought could be used at 1067, and some things he wanted to store there. The place was gutted to the walls, and there were a lot of boxes and various items strewn around the main floor. I loaded up my car with the things for 1067. At the end, just before midnight, Régis dug through a box to find a small gift for my daughter.

It was heartbreaking.

2006-12-12T11:47:00.000-08:00

'Tis the season to be active

Somehow I missed posting this one back on Dec 12th.

I'm about midpoint in my stretch of daily gigs and so far so good. There is something to be said for performing this frequently, namely the benefits of connecting with your instrument in a way that doesn't happen when you're solely in the practice room.

The Christmas show I'm playing in wraps up next Monday night, by which time I'll probably be ready to be done with it. At present, it's enjoyable to do and there's always room for improvement. As Bill Green used to say, "If you know it so well, why doesn't it sound better?"

The show itself is an institution in Vancouver, this being its 40th year of production. In total, about 24,000 people see it each year, no mean feat. I feel this may not be the strongest production they've ever done, but I'll leave the critiques for the audience. For me, this whole experience is always a fascinating peek behind-the-scenes at the Christian music thing, which is a world unto itself. There are some very good musicians in the show and some great singers and I guess they can make a decent living on the circuit. It's something I just get a yearly glimpse at, being an unrepentant heathen and all.

Sprinkled through this performance schedule are my more regular gigs, which are the tonic for the Singing Christmas Tree. With Wanda, we have a number of corporate Christmas gigs, always welcome at this time of the year. Tomorrow Sharon Minemoto's subbing in with us, so that should be fun.

The improv rolls along as well. Last week's show for the NOW workshops at the Western Front went very well. After that, I went to the Cellar for the second set. The music was pretty strong but there was an unusually small crowd there. I attribute that partly to a fairly dry wording for the billing that the VCMI people insisted upon. Too bad - the players had worked hard to put on a good show.

<- Carol Sawyer, Clyde Reed & me at The Cellar Last night it was ion Zoo's turn and I was very pleased how this group continues to develop. Here's a photo from the show. This shot is indicative of one of the challenges photographing groups at the Cellar, that it's hard to include the pianist in the shot unless you shoot long from the back of the room, which often results in a flat looking picture. The other way is to stand at the bar and shoot over the pianist's shoulder, which generally means you will have a depth of field problem and certain players will be out of focus. Plus, the area on stage right is usually underlit, despit my efforts to aim more lights over there. So you end up composing shots just for the pianist, or for the rest of the band, which is what happened here. Too bad, because Lisa Miller was just great last night. <- over Lisa's shoulder

Tonight Carol and I are off to Chris Gestrin's to finish off the mixdown from our last performance at the Cellar. As I anticipated, there was so much good material from last night, that it will be very hard to resist the temptation to include some of those tracks on the cd. By coincidence, that's Chris's picture on the wall just in front of my bass clarinet.

Also on the recording front, we've secured the funding to take the Wanda Nowicki Group back in the studio - thanks, Joe! So we will switch back into that mode early in the new year - always a fun and educational experience.

This is a good sign that I'll start off the new year in a fairly active mode.

2006-12-04T11:23:00.000-08:00

Busy again

Why is is that for many of us, for two months of the year, that things are crazy busy and the balance of the time musicians have to scramble for work? Every 6 months it seems that the universe is unfolding as it should. June and December are quite active for musicians at my level of the jazz food chain.

I'm gigging vitually every night for the first few weeks of December, sometimes twice a night. The New Year's Eve gig that we were working on just fell through a couple of days ago (cheap bastards won't shell out any more than a regular night) and I don't even mind not working that night.

Tonight is going to be an interesting one. When Coat and I were programming the NOW workshops, we didn't think twice about following our annual pattern of making the last Monday in the series as an evening performance. All well and good, except that we had previously scheduled this evening as a special night at The Cellar for alumni of the Vancouver Creative Music Institute. Then Coat got the call from Canada Council to sit on a jury all of this week. So now, not only had we programmed two events for the same night, but Coat would be out of town.

With some help from Dave Chokroun, who will hold the fort at The Cellar until I arrive, I will make things work. I will host the show and conduct the large ensemble at The Western Front, then bomb over to The Cellar to host the balance of the evening's proceedings and maybe get some playing in as well.

Well it beats sitting home and watching the TV, except for the bit that I posted on vancouverjazz.com today. There is a great musical segment at the end of Studio 60 on The Sunset Strip. Who are these guys?

Why does strange shit happen on the day I'm trying to get my jazz festival submissions in? This is a regular pattern over the last few years. Though I'd started early enough, it went down to the last day yet again. And just like previous years, that's the day my computer slowed down to a crawl and the printer wouldn't work right. Then on the way down to CJBS, I got a flat tire. Brand new tires, no apparent holes or leaks, just flat. I was redlining as I had to head out to a gig right after that.

On the plus side, doing a couple of private Christmas functions over the weekend has its benefits. The food was good and plentiful and people are all dressed up, though the latter is a particular disctraction for our piano player. If only all of our gigs had such hazards.

Another positive is the we've also almost finalized the Monday lineup for The Cellar for the first half of next year, right up to the jazz festival. I'm just nailing down the last couple of slots in Coat's absence. The lineup just keeps getting better and better and it's quite gratifying to see the depth of talent in this city and give them a chance to be heard.

2006-11-15T20:01:00.000-08:00

Fallow

I can't recall having such a slow period for gigs in the last few years. Since joining forces with Wanda Nowicki a couple of years back, we've worked fairly steadily. Adding in ion Zoo and the other ventures that I get involved with, I'm usally as busy as I want to be. Since the Cage concert, though, work has been less plentiful.

With Wanda, we do a lot of restaurants, and in the last few months, many of the places have changed music policies or closed altogether. I know that change is just a fact of the restaurant business. In the past, we've always been able to find new venues, but at present, it's a bit of a challenge. In addition to her voice, one of Wanda's real talents is hustling gigs, so I am sure this is just a temporary situation.

In retrospect I was so busy in September and October that I didn't bother chasing down gigs for November. December is going to be a very busy month, so it all balances out.

So what do I do during the slow times? Nothing surprising here. I never seem to have enough practice time. As opposed to the young lions out there, the Evan Arntzens and Eli Bennetts of this world, I am on the slow track to learning the saxophone. Every day that I play, I feel that I get incrementally better, albeit microscopically. That's just the way it is for me. And Stan Karp will have a lifetime of things for me to work on.

On Sunday evenings, I have been part of a newly-created rehearsal ensemble that is reading through the extensive library of the NOW Orchestra. There is a lot of great music there that doesn't deserve to sit on the shelf. At some point, I will be able to bring out the three large ensemble pieces that I wrote for the Banff orchestra, also a good thing. And I get to play my alto sax, which otherwise sits in the case most of the time.

I have a couple of compositions in the works. Writing music is not something that I do on a regular basis. I need to have specific projects and deadlines. I am excited to have been asked to write something for LSB, an improvising string trio. I've been bouncing conceptual ideas for a graphic score around in my head and now it's time to get them on paper.

I've been doing the NOW workshops at the Western Front, something that I have helped to organize this year. I will be leading the final concert on the fourth of next month as Coat Cooke is off to Ottawa to sit on a Canada Council jury. My second composition in the works is for this concert, using a distillation of ideas gleaned from the workshop series.

The Monday evening series at The Cellar has been excellent. By the end of December, there will have been over 60 groups that will have participated this year. Only a handful of them have not been to my taste. Some have been absolutely outstanding, and this has been evidenced by the steadily growing audience numbers. I've had a small hand in the programming of this series and it's extremely heartening to see new talent appearing with such promise. Cat Toren's set last week was a fine example. I have been photographing most of the evenings for the past couple of months and some of my favourite shots are available for viewing on my page at flickr.com. Or click on the link at vancouverjazz.com. It's in the centre column under the Jazz Gallery heading.

I'm a rank amateur when it comes to photography. I liken it to performing on an instrument that I've never played before - sometimes the results are dubious, but the effort has been enjoyable. I've made a point of giving some prints to the bands and e-mailing all of my shots to the leaders. All of us have had too many gigs that have gone undocumented and later wish that there had been some record, audio or visual, of that time. We have worked at addressing that for the participants in this series.

And finally, there's the annual spate of submissions with their attendant deadlines. It often falls to me to put together the packages for the various groups that I am a part of, and this year I have my annual high hope of avoiding that last-minute panic to prepare and deliver them.

2006-10-22T13:19:00.000-07:00

Cagian interpenetrations

It's now Sunday at the end of a very long week and I am pooped.

Vancouver New Music presented a 4-day festival called Silence:John Cage. I was invited to be part of the large ensemble playing Atlas Elipticalis on the final evening. There were about 18 people in the group, a mix of the free improv crowd and UBC new music types. I'd played with many of them previously, so it was a comfortable fit for me. It was also very pleasant to be rehearsing at the Scotiabank Dance Centre, with floor-to-ceiling views from the 7th floor.

<- Giorgio Magnanensi and Marina Rosenfeld

It's always great to have a chance to work with VNM's artistic director, Giorgio Magnanensi, and he taught me an invaluable skill this time around, namely where to find the very best espresso in town and how to order it. He led the first day of rehearsals and it was fairly taxing, especially on him. Conducting this piece is akin to butoh dance, only slower.

<- Carol Sawyer, Clyde Reed and me at Rime

That night, I played a double-bill at Rime. The first set was with ion Zoo and it went very well. We are now a quartet, with Lisa Miller joining us whenever there is a piano available. Lisa is also part of the Atlas ensemble and at one point I became aware that she and I were both playing at that moment from a Cagian perspective. Afterwards, she confirmed that was the case. It was very cool to see that the Atlas experience had an immediate effect. It will be another tool in the ever-growing tool box.

The second set was with the Helsinki 8, just our third performance. The group has a lot of sonic possibilities, and gets stronger each time out. We did a set of mostly scored pieces, including my graphic score from Banff. It went well enough, though it did confirm my feelings that there is a much better piece hidden in there if I just use 10 per cent of the material. The gig was lightly attended. Blanche Norton, Rime's booker, told me that we were up against some stiff competition that night, particularly the Cage festival. That tickled me because half of the evening's performers were also in the festival. It was a fairly satisfying night on the whole, but getting in at 2:00 am just exhausted me the next day.

<- 7 of the Helsinki 8

Back bright and early at the Dance Centre, we were greeted by the guest artist for the Saturday performance. Marina Rosenfeld was described in this week's edition of Seattle's the Stranger as a "NY-based dub plate sorceress", and I thought the Georgia Strait had some flowery music writing... A quick visit to her website revealed her substantial credentials and she was indeed very stimulating to work with. She directed the group throughout the morning session, then had one-on-one discussions with each of us. She encouraged us to interpret Cage's performance notes to the word, and that definitely elevated the music as well as pushing our boundaries.

Many of the people in the ensemble remarked about how much work it took to perform the piece. Playing Cage requires a significant philosophical shift in one's approach to playing music, which in turn forces a pushing of technical boundaries. It just doesn't happen in a straight line, at least in the traditional sense.

<- excerpt from Atlas Elipticalis percussion 1 part

Atlas Elipticalis was composed by Cage in 1961. The visual device for creating the score was achieved by overlaying star charts and the i ching on top of manuscript. All notes were to be played as quietly as possible, with as short a duration as possible unless otherwise indicated. There was to be no repeated notes, no "extraordinary" tone, no intention of melody and an avoidance of ego in the production of the sounds. Cage encouraged the idea of interpenetrations, wherein an instrumentalist produces two different sounds at the same time, say a bassist bowing with one hand and tapping the top with the other. Wind and string players were to play microtonally. Not all notes on the score had to be played. The list went on...

In short, rather than just a random production of sounds, musicians had to really think out how to play each and every note.

I had three sections where I had to play 70 notes or more in the space of 15 seconds. In other sections, maybe 9 notes in 2 minutes. And I decided to play just percussion. I had put together my rack with items that were often loud, had very long sustain and extraordinary sound quality, just the opposite of what Cage specified. So I had my work cut out for me. I had to find different ways of playing the rack, and ended up using bamboo skewers most of the time instead of sticks or mallets. Marina also wanted more "skins and wood", so I pulled whatever I could find out of my closet. It was quite a mixed collection, which I dubbed the "Randy Raine-Reusch Starter Kit".

In the end, the concert went very well in my opinion. Atlas Elipticalis was broken up into three sections. Other Cage compositions overlapped the various sections, often playing concurrently, yet they were distinctly different while occupying the same space. The audience and performers were intermingled and the audience was encouraged to move around to hear different sonic combinations. The program ended with two versions of the final composition John Cage wrote, first in the original piano/violin duet form, then with Marina doing a very musical and compelling version on her turntables, something Cage would have approved of, I'm sure.

<- RR-R Starter Kit

As I was listening to those pieces seated behind my percussion, I had an interesting experience. The performance hall was dark except for the starkly lit soloists. I was looking through my rack in Marina's direction, but she was obscured by one of my bronze sound plates. The way the lighting was, it appeared that the plate was a black square, not between the two of us, but rather in the black curtains on the opposite side of the recital hall. Logically, I knew where the plate was hanging, but the more I looked, the more it appeared to be a black hole, square in shape, on the other side of the room. This black hole was absorbing the images of everything directly in front of it, cutting off human forms at the neck or wherever. This effect lasted for what seemed several minutes as long as I was caught up in the music. When it came to a point that was less engrossing, the effect ended.

I understand that Cage enjoyed his shrooms, so he probably would have approved of this as well.

2006-10-14T17:20:00.000-07:00

Humbility

I think it's important for a musician to stretch his/her musical boundaries. Taken in the proper context, all experiences be they good or bad can enrich one's musical ability.

To that end, I've been doing some new things lately.

One of them was leading an improvisation workshop at the Western Front for the New Orchestra Workshop. I've participated in the workshops for years, now with thanks to Coat Cooke, it was time to teach one. I immediately broke my own prime directive for what I think constitutes a good workshop. I talked and encouraged discussion for a greater period of time than we played. The participants were are fairly experienced, and so I decided to spend time on a number of more advanced improv concepts and to share a number of the more important points that I had distilled over my years of taking these workshops. Since then, the feedback from most in attendance was positive, but next time I will work to severely limit the number of concepts that I present. As any regular reader of this blog can attest, I can go on for a bit.

Another one has been to start taking music classes at Ache Brasil. As a saxophone player, singing while playing is a great conceptual technique, but doesn't happen in the standard sense. So it is a very new thing for me to sing, in Portuguese no less, and play percussion at the same time. At this point in time, I can't really do it for any length of time without screwing up.

I can't help but think that this is one of the most ancient forms of music making, yet a considerable challenge for me. Capoeira music is very deeply connected to African music and operates on the same primal level. It's a relatively simple combination of percussion instruments and song that quickly becomes fairly complex, subtle and powerful.

No problem for a university educated jazz guy, like, we're supposed to be able to play everything, right? Riiiight...

I have no pretensions about where I fit in the local music scene, and consider myself relatively low on the food chain. Conversely, I have done a few things in my life at what I consider to be a pretty high musical level. Yet it really counts for very little when I walk in the door at Ache Brasil. I'm just another novice pandeiro player, and I'm quite happy to have it that way.

The next challenge this coming week is my participation in Vancouver New Music's presentation of John Cage's Atlas Ellipticalis. The performance is next Saturday night at the Scotiabank Dance Centre, part of a John Cage series being staged next week. It's a great privelege to be invited to play a composition by one of the icons of 20th century music. The score is a going to take a lot of work just to understand. We have 3 days of workshopping it into shape, led by Giorgio Magnanensi and visiting artist Marina Rosenfeld. Just to add to the degree of difficulty, I'll play percussion, maybe have one sax or clarinet ready if the music leads in that direction.

Here again, I expect to have my work cut out for me.

Finally, this coming Wednesday night at Rime, I will perform one set with ion Zoo, then a second set with Helsinki 8, where I'll conduct one of the pieces I wrote this year in Banff.

That's enough on my plate for now.

2006-10-08T23:37:00.000-07:00

Gratitude

This being Thanksgiving Day weekend and all, during a long drive out to a rehearsal, I had time to reflect on what I have been grateful for in my musical life.

It struck me that I may not be unique in being thankful to a long line of people who helped me develop what has become a life-long journey. I assume most musicians whose careers extend beyond their bedrooms don't develop in a vacuum.

If long acceptance speeches during awards shows or lengthy acknowledgements on an album cover are not your cup of tea, then you might as well skip this post. I figure I might as well do it here, where I control the horizontal and the vertical.

First and foremost, my friend and partner Clara has been my strongest supporter for almost 30 years. During all those years, she has had near unfailing support for my musical misadventures, often giving me wise advice and the occasional well-earned ass-kick.

My very first band teacher, Don MacKay, started me off on recorder in Grade 6 . I was considerably less thankful when I joined his marching band and he gave me a beat-up euphonium to play. My first-ever public performance was a Santa Claus parade and the mouthpiece froze to my lips. I switched to tenor sax the next day.

Band teachers: grades 7-9 Ken Elloway, grades 9-12 Jack Armitage - very patient and dedicated men, to say the least.

My music teacher in junior high school was Sister Margaret. A key day for me was late in my Grade 9 year when she asked the class who was going to continue on taking music in high school. Nobody put up their hand and she was so disappointed that she started to cry. I knew right away that she felt like she had failed in instilling her love of music to her students. I felt guilty, as I hadn't disliked her music class, so I signed up, no big deal, if it helped make her feel a bit better.

My high school music teacher and choir director turned out to be a significant influence on my life. Jim Farmer loved to show the interrelation of all of the arts through history, and was the person who introduced me to the likes of Stravinsky, Stockhausen, Penderecki and Cage. He taught us many useful skills like how to cheat on university listening tests, by memorizing the labels of the records. He staged big musical productions every year, sometimes too ambitious. He coped with them by sneaking a drink or two or three. He told us how being a music teacher meant a constant struggle with school administration for funding and recognition - how times haven't changed. The way he managed to be successful was be having a top-notch choir which always won its class in the music festivals, and to put on the crowd-pleasing big productions. He was only a few years older than us, and had plenty of human failings, but he was one of those very few great teachers that had a profound effect on hundreds of his students. That choir was my life in high school.

Jim's former university roommate was also a music teacher in the city school system. Brian May recommended me as his replacement in what became my first pro band. I had a union card before I graduated from high school.

In university, I am very thankful to have had a couple of great professors. Dr. Alfred Fischer was my composition prof. He was a student of George Crumb and pianist David Burge. Al really opened my eyes to the avante-garde. Marie McCarthy was a fabulous voice teacher and choral director. The rest of the faculty taught me many of the skills I was later to use in business - petty back-biting, bitter politics and general discord. The less I say about my sax prof and other voice prof, the better. This post is about gratitude.

I had also formed another band with some high school friends that was probably the only bona fide prog rock band in the Maritimes in the 70's. We kept at it for 5 years and gained some measure of success, and a fair amount of debt. Kurt Haughn, Kevin Atwood, Bob Atkinson, Bill Elliott and later Glenn Wright, Terry-David Désprés and Mike Connor were all a key part of my life. We were into that band as only a bunch of young fanatics could be. It broke my spirit when that band split up and I put my horns away for quite a few years.

I moved to Vancouver with Clara and forgot about music for many years. When I saw Urban Sax do their thing at Expo 86, I knew I had to play again.

Dave Quarin led the community big band that I stayed with for 16 years. He passed the band on to late great Ray Sikora, who inspired us to the end. Once Ray's health was no longer sufficient to lead the band, on the recommendation of bandmate Lorae Farrell, I called Robin Shier to see if he would take over, and he continues to lead it to this day. I learned volumes from these leaders, and the many great subs who directed over the years, as well as the workshops they organized with the likes of Jeff Hamilton and Bobby Shew.

Music stores have been very helpful for me and a couple have certainly seen a fair amount of my income, disposable or otherwise. Gerry Prussin has been there for me for years, and also now Sandro and the guys at Mussullo Music. Bob Syme has been my number one repair guy forever.

Bob introduced me to Stan Karp over ten years ago. I was looking for a new sax teacher and Bob told me there was only one guy to see and he would rock my world. Bob was right. Stan has been a great friend and teacher and has been the single reason why my playing has gotten to where it is today. I hope I'm still studying with him when I'm 100.

The other guys I've taken some lessons with: Dave Quarin, Graham Ord, Mike Allen, Cam Ryga.

I also owe a huge debt of gratitude to three of the stalwarts of the new music scene in Vancouver - Kate Hammett-Vaughan, Coat Cooke and Ron Samworth. They have been movers and shakers in this city for as long as I've lived here. I've known Kate since our days together at Acadia and she occupies a special place in my heart. Even after all of these years, she continue to knock me out with each new performance. Ron continues to create amazing and inspiring music in a variety of situations. His words of support to me are valued. I have done what I can to support the New Orchestra Workshop's endeavours, especially when Coat has had a heavier workload in recent years. In return, Coat's support of my musical ventures has been invaluable.

I can't begin to list what I've learned from them personally, and also from the things that they have been involved with, especially the New Orchestra Workshop and the NOW Orchestra. I took my first improv workshop with them 12 years ago. Last week, I taught my first one for them. The list of facilitators over the years (myself excluded) reads like a who's who of the world improvising scene. I got something from every session I attended. The individual members of the NOW Orchestra have all been inspiring to me.

Another one of those giant debts of gratitude is to Hugh Fraser and Lorae Farrell. The first call to Banff five years ago was one of the major turning points in my musical life. The guest artists - Maria Schneider, Kenny Wheeler and Chucho Valdes in particular - what can I say. Words fail. The friendships and musical relationships that have come out of that experience - Bill Mahar, Michelle Grégoire, Paul Rucker and Marianne Trudel to name but a few.

All of my bandmates past and present. Even the dinks (rare as they may have been) - I am a better person for playing with all of them. In particular, the people in my two main current groups: Wanda Nowicki, Chris Potter, Mark Bender, Carol Sawyer and Clyde Reed. I am blessed.

In previous posts, I've given shout-outs to guys who present music in Vancouver: Cory Weeds, Cem Zafir, Tom Cone and David Pay, guys like Raymon Torchinsky, also at The Cellar. Ken Pickering, Robert Kerr (now at VANOC), Carl Chinn and everyone at Coastal Jazz and Blues. People like Stefan Smulovitz and Jared Burrows who organize annual events for the improvising community. Julie Smith, for organizing the Vancouver Creative Music Institute with an illustrious faculty - George Lewis, Evan Parker, Marilyn Crispell, Mwata Bowden, Nicole Mitchell, François Houle, John Korsrud, Giorgio Magnanensi, et all.

Then there's Brian Nation at vancouverjazz.com. The contributors to the jazz forum and blogs, trolls excepted.

So many good friends that I've made. I've written about many of them in this blog, many more still unnamed. My community in high school was the musicians, and they continue to be so today.

Yeah, I'm bloody thankful. Time to eat turkey.

2006-09-27T17:10:00.000-07:00

Get Smart, slit wrists and other musical musings

I've been reflecting on the amount of time I've been spending on music-related things - photos, going out to see gigs, working on setting up gigs, composing or arranging, tweaking my instruments, internet time especially vancouverjazz.com, burning my groups' cds and printing covers, doing cd cover artwork, and so on, not to mention blogging. Part of that is just necessary to move ahead as a performer, but I wonder how much is avoidance on my part. I love practicing and don't want to stop once I get in a groove, but getting started every day is a challenge. If I actually spent all of that time seriously practicing, I might be dangerous. OK, maybe menacing. Would you believe devil-may-care?

(I hear rumors of a Get Smart movie in the works - how can they ever replicate the comic genius of Mel Brooks, Buck Henry and Don Adams? And don't get me started on Barbara Feldon!)

Back to my original thoughts, I see this tendency mirrored in my daily battles with my daughter to stick to her piano practice. Maybe it's just payback time.

The Monday evening series at The Cellar is proving yet again that Vancouver is chock full of fine improvisors. Coat Cooke has done a great job of pulling this together and highlighting new groupings and musicians deserving of greater exposure. There could be a whole 'nother series featuring the established groups and musicians. I've cleared my Monday evening slate in order to be there weekly.

<- Clyde Reed, Bill Clark, Coat Cooke and Kenton Loewen at The Cellar on September 25th.

This week's gig by the Coat Cooke Trio was exceptionally good. Though not an unestablished group, Coat certainly deserves the monthly spot for all of his efforts in creating this series. He has lined up a series of guest artists each month and trumpeter Bill Clark was a fine fit. He and Coat and Clyde Reed have had decades of experience together in the NOW Orchestra and the group explored a lot of new and compelling sonic territory that night. The trio's cd on the Cellar Live label is getting fabulous reviews, and a guy like Bill could seamlessly turn this group into a killer quartet.

My contribution is to photograph the groups. Too often there is not enough documentation of one's gigs, and with Raymon Torchinsky recording almost every night, photos are a nice complement. I finally figured out the best combination of lighting levels and camera settings and was quite pleased with my results. I'm quite flattered that Brian Nation saw fit to make one of my shots Pic of the Moment on vancouverjazz.com. Now I just need to get myself set up on something like Flicker to post more of my pictures. As an added bonus for the performers, on some nights I'll bring my photo printer along and give them a shot or two of the gig before they pack up. Polaroids for the 21st century...

On another note, in my last post, I made reference to some of the indifferent managers that I deal with at certain local venues. Two of the people that do not fit that generalization are Cory Weeds and Cem Zafir, of The Cellar and Zula Productions respectively. Cory mentioned in his latest blog post that The Cellar is celebrating its 6th anniversary. I for one now feel like The Cellar has been there forever, always keeping its commitment to presenting the finest jazz has to offer. It is hands down the only place to really listen to jazz in the city. The Monday evening improv series presented by the New Orchestra Workshop Society is certainly well beyond the usual stylistic leanings of the club, but I think it's a good fit. As for Cem, he had a teriffic run at Rime and now is aiming to turn the WISE Hall into a great venue. I have a lot of respect for these guys. They could turn their considerable talents elsewhere, and the artistic fabric of this city would be the worse for it.

Tuesday saw ion Zoo do a short but sweet gig at the Western Front. We were providing music for a book launch and poetry reading presented by the literary magazine Capilano Review.

Some time ago on the vancouverjazz forum, I mentioned one of my worst all-time gigs, which was at a poetry reading. For those of you who don't hang on my every word (namely, everybody) I'll recount that infamous evening. About a dozen years ago I was playing with a saxophone quartet called The Four Neat Guys. We had a repertoire of light classical music and swingy sax quartet tunes. We got hired to provided light interval music for an author's night at the Harrison Festival of the Arts. The night was going along fine until we heard from a young angst-filled poet who used the evening to spill her guts in the most vivid way she could, going into great and gory detail about losing her virginity and a subsequent abortion. Good times. The whole room was ready to slit their wrists. OK guys, Pink Panther theme, 2, 3, 4...

Fortunately last night couldn't have been more different. We had two very, very short sets to play, for which we were very nicely compensated. Carol improvised a song using a poem written by the featured author of the evening. The second improv, she went on this very entertaining jag about being daunted to perform in front of a room full of writers, so she'd do it in Esperanto so nobody would know what she was saying. After a break for the reading by the featured writer (which was right on schedule as opposed to Kaslo, and not gut-spilling as opposed to Harrison) our third and final improv was also based on a poem. It was all very together and entertaining and very well received by the audience. I've said it before and I'll say it again, Carol doesn't realize how good she is, despite what we tell her. Clyde was totally bang-on with his bass playing, despite some last-minute manipulations of his bridge backstage. I played soprano sax, bass clarinet and debuted my just-refurbished alto clarinet. I was quite pleased with my results. One of these days, I'll go just with clarinets alone, but for now a saxophone on the side is my security blanket.

In a very recent posting, I wrote how sometimes I don't know if a gig was good or bad. There was no guesswork here, it was a keeper.

Just like Kaslo, I forgot to arrange for someone to take pictures of the performance with my camera. There's always next time.

2006-09-25T11:06:00.000-07:00

Descending into Hope

<- Similkameen sage

I was dreading the end of last week. Wanda had been asked to do a gig in Kaslo. The dough wasn't particularly good, but expenses would be covered. The main impediment was the bloody long drive to get there, 9 hours each way at the least. On the other hand, the organizers of the Kaslo Jazz Festival would be in attendance and this was a fine opportunity to get our foot in the door.

There were a number of early signs that we shouldn't take the gig. I won't bore anyone with the details, but there were a few miscommunications between band members, and with just over a week to go, we discovered that our bassist and pianist both couldn't make the trip.

We knew from the jump that Chris, our pianist, couldn't make the gig, so I got guitarist Rich Rabnett, now living in Nelson, to fill in. Rich and I have done a number of free improv things in the past, but nothing straight up, so I was looking forward to this gig. I had to ask him to line us up a decent acoustic bassist who could read down our arrangements, of which there is exactly one in that neck of the woods. So now we had to hire two subs. Paying them what they wanted in order to make the drive to Kaslo cut into our share, but what the hell.

Then last Tuesday, while in the depths of that cold bug that was going around, I realized that Wanda doesn't drive, and without our bassist Mark coming along, I would have to do all of the driving in my car, not Mark's van as originally expected. Plus I got a note from my daughter's school that Friday would be a Pro-D day, no classes. That meant that I had to line up some care for her for the day. For various reasons, none of the usual group of classmates' parents could help me out, so I was going to have to pay for daycare for the day.

Then my wife suggested I arrange for a rental car (we are a one-car family) in order for her to deal with all of the necessary family logistics while I was away. As ever, Clara has supported me unconditionally in taking this road trip, so if she asked me to line up a car, I'd do that gladly. Now the trip was going to cost me out of pocket. I had to decide on whether or not to bail, in which case Wanda would have to cancel the gig at the last minute, or just take my lumps and go.

I've always maintained that I'm not in music solely for the money, so I decided that I would look at this as yet another investment. I also decided that I would take a good attitude into the trip, despite the cost, the 20 hours driving, and the energy required to make it happen. I always have a choice in these matters. I could decided to be miserable, in which case the whole trip would be guaranteed to be miserable, or I could make the most of it.

Every year at Banff, during his music business lecture, Hugh Fraser has talked about how he handled similar situations, often on a larger scale. He talked about when he self-produced VEJI gigs that he knew were going to lose money, or cancelling an entire recording project mid-stream. In the end, he always found that if you are coming from a place of musical and personal integrity, these events would have a payoff greater than the momentary loss. Sometimes that payoff would come from unexpected quarters, but it would always be there in the fullness of time.

With this in mind, I decided to soldier on, despite the perceived roadblocks. I also knew this gig was important to Wanda.

So we set out for the Kootenays at 6:00am Friday morning. Driving through Langley, it was all we could do not to show up at Mark's door and say "We're here, let's hit the road!" He would have felt so guilty from this prank that he probably would have come along. We didn't do it only because we wanted to make good time, but we regretted not pulling this one on him.

The weather was perfect and the roads were virtually empty. I've done the drive to Nelson many times in the past, always on long weekends in the summer when there was considerably more congestion. I discovered a few secrets to a successful road trip which I am willing to share here. #1 - Drive a new car with a decent stereo. My old Volvo was getting to the point where I was uncertain if I could reach the out of town gigs without a major breakdown - not good for the nerves. And it didn't have a cd player.

<- Copper Eagle, Greenwood

#2 - Know where the real coffee and the decent food is. I am a typical Vancouver coffee snob and I need to have multiple fixes of serious caffeine, especially when I'm doing all of the driving. Those Bunn carafes of diner coffee don't cut it. The Copper Eagle in Greenwood is recommended. The Omega in Grand Forks is not.

#3 - Know when and where to gas up. Of all places, Princeton had the cheapest gas of the whole trip. Many years ago, I literally had to roll down the mountain between Grand Forks and Castlegar, all 21 kilometers of it. We hit Grand Forks too late at night to find an open station and I ran out gas right at the summit. We coasted into the Castlegar Chevron at 5:00 am.

#4 - Make sure you drive through the Similkameeen and Okanagan areas during business hours, not for the fruit stands (which are great), but for the winery tastings. We discovered this time that a well-timed glass of wine (avoid the plonk!) certainly made the trip go smoother. And they have nicer bathrooms than at the West Hedley Mall.

#5 - It almost goes without saying - pick your tunes. We had quite a range of music going on in the car, from Ella to Hard Rubber Orchestra. But early on in the trip, we started to have a series of times when the randomly selected music perfectly matched the setting in which we were driving.

<- Abandoned farmhouse west of Keremeos

The first time it happened was driving through Keremeos on to Osoyoos. I threw on Bill Frisell's sublime Quartet album, with Eyvind Kang, Curtis Fowlkes, and Ron Miles - one of my desert island picks. I now know it also works beautifully with desert valleys. The match was unreal, and when it happened, I knew that our trip was going to be much better than expected.

<- Spotted Lake, just east of Osoyoos

Past Osoyoos, as we crested the intriguingly named Anarchist Mountan, it was time for Marvin Gaye's Greatest Hits, and we hummed along the almost deserted highway. Well, the car hummed, we were gettin' down.

The capper was on the return trip, descending into Hope along with Joni Mitchell's Both Sides Now. Vince Mendoza's orchestrations are just so goddamn magnificent, combined with Joni's voice, Wayne Shorter... I could have veered off the cliff and died a happy man. As it was, we just had to drive in silence for about a half hour after that. Even after that length of time, I had to be careful what I put on, choosing Ellington's impeccable Such Sweet Thunder.

Listening to these cds at volume on the open road is so much different then having them play while I'm navigating through traffic in the city. I could really listen to so many of the details that make all of these albums so great, even though I've heards them many times already. I have little time when I can just sit and listen at home, so this was a real treat and almost enough incentive to take another road trip next weekend.

We arrived in Kaslo well ahead of schedule. Wanda's friends Jim and Barbara met us and took care of us the entire time we were there. They had two spare bedrooms in their lovely house and fed us at every opportunity possible. We got to the Langham Cultural Centre in Kaslo ahead of schedule and set up before dinner. That was a good thing as our hosts kept us overly long at dinner and we only hooked up with Rich and bassist Rob Johnson just before we had to go on. With no time to go over Wanda's arrangements, there were a few rough spots, but I doubt anyone in the audience noticed.

The deal was that we were to play a brief set, then take a 40-minute break, during which there would be a presentation about the SS Moyie, the restored paddlewheeler docked in Kaslo. Short story long, this guy droned on for an hour and half in the most excruciating detail possible. That meant we had to wait around to start our set almost at the time we were scheduled to finish. Rich and Rob were very gracious about it. They were having fun, so were willing to wait around. My major concern was that the Kaslo jazz festival people missed the first set. They arrived when we were scheduled to start the second set. Wanda chatted them up over complimentary drinks. I would have been truly pissed off had the left due to this boor not being able to keep to a schedule, but fortunately they stuck around and liked what they heard.

<- Langham Cultural Centre, Kaslo

I killed the time by exploring the building. It struck me as being somewhat similar to the Western Front in feel, and also as it was home to a nice little theatre space, a gallery and numerous artists' studios. The Langham building is about 100 years old and has the dubious distinction of being the place in Kaslo where the Japanese-Canadians were interned during the 1940s. There was a museum documenting this sad chapter of Canadian history. I read through the exhibits, feeding my middle-aged white guy's guilt, dreading that I may find a family name that I recognized.

Thus invigorated, we played a decent second set, though we lost most of our audience due to the delay the speaker caused. He had the theatre doors closed so nobody could escape during his somnolent talk, talk, talk. When everyone had a chance to get to the bar, they went and many never returned.

Regardless, Wanda and I immediately felt that the trip was a success. We had made a good Nelson connection with Rich and Rob. We shared the bounty of the Kootenay harvest. We had left what we hoped was a favourable impression on the Kaslo jazz folks. We'd also made a good connection with the people at the Langham and we now know the costs involved in self-producing a gig there in future. Combined with a gig in Nelson and another in the Okanagan, we feel we could now set up a modestly profitable mini-tour.

Most of all, we felt the appreciation of the all of the people involved with setting up this gig, particularly our hosts Jim and Barbara. Yeah, it doesn't pay the rent, but it's always a welcome change from indifferent or sometimes worse treatment that seems to be the norm in many of the places we have played in Vancouver.

We hit the road Saturday morning at 8:00 am. I chose a longer route through the wierd little ghost town of Sandon, then on to New Denver (great cafe, but passed on the Nikkei interment museum - enough guilt already, thanks). The drive through the Slocan valley was beautiful. Wanda and I had enough time to discuss plans for the band, fix the US administration and deal with the Middle East mess.

Our only bad meal of the trip was at the aforementioned Omega in Grand Forks, unless you're a fan of overpriced soup and brown caesar salad. FYI the cheapness of borscht is now pegged at $6.95 for a small cup. Next stop was the Nk'Mp winery where we picked up a nice bottle of merlot - they have a great operation there. Then on to Keremeos to load up at the fruit stands. Finally we rolled on to Vancouver to the sounds of Joni and Duke, getting home at 8:15.

<- Keremeos valley

<- Obligatory fruit stand visit

I was pretty beat the next morning, gathering only enough energy for a family stroll along the dykes at Steveston. It was another beautiful day, as if I needed reminding what a beautiful corner of the world we have the good fortune to inhabit.

Next up, ion Zoo returns to the Western Front on Tuesday evening.

2006-09-12T11:37:00.000-07:00

Perceptions

I'm sitting here reflecting on my emotional reactions to how some of my recent gigs have gone. First off, I'm excluding the ones where I say to myself, "Man, that really sucked." or "Shit, that was unbelieveable!". Fortunately, I can't really remember the last time I said the former, though I've had my share, and one that definitely falls into the latter category was the show featuring Chucho Valdes at Banff.

It's the ones that fall in between these two poles, especially when I have some sort of personal interest in the outcome. So that eliminates the more commercial ones like the fundraiser I played last week. I go into every gig with the aim of playing as best I can and at fulfilling my designated role for the evening. For the fundraiser, we were background music, and we did a fine job of being wallpaper. That's all there is to that sort of gig.

Rather, I am thinking about my other three most recent gigs, one with the Silent Summer Nights Monster Orchestra, a restaurant gig with Wanda, and the ion Zoo set last night at the Cellar. I think they were all good gigs, at least in terms of audience satisfaction. How they merited musically is where I get hung up.

The only way one could tell if the Monster Orchestra show had any merit would have been to be part of the audience. Keeping my focus on three conductors, and being in the back of the orchestra where the sound was sketchy, there was no way that I could really hear everything that was going on. The energy felt good and there was a large range of sounds and textures that seemed appropriate to the movie. The audience seemed to really like it, mind you quite a few of them were pretty stoned. I had fun playing, and that was really why I came away from that gig feeling like it went well.

I know the audience really liked us at Wanda's gig on Saturday. Seb's is a fairly small room and we got immediate feedback from the patrons. They came up and complimented us and bought cds from us, so we knew we did our job as far as providing an evening's entertainment. Plus, we can make objective assessments of how well we played technically - how well we blended as a group, kept the time and the feel, played over the changes, tuning, etc. A recording of the night would have provided a way for us to go back an mark how we did. I fear that I would have to take a few marks off for showboating a couple of times when I soloed, getting a little too big for my own britches. It happens with this group when things go well and I'm having fun. Another measure of how we did on the night is if we get booked again. In that regard, this group is generally quite successful. We bring in people, the rooms are usually full, we start and finish when we're supposed to, take reasonable break time, look good and play not too loud - all the things that a manager is looking for. It's why this group works so frequently.

ion Zoo is much harder to evaluate. In free playing, many of the familiar measuring sticks are thrown out the window. There are certainly no chord changes to play over and we generally avoid groove. We have a passing acquaintance with tonality, which we may choose to work with or not. Form? Pretty amorphous. So what is left are often much more fundamental questions: Was that musical? Did we connect and communicate as a group? Was it original? Did we connect with the audience? This sort of questioning is one reason why I am so attracted to this form of music.

There is a variety of opinions in improvised music circles as to whether or not connection with the audience is important. I believe it's crucial, otherwise you're better off wanking off in the practice room. It does have a bearing as to the choices I make in the moment, as I believe I have a responsibility to the audience. As I've mentioned in previous postings, I also believe that having a singer in the group provides the most direct connection with the audience. Carol Sawyer is tremendously talented and has a knack for improvising stories and songs based on her life experience, often in a very funny and engaging way. We do strive to connect with our listeners.

<- ion Zoo sound check at the Cellar

So was the Cellar gig last night any good? I think so. We had a reasonably good-sized audience. We kept them in their seats through our set and they listened to what we were doing. (It's never good when they start streaming through the exits!) I always take it as a good sign when we can quiet a large room, as Wanda can also do when she nails a ballad. We had a few of those intuitive group moments when we all started shifting together. We also came up with some interesting spontaneous compositions, where it sounded like it had been written. Some of the moods we created were also new for us, somewhat on the dark side. Maybe it had something to do with being the 11th of September, I don't know. (I hate what I call the numericization of the English language, like 9/11, 24/7, "get the 411" or even "that's a big 10-4", but that's a topic of for another rant.)

The only real way to evaluate this particular gig will be to listen to the recording of the night, preferably a few weeks down the road. Our track record is that almost always we have created some good and interesting music. Perhaps I am too analytical of what's going on during the performance, that I can't step back and be objective. But I need to be involved in order to make what I trust are musical decisions. And I want to be playing from my emotional core.

We've had a few gigs where things have been transcendant, and if we have anything less, I'm a bit let down. That's a pretty big burden to put on one's self, and a nice way to undermine all of the good things that happened at a gig. It's those damned expectations again.

As for the audience, I'm sure that there were as many reactions as there were listeners, ranging from "Oh, wow" to "That really blew" to "Oh man, Bagnell's stealing my shit again!"

Another very sure yardstick for the success of a gig is if the leader, in this case me, forgets the cheque for the band at the bar. Which makes me yet again a loser.

2006-09-07T10:34:00.000-07:00

Gearhead

September brought a slew of activity and I was happy to get back into a routine at home . The first gig was with the Silent Summer Nights Monster Orchestra, an annual film soundtrack performance series every Labour Day Weekend. Through his Eye of New Collective, Stefan Smulovitz continues his long tradition of presenting improvised sountracks to movies, mostly the silent variety, or at least with the original soundtrack turned off. SSN is held over three nights at Grandview Park, and the final night features a large group of improvisors, about 26 this time round.

I played percussion, bringing out the Big Rack, and was part of the percussion section with Joel Lower and Gary Wildeman on drum kits. Playing with them is a gas and I feel I lock in better with them every year. The night got off to a good start when I won a door prize pack from Womyn's Ware, including some massage oil and a nice little stuffed Orgasm, which is apparently the new pet rock. On the whole the night was quite successful. The movie was Fritz Lang's masterpiece Metropolis from 1927. There were three conductors, Stefan, Coat Cooke and Giorgio Magnanensi, so you had to keep your focus on them all of the time. Each had a specific role and would jump in and take over in various combinations. Having the Big Rack, I could provide sound effects, play time with the drums, or play Stefan's written melodies on the crotales, so I was able to function in a few different roles. I played a bit at the afterparty at the WISE Hall, but the music wasn't really happening, so I called it a night.

Later in the week, I played at a private function with Footprints Jazz Trio, basically the Wanda Nowicki group sans Wanda. Since we started gigging with her, we've had a lot less trio gigs, so it was nice to go instrumental again. I certainly needed to blow the rust out of my tenor, which I hadn't touched in the month of August. The organization of this gig left a lot to be desired. We were promised dinner, but the food only appeared when we were playing, and nothing was set aside for us. Then, with about two numbers to go, one of the organizers told me that they wouldn't have a cheque for me for at least three weeks. I was choked and let her know that I would have to pay the guys out of my own pocket. My friend who had arranged the gig was laying low, knowing I wouldn't be very happy about the payment situation. Serves me right for not looking after the details.

It certainly resonated with me today when I read Cory Weeds' latest blog installment about the value people place on live musicians. I was originally asked to do this gig for free, which I refused. Then I saw their advertising where they prominently featured the word Jazz. They finally came back to me offering a reasonable payment, probably after they were refused by a number of other musicians.

So I join Cory in wondering what value the general public puts our chosen art form. Nowadays music students spend untold thousands of dollars on instruments and related accessories, private lessons, college and various workshops, not to mention thousands of unpaid hours in the practice room. With the exception of a few places in the town, if you want to work regularly and aren't at the top of the jazz food chain, you play for the door or get paid peanuts. It doesn't make sense. Yet we persist.

It puts me in mind of the last gig at Rime that I did with the Wanda Nowicki Group. We agreed to play for the door because we were confident that we would be a good draw and we were, so we got reasonably paid for our efforts. During the second set, a group of guys came in and wouldn't pay the cover. They sat at a table near the back of the main floor, not far from the stage and talked loudly. On the break, Wanda went over to the table and very diplomatically asked for a cover fee. They all refused. Obviously their precious money was better spent on beer. I really wanted to find out where they worked, so I could be as discourteous in their job situation. Assholes.

We do persist in this because we love what we do. I am fortunate that I love the music that I am playing and so will take a certain amount of crap in order to perform. I have friends who are longtime professional symphony players and are burnt out. They hate the music that they do, being in a city where the repertoire is very conservative, playing Bach, Brahms and Beethoven year in and year out, yet it's the only way they can make a living. I am indeed fortunate to live in a city like Vancouver.

I'm looking forward to the next few days. Saturday night will be the first gig with Wanda since July, then I have a set on Monday evening with ion Zoo at the Cellar. These two musical styles are as different as chalk and cheese. I enjoy them both immensely.

Wanda's going to be at Seb's Market Bistro on East Broadway, a place where we always enjoy playing. It's cramped, but the food and the atmosphere is great and owner Francois always treats us well.

At the Cellar, we are going to have a focussed set. I am only going to play only bass clarinet and soprano sax, Clyde will be playing his cut-down travelling bass, and Carol will bring her full voice. Sometimes it's a really interesting exercise to achieve more by using less - the power of limitation.

Which brings me to what I was originally planning to write about. Hi my name is Steve and I am a gearhead. There, I've said it.

I own quite a number of instruments, a lot if you count the percussion individually. I have had most of my saxophones for between 15 to 25 years, and my closed-hole flute for over 30 years. Some of my percussion has been around for that long too.

The last sax I bought was my Serie III Selmer tenor, over 8 years ago. My clarinets have come in the last couple of years (coming out of my experience with Maria Schneider at Banff) and I just got the open-hole flute this past June. Most of my percussion has been purchased from eBay, which is insidious in its ease to absorb my money.

It's the accessories for some of the wind instruments which is an endless source of gear-hunting - new mouthpieces, reeds, ligatures, custom necks, new cases to replace 30 year old junkers, stands. It goes on and on.

Then there was the PA system last year, which gigging with Wanda has paid off. I got some really nifty mics, then pre-amps, compressors, a parametric EQ... There were my computers, a laptop, a couple of printers, various peripherals... Now it's digital camera equipment - lenses, another printer, neat accessories, cases, WAAAAGGGGHHH!

My only justification is that I'm not as bad a gear fanatic as this guy who has dozens of mouthpieces, or that guy who buys a case of reeds just to find the right one, or the guy with the complete home recording studio, but never uses it.

I tried to be a one-horn guy. Lord knows I tried. I envy a musician like Lori Freedman who hasn't bought anything new for her bass clarinet other than reeds for the last 25 years. She professes to not remember what type of mouthpiece she plays and has very little interest in seeing what the new instruments are like. She is the Anti-Gearhead. Guys like Dave Say, who's playing the same horn (albeit a very nice one) that he's had since high school, one that's so out of adjustment that a mere mortal couldn't get a note out of it. Yet he never sounds anything less that great every time I hear him.

I'd like to be like them, but I'm just not wired that way. I'm the classic jack of all trades, master of none. And I'm happy to be like that.

2006-09-06T22:49:00.000-07:00

Travelogue

<- Annapolis Valley
I took August off from the blogosphere and most everything else, including gigs. I can't remember the last time I took such a long break. The highlight of the month was a family trip back to Nova Scotia, where my wife Clara and I both have family. It was a great vacation, to say the least. Those of you who have been to the Maritimes already know this, and for those who haven't yet been, maybe I shouldn't let the cat out of the bag, but Atlantic Canada is without doubt one of the most special places on earth. I spent the first half of my life there, and the last 25 years vacationing there regularly.

Every time we go, Clara and I pick another corner of Nova Scotia to explore. After all that time, it never ceases to amaze us that a turn down an unfamiliar little road can lead to a new and often breathtakingly beautiful spot. We certainly found our share of them this time. And it takes time for me to adjust to how really friendly the people are everywhere we go.

On the downside, the uncontrolled development and suburban sprawl in Halifax and particularly in my hometown of Dartmouth makes me puke. Cole Harbour (birthplace of hockey hero Sydney Crosby) is so bad that the only relief that I saw on the day we passed through was the purpose-built set location for the Trailer Park Boys movie. Endless strip malls, butt-ugly architecture, gawdawful public housing developments - I will never criticize Vancouver city planners again. Vancouver specials and monster houses have a long way to go to match the dross that I saw. The cities are booming. Dartmouth's population has increased tenfold since my early days there and local city planners are not dealing with it very well.

Halifax waterfront ->
I took about a thousand photos with my new digital camera - it's hard for me not to post most of them. As far as music, that all went by the wayside between family obligations and touring around the province. I had made some overtures to Paul Cram, a founding member of the NOW Orchestra now residing in Halifax, to hook up. Unfortunately the one new music gig he had in August fell on an evening when I was in Cape Breton. I quickly came to appreciate the rarity of such gigs in Halifax, maybe once a month at the best of times. Yet again, I am grateful to be a part of the Vancouver scene, where the improvised music community is relatively healthy and quite active (but still not lucrative!).

Whilst in Cape Breton, we sought out live music every day. The area is justly famous for its fiddle music, producing acts like the Rankins, Natalie MacMaster and Ashley MacIsaac. As a kid I was never a fan of this genre, and really haven't changed that much. What I do appreciate as a musician is that this is a living music, and that these people perservered for decades, regardless of being perceived as cool or not. Even though the Celtic music craze has cooled off somewhat in recent years, it continues to thrive in Cape Breton. It was great to go to a restaurant to hear an old pro play and to see the young musicians coming up, paying their dues, no different from jazz. And that this music comes from the hearts of the people of Cape Breton and much of the rest of the province, this is not something I can dismiss.

There is more money at play in Nova Scotia now, with offshore oil revenues starting to pour in. I noticed that many houses, even in poor fishing villages, have been spruced up. A lot of this is due to tourism - people there know it is a major employer in the province, second only to the goverment, especially the Armed Forces. People take pride in their way of life. Very few times did things ring false, in a tourist-trap way. There is also money flowing into the province as wealthy people "from away", mostly Americans snap up every inch of oceanfront property. Europeans, particularly Germans, as well as western Canandians (west being anything past New Brunswick) are also in the real estate game. Two hours south of Halifax, at the end of a nondescript road in the middle of absolutely nowhere, we found million-dollar-plus homes sitting on rugged headlands.

Fortress Louisbourg - fantastic! ->
Another factor, particularly in Cape Breton, is that an entire generation, maybe two, have left the province to work in Toronto, or more likely in northern Alberta in the oil patch. Money is being sent back home, and it's a rare person, especially a Caper or a Newfoundlander, who doesn't dream of returning home sometime.

A nice spinoff of all of this is that the food is way better. We ate at quite a number of great restaurants all around the province, some of them absolutely spectacular. Clara had a bit less luck than I did. She ordered a couple of Greek salads of dubious provenance, and got stuck with fake crab in crab cakes when they ran out of the real deal. That was pretty lame - you can fool the tourists but not someone who's lived their life on the East and West Coasts of the country.

My absolute favourite was the Red Shoe Pub in Mabou, owned by the Rankin sisters. Obviously they learned what made for a great restaurant while they spent so many years touring with their band. They took that concept home and adapted it to home cooking with some real flair, and added live music every night. It worked for me.

That same night, we enjoyed the bar at the Glenora Distillery, where we stayed with friends from Vancouver. Glenora is the only distillery in North America to make single malt whiskey (it can only be called scotch if it's made in Scotland), and Glenora's Glen Breton 10 year old holds up pretty well to a random sampling that we tried at the bar. The tasting was all quite erudite and dignified until the four of us got plastered. Then we retired to one of the guest chalets on the grounds. That's where I fell down the stairs - I've almost healed up from that one.

Clara was feeling a bit too wee the next morning when we did the distillery tour, and passed her glass over to our friend David, a born Scot, who was more than happy to oblige. I have Stan Karp to thank for turning me on to the ultimate single malt. Glen Breton still has a way to go to catch up to Lagavulin.

While on vacation, I had planned to do some composing, a graphic score for a string trio in particular. I also thought a few quiet days at my brothers' beatiful and isolated beach cottage would be conducive to going through a pile of various recordings that I've made over the last 5 years, with the aim of compiling the best onto two or three cds. None of that happened - we were just too busy and to boot, my laptop display packed it in after a few days.

So I returned to Vancouver with a couple of unfinished projects and a bunch of gigs. Clara is one of those fatalists who declared that summer is over on the Labour Day weekend, but I've decided that summer will officially continue until I finish these tasks. So I may be wearing shorts and sandals well into January, given my rate of production when a firm deadline is not looming...

Finally, a shot of me attempting to surf. It would have been great to have had a picture of me standing up on the board, but that would have required that I actually managed such a feat. Maybe Photoshop can help.

2006-07-27T18:11:00.000-07:00

Con Works

The listening session on Monday evening convinced us that we indeed have something good with the ion Zoo recording from the Cellar. Listening to it on Lisa Miller's home stereo was helpful. The group sound was not as together as it sounded on Chris's studio monitors or in my car, which has a nice stereo system. I have yet to give it a listen at home where we have a decent stereo, or at Clyde's, who has a great system. The challenge is to get a mix that sounds good on all systems.

We seem to be inclined towards releasing it as a cd, but this is not a process to rush. One thing for sure is that we want to perform more with Lisa. We've got a couple of more dates already booked for coming months where there's a nice piano, so the opportunity will be there.

I visited Raymon Torchinsky yesterday to pick up some more recordings from subsequent Cellar gigs. He is a big booster of ion Zoo, so that is encouraging.

I'm writing this from a cafe in Seattle near where I'll be playing tonight. What can I say - either Homeland Security has totally failed or free jazz musicians are not yet on the watch list. I guess they are too busy listening in on America's phone conversations.

I think it's such a crock that it's not permitted to have a free flow of artists over the border. Certainly in the musical circles that I inhabit, it's not like there is a massive amount of money being sucked out of the Vancouver music scene by visiting Seattle musicians, or vice versa. There's a negligible amount of money involved at all. For my case, it has averaged out to gas money, perhaps covering accomodations occasionally. It's great that I have friends here where I can crash on a relatively comfortable bed for the night. But really, if I was into creative music for the money, then my motivation would be dead wrong from the get-go.

I come down here to play with Paul whenever possible because we've always created great music together. I figure we've played about a dozen gigs together in various configurations since we've first met and they've always been musically satisfying. He's a great player and a fine person, just the sort of musician that I prefer to spend my time with. Besides, my daughter loves him, and that is the litmus test. Her radar is way better than mine.

Tonight's show is with the Paul Rucker Large Ensemble, a group that he created two years ago directly out his experience at Banff. Driving down today, I listened to the cd of the initial concert we played at Earshot, the one that got so much acclaim. The opening tune in particular absolutely kicks ass, and the music is strong throughout.

We are back at Consolidated Works tonight to reprise that show. The event that brought this show about is rather unfortunate as it is being staged to mark Con Works' closing. I don't know the circumstances at this point, but I would bet that money is at the core. This place is about 30,000 square feet and it's in the Westlake area, fairly close to the Space Needle. It has been a multi-media artists' space with facilities for theatre, film, large scale installation art, music and a pretty cool lounge. I've been envious of not having such a great space in Vancouver, but now it's coming to an end. Judging from the fairly virulent anti-Republican material I seen there, it's a safe bet these guys haven't been getting a cent from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Time to get to the soundcheck...

I'm now finishing this post off back home in Vancouver.

The show went fairly well. Paul has often gotten funding from the City of Seattle to produce the Large Ensemble Concerts. But in this case, he was really doing it to honour Consolidated Works, and it was a door gig. Half of the people from the original show performed, about a dozen. The entire evening was improvised, rather than playing Paul's compositions and the first set went fairly well. Fairly early on in the second set, Paul starting having some fun and a general goofiness permeated the set, as evidenced by a deconstruction of Row Row Row Your Boat. The audience enjoyed it - perhaps it was just refreshing for them to see some avante-garde musicians not taking themselves too seriously onstage. At one point, the seriously talented guitarist Bill Horist struck a rock god guitar pose, placing his foot on the middle of my back for maximum effect. It was that sort of night. To be honest, it wasn't my favourite set that I've played with this band, nevertheless it was fun.

Best of all for me, I had the pleasure of playing with all of these guys 3 or sometimes 4 times now, and they're all great people. I'm sure more musical connections will evolve out of this. And they all want to come up to play in Vancouver, quite envious of the scene we have up here. And here I am thinking that Seattle is pretty great. I guess the grass is always greener on the other side of the world's longest undefended border, undefended at least for now.

I hit the road for home at midnight and ran nonstop to the border, then home for 2:15 am. By not taking any pee breaks, I was sufficiently uncomfortable to stay awake for the drive, but just barely. Then of course, I couldn't get to sleep at home.

So this morning was a bit rough, and it stayed that way for the day. By the end of of the afternoon, I had a short temper and just wanted to get the evening's gig over and done with. I arrived at the restaurant with instruments and PA system, but no charts. I've been playing Wanda's tunes enough by this point, so I did quite well from memory, aided by the odd peek at the bass book. I had been feeling fairly comfortable with the music lately and I know I should just ditch the charts. They're a bit of a crutch, but I really have a poor memory for chord changes.

I have a great wealth of arcane trivia that I can call up but something that really matters, like chord changes, elude me. What can I say - I'm lame.

On the whole, it ended up being a pretty good gig. The place was quite full of people and they really liked our performance.

So here I am pecking away at a keyboard rather than hitting the sack. Lame!

2006-07-23T22:10:00.000-07:00

Killer baris

There was an open Monday night in the Cellar schedule and Coat Cooke asked me if I wanted to put something together for July 10th. Ken Hoffman, my roommate from Banff, was planning to be in town. My original idea was to get trombonist Robin Jessome over from Victoria and we could revisit the ad hoc trio that did the surround sound recording. However, Robin and his wife Natalie are vacationing back home in Nova Scotia for the summer, so I called Chad Makela so as to have a three baritone sax group, with doubles on bass clarinet.

I also decided to work out some structures for each of the improvisations, particularly for the sake of Ken who's a great player, but not really experienced with free improv. I knew Chad would like it that way, too.

We set a rehearsal for the day previous to the gig and I brought about a dozen sketches of what I wanted to do. Ken and Chad hit it off immediately and the rehearsal went well, punctuated by honking and howling of Italian soccer fans celebrating the World Cup victory. I made a quick executive decision to forget about the bass clarinets. Ken hadn't brought his from Edmonton, so rather than search around for one to borrow, I thought we should just simplify.

The following night we showed up at the Cellar, and much to my chagrin, Raymon Torchinsky had brought his own bass clarinet for Ken to play. Unfortunately Chad and I hadn't brought ours. Raymon has been a great supporter of the series on behalf of the Cellar and has recorded most of the Monday night shows so far.

The gig was very lightly attended, the smallest crowd that I've played to there, but it was just 8 days since the jazz festival (burnout still a factor) and a lovely summer evening. That's pretty well impossible to compete against in this city.

Nevertheless, I thought the music went really well on the night. For the most part, my structured improvisations worked out. Chad and Ken and I had fun, and the audience enjoyed it. We each have our on disctinctive style on bari, and they complimented each other. Chad thinks that with some steady rehearsal, a really nice group could grow out of this, and I agree.

During the second set, Coat joined us for a couple of numbers, and that was really a blast. I'd asked Chris Kelly and Shane Krause to come by, but they couldn't. Six baris would have killed. Too bad Danny Kane isn't into this sort of thing any more - seven baris at once would probably have broken some sort of municipal bylaw.

Here's a shot of the four of us. I'll be picking up the rough mix from Raymon this coming week, so I'm very hopeful that the recording sounds as good as I expect it to be. My personal feeling is that some really fine music has been created during the Monday night run starting last year with the long engagement of the Coat Cooke Trio. Raymon has learned the house recording system and worked hard to get good raw recordings, then do rough mixes. Time may well prove that this has been a very important series of gigs, and to document it as well as he has is a real plus. I think there could be a number of great live cds coming out of this. There should be some distribution for them.

In the past week, we just finished our initial mixdown of the ion Zoo gig in February with Lisa Miller on piano. We did the mix at Chris Gestrin's place and were very happy with the sound on the night. Our next step is to have a group listening session and figure out just what we are going to do with it. This is one that may be releaseable as a cd. It's certainly good enough for festival submissions for the coming year.

Also on my calendar this week is a jaunt down to Seattle to play in the Paul Rucker Large Ensemble. Any time I get the call from Paul, I'm there.

2006-07-22T16:25:00.000-07:00

Jazz Festival

This year was different for me as far as performing. Last year, between club gigs and VCMI, I had five festival gigs, and this year was just one, but a nice one. The Wanda Nowicki Group got a booking from CJBS to play at the Capilano Suspension Bridge Garden Stage on the second night of the festival.

It turned out to be a really nice venue and a fine performance. I hadn't been to the suspension bridge for at least 20 years and it was a chintzy tourist trap. They've done a lot of work there and now a really nice tourist trap. And the stage area was quite lovely. I had concerns that there would be no audience, but we ended up having a full house. I can now appreciate why this has been a perrennial festival venue.

We were booked as a quintet, and very happy to have Tom Foster play drums again with us, as he did in the studio. We may have benefitted from a rehearsal, but it went very well indeed and was enthusiastically received. Prior to the gig Wanda asked if we should bring 20 cds to the gig and I laughed and said we have never sold that many. I got to eat my words - we sold out on the first break and could have easily sold 20.

Tom is such a great musician to play with, we felt really solid with the time. Mark could ease up on bass with a great drummer beside him and his playing was much more fluid. Chris really bore down and we could see him concentrating on his playing. He's usually like a magpie - shiny things distract him easily. Wanda did great job fronting the band and singing as well as ever. The tunes flowed nicely from one to another. I was happy with my playing, though felt I could have been more relaxed.

We had a sound guy that I worked with before at Cap College and Lloyd did a fine job for us, a real professional, which was nice for me. I'm the default sound guy at our regular gigs.

So it really was one of our best gigs, which is satisfying, We've been playing a lot and it shows now. Tom added a lot of punch - it's a shame that we really don't have very many places where we could afford to pay (or even have room for) him. It will be a treat a few times each year when we can do it. I particularly liked how we did Waters of March, a fabulous Jobim song, a tune that took us a very long time to work up. I play percussion for the majority of the piece, except for a short instrumental section in the middle, then a longer solo to finish the piece. I told Tom that I would play pandeiro for most of the piece and he immediately played a drum pattern that was closer in style to a pandeiro than a standard bossa sort of thing. It really gave the tune a much more Brazilian feel in my opinion, and so it really worked well.

That was our official gig in the festival and I think we did it justice. I'd be very pleased to get the gig there again in future years.

I made use of my artist's pass right away. On the opening night of the festival, I saw Andy Bey perform. He's a very accomplished singer with a unique style. I particularly dug his arrangements.

My one regret was that on the night of our gig, I had to miss most of the NOW Orchestra show at the Cultch. I caught the end of it and it went quite well, particularly a new piece of Coat's called the Westside Stomp. It has a very strong political message, very anti-Iraq war, and that naturally played well at the Cultch.

Sunday afternoon I went to Ironworks, where the VCMI performance was being held. Having been a part of the program last year, it was very interesting to be on the audience side of things this time. All in all it was a fairly interesting show, and I got to hang a little bit with Marilyn Crispell, Mats Gustaffson and Nicole Mitchell. I am working to arrange a VCMI night at the Cellar during the fall Jazz Projections series, and this show convinced me that this year's participants would do a fine job.

Then I was off to Gastown, actually Victory Square to see Ann Schaeffer's group perform. It was the only unpleasant experience I had during the festival, and nothing to do with the musicians. The sound man was totally useless and ruined the gig in my opinion. Ann is a fine singer and guitarist, but this meatball had her acoustic guitar louder than the rest of the band combined. Her vocals were often inaudible. Onstage, drummer Kelby McNayr later told me they couldn't hear Ann's guitar in the monitors, and that's what he and the bassist needed to hear in order to pick up on her intricate finger picking patterns. Instead of applause for the first few numbers, the audience kept yelling out to fix the sound. After a half a set with no sound relief in sight, I had to leave. I just couldn't stand it any more. It was very out of keeping for this jazz festival.

I won't bore you with my gig-by-gig experience at the festival. In the end, I reflected on my trends in gig choices. I saw a lot of singers, particularly liking Jeanette Lindstrom enough to go to two of her gigs. She has a great voice and is a fine composer. I really dug her trumpeter Staffan Svensson - like JP Carter, an anti-trumpeter. He did none of that macho brass thing and really said a lot more by playing a lot less. Ditto for Russ Johnson, who was part of Michael Bates' great show at the CBC studio. I didn't see any sax players who rocked my world, free or straight-up, though I was unable to see any of Mats Gustaffson's appearances (I heard mixed reviews on him, but I've seen him before and like him), and I didn't go to see Paquito d'Rivera, who was reportedly fantastic. But this wasn't a "sax festival" this year. I don't know if any one instrument was more prominent this time round.

I caught a lot at Granville Island, and the final weekend at David Lam Park and the Roundhouse. I am a big fan of the High School Intensive and Nicole Miller did a standout job with them. The whole concept of taking an all-star high school band and having them play a combination of classic repertoire and some new music like graphic scores is a winner with me. It's usually the first introduction of free improv techniques to these kids and it opens a whole world up for some of them. And I love to hear some of these kick-ass young players.

I also liked Ache Brasil's show to finish off Saturday night at David Lam Park. I must admit I have some bias since my daughter has recently started studying capoeira at their studio, but these guys put on one hell of a high-energy show. I am also partial to Brazilian music as evidenced by my attempts to play pandeiro.

By Sunday night, I was dragging my sorry ass around, and as much as I hated to miss Alita's festival closing set at the Roundhouse, I had a birthday party to attend - my own. Even then, as I drove someone home to the West End after the party, I couldn't resist popping in to O'Doull's. But by midnight, just as Mike Allen was taking the stage, I had to bail.

The other thing I did at this festival, which was a first for me, was to go out to some of the late-night jam sessions. Cem Zafir organized the Avant-Jam sessions at Rime, which got moved to the pub at the WISE Hall. The initial Sunday night one was cancelled altogether because the pub wasn't open late Sunday nights. Of course, that was the first one I tried to attend. Then on Tuesday night I went to the one hosted by Ron Samworth - the leader of the final gig of the night at Rime hosted the following jam session. Only three musicians showed up that night, Ron, drummer Roger Baird and myself. So we got to play as a trio for the whole session. It was a lot of fun.

I went again on Thursday and Friday. Thursday night there were a lot of enthusiastic but inexperienced improvisors, which always translates into nonstop noodling on the night. Not my favourite night. Friday was hosted by trumpeter Dennis Gonzales from Austin TX, and he is an old hand at this sort of thing. He kept it organized and set parameters for each jam. This was a lot of fun too and afterwards I went out to eat with Cem, Dennis and guitarist Greg Prickett. I really like what Dennis does and I hope I have a chance to play with him in future.

These jam nights cost me dearly in sleep, getting in at 3 or 4 in the morning, but they were worth it. I certainly had the glazed-over look of a hardcore festival goer by that last night. All in all, another fine jazz festival. Too bad the T-shirts sucked. What was with that artwork???

So on reflection, what appealed to me most this year were the performances that had some emotional impact on me. I did go to see a lot more singers than ususal, which was telling. Again, I am seeing the effects of my time at Banff. Sheer technique bores me. It's what a performer says with it that counts.

2006-07-21T10:57:00.000-07:00

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.

2006-07-21T00:59:00.000-07:00

Box set

This is Carl Anderson leading the orchestra during the recording of his composition during our amazing day in the recording studio at Banff. The session went about 11 hours, we did 2 takes of each piece by 10 different composers in the band. And the band just got better and better as the day went on. By the final take, we were in overdrive. Perhaps it had a lot with Chucho Valdes about to take the reins the following day. Carl's piece was one of my favourites - he's definitely a guy to watch out for here in town.

In June I got a package of 10 cds documenting our various concerts and recording sessions. A couple of them, including half of the studio recording (the morning session with Carl's and Marianne's pieces) were poorly duplicated and unplayable. I need to get Technical Services to send me a good copy.

There was some great music, and really nice recordings there and some that were less so. The one playable disc I got of the marathon day in the studio sounded really good. I was relatively pleased with the way my piece came out, although I now question my decision to move the piece along through the various cells so quickly. Some of the sections could have been left to develop more.

Some of the live concert recordings had uneven miking, so that certain soloists were never loud enough in the mix. There is a simple reason for this. The full orchestra had 25 members, sometimes more. There simply were not enough channels to indivdually mic everyone. Most saxes had to share 1 mic between each 2 players, and some of the studio mikes used were very directional, so one guy sounded fine, but the other guy didn't when it came time to solo. Lead tenor Mike Ruby and I both had this problem in both of the big concerts. We consistently were way too low in the mix when we soloed. I was playing on mic, but it was pointed at the guy beside me. Live and learn. I was only mildly disappointed. Setup time was at a premium and we knew going in that some compromises would have to made. Trumpets and trombones also had some uneven solo micing, but hell, everyone in the band got at least one solo. Recording an orchestra of that size live in concert is one hell of an undertaking.

I would liked to have had better recording quality for myself on the Love Supreme Suite and the final performance of Mambo Influenciado, with Chucho, but it was what it was. These are documentation recordings, not commercial releases.

In the end, I liked the studio recordings, the three "simple" pieces that Chucho shared with us, and a set at The Club of music written by Bunny Stewart. I didn't care for much of my own playing. Especially in the concert recordings, I sounded like I was blowing my brains out to compensate for the lack of adequate micing. No big deal - in previous years I would have gotten worked up over it, but now it's time to move on.

Jumping ahead to the present, today I spent several hours at Chris Gestrin's house working on a mixdown of a recording made back in February at the Cellar. It was a full evening of ion Zoo - Clyde Reed on bass, vocalist Carol Sawyer and myself on saxes, bass clarinet and a wall of percussion, along with guest Lisa Miller on piano. Now here was a recording where everyone was nicely miced and I never had to overblow. This session came out really well and we're quite stoked about it.

Then when I got home, I got a message that the recording of the Song Room show would be available at the end of the month - that's one I'm dying to hear.

2006-07-19T10:41:00.000-07:00

Ass. gigs

I've decided to put up a few selected images from Banff with each posting. Here is a shot from a performance at The Club, with part of a wind octet doing a piece by Gunhild Seim from Norway. She was another one of the composers in our residency and she wrote some lovely pieces, particularly this octet. Pictured from l to r are yours truly, Ken Hoffman and Audrey Ochoa both of Edmonton, tenor phenom Mike Ruby from Toronto and the pride of Pitt Meadows, talented composer and trumpeter Carl Anderson.

I've played a number of assorted gigs since I returned to Vancouver in May that held some significance for me.

The first was with the Wanda Nowicki group at Rime, the first time we played there. I had some trepidation as to whether or not this was a suitable venue for the group. We we sufficiently ironically hip? Worldbeat melange? Whatever, in the end, we were a good fit for the room. We had a good crowd and many stayed to listen for the whole evening. It's always a bit hit and miss when I've played there - you never know what sort of audience you may get. I've also got a theory that when the people in the back of the room see a drum kit onstage, that is permission for them to talk loudly all night.

It was my first AD (after discovery?) gig with the group and they all heard something different in my playing. That was really good for me, but what I really dug about the gig was a couple of times when we all internalized the time as a group. That's something that we hadn't done before and something that I've been on them about, since the time is not always super-solid with these guys. It's something that I admire in groups like Kate Hammett-Vaughan's or Mike Allen's. Anyways we had a taste of it that night and I want more. Part of it may have been the setup of the stage at Rime which makes it much more like a performance than backround wallpaper at other restaurants we play. With Cem's departure from the management team there, I hope we can get back there soon. Emir certainly liked this group and ion Zoo as well.

Speaking of ion Zoo, the following Monday was a set at the Cellar with an expanded version of that group. With the addition of Marianne Trudel and Seattle cellist Paul Rucker, we go by the name of Fuzzy Logic. This group only gets to play once or twice a year and we had an instant chemistry from the first time we got together for a gig in Seattle. Paul arrived in town the day of the gig and we rehearsed at Clyde's place. Sure enough, the magic was there from the first notes we played. This is the only group where I expect brilliance all the time, and the rehearsal only bore out this belief.

We were the second half of the double bill at the Cellar that night. There was quite a long changeover between the two groups and Raymon Torchinsky was pulling out all the stops to get the recording gear set up as quickly as possible, but there were inevitable glitches to work out. We eventually sort of slid from an extended soundcheck into our set. Much to our dismay, for the first time, that spark wasn't there right off the get-go. We all tried ways of pushing it along to reach our customary zone, but it took a long time to gel. It got progressively better and in my opinion, the last piece was breathtaking, with all five of us twisting and turning together through an improvised song. Afterwards, musicians in the audience asked if the piece was written. It wasn't. The concept of spontaneous group composition is very exciting for me and when it happens for me as a performer or a listener, I think it is one of greatest aspects of improvised music.

Listening to the recording later on, the whole set sounded relatively good, getting better as it went along. But each of us had the same immediate reaction after the gig was done, that for the first time ever we had failed to achieve our group potential. In other words, we weren't brilliant right off the mark.

This all led to some very interesting and productive discussions amongst us and with other improvising musicians. That group mindset, the "zone", whatever you may call it is a very elusive thing to capture. We were very fortunate to have had that chemistry from the start, but it turned out we were quite unprepared as a group as far as having ways to deal with the music if things weren't there from the start. Some of us over-played, some under-played, but we didn't seem to have the trust in ourselves just to ease up and let it happen. As I say, you can't push a chain.

In the end, after listening to the recording, yes it was a good gig. But the real value in it was the learning we gleaned from figuring out why we didn't gel immediately and how we can recover onstage if things aren't really working. I am just honoured to be part of a group where we can improvise at such a high level and have such high expectations.

Throughout this whole time, there was bit of a dark cloud hanging over my head. The SongRoom was fast approaching and I had not finished my composition or worked out all of the logistics to pull the performance off. It was time to get it together.

2006-07-18T16:14:00.000-07:00

Back at it

It's been almost two months since my last post.

No that's not a cardboard cutout. Chucho Valdes is really standing beside me. Chucho is a big man - I'm 6'2". And he does have huge mitts, though not as large as I recall Oscar's to be. Those suckers seemed to wrap around my hands twice when I shook hands with him backstage after a gig in Halifax in the late seventies.

I really hadn't intended to write anything more but I've received encouragement from a number of people, particularly Brian Nation, to keep going so I will, but not on a daily basis.

I needed some time to decompress after Banff and really process what happened there, but I didn't have that luxury. Reintegration into regular family life would have been enough, but just to raise the degree of difficulty, I had a deadline for my Song Room composition and a number of important gigs.

Also Marianne Trudel came to Vancouver and used my home as a base of operations for two weeks. Keeping up with her whirlwind lifestyle was like doing another intensive program. She ended up gigging almost every day and made two trips to Vancouver Island for work. She played at The Cellar four times over a period of eight days, an evening at Rime and did a CBC radio recording session with Andre Lachance and Dylan van der Schyff, and made a couple of visits to Tom Keenleyside's studio, amongst other things. A number of people, myself included, have been encouraging her to spend part of every year here, perhaps a two-month stretch once or twice a year. I pulled out the heavy artillery, which was taking her on a walk at Lighthouse Park, something that really turned her crank. A jaunt to the Gulf Islands would probably have sealed the deal.

People who heard me play in the weeks after I returned home heard an immediate change in my playing. There was much more of an emotional element, an urgency, that I was feeling. It's the very thing that I admire most in a player like Bruce Freedman. It was certainly the Big Message that I got from my brief time with Chucho.

So now I measure my time in terms of BC (Before Chucho) and AD (After Discovery, no Devastation, no... I'll have to work on something catchy). Whatever the hell I'm going to end up calling it, this year at Banff marked a turning point in my career as an artist. I had wondered when Hugh had pronounced that hearing Chucho play Giant Steps had changed his life, if it was hyperbole in the heat of the moment, but no, it was simply a statement of fact.

I have performed weekly with Wanda Nowicki since returning home. Especially in doing this sort of straight-up playing, often in a restaurant situation, I realize the challenge to play with a higher emotional urgency. It's an interesting constraint to have, if one is to play within a standard group context, and certainly helps to avoid the trap of overplaying or musical hytrionics, as I may be wont to do. It has to be done in a more subtle way. There is also the trap of falling back into old patterns, or becoming cynical about the gig situation. So this is actually a great vehicle for putting this new approach into practise.

Coat Cooke has often mentioned that his favourite musicians to play with are the guys who play like there there is no tomorrow, like every day may be their last. These guys bring it all to the stage every time they play, and furthermore are thrilled to be playing regardless of the context and show it. They bring an element of joy to everything they do.

As musicians, most of us have talked about this approach to music. Few of us actually model this behaviour. Of the people I know well, perhaps Hugh Fraser exemplifies it best. He brings a certain joy to the stage every time, sometimes a barely contained mania, even on the nights when I have seen him backstage feeling anything but joyous. He models himself on players like Chucho and Slide Hampton, who embody this approach. Of course, they all have seriously heavy chops to back it up.

What I've found is that playing with this approach is unexpectedly liberating. Stan Karp has often said that the sole purpose of musical technique is to better enable the musician to express through his instrument what is in his head and in his heart. I find the more I connect my heart to what I am playing, the easier it is to do. Playing over changes is different, not so hard when I am really saying something.

This is why the regular gigs with Wanda are so great. I get to work on the same songs week after week, aiming to put more into them, but not going overboard. As recently as last Friday, I continue to have small insights as to how to achieve this goal. That night I realized that a person can play a simple egg shaker with emotion and commitment, not just stand there like a lump and keep time. It may not sound any different, but it FEELS different. And I saw how that works in performance, when we got some unexpected and very enthusiastic applause during our third set, particularly after one of Wanda's great ballads. I knew that it felt more passionate onstage, but was nontheless pleased and surprised when the audience acknowleged it.

The other challenge is how to keep the spirit from Banff going. Often these things fade over time, but my goal is to make this a permanent change in my life. I keep a poster with Chucho's picture on my practise room wall. I ordered that great DVD Calle 54 to watch Chucho and his dad Bebo play together. In the DVD performances, I now very clearly see how he combines simple folkloric melodies with staggering virtuosity for the big emotional wallop. And with Wanda's group, I'll now call Chucho's Mambo Influenciado as an instrumental set-opener. I still practise it at home, as part of my daily flute practise, including the great tutti section that Hugh wrote. I have no idea how I played it so fast on flute in Banff!

All of these things serve as small reminders of what I should be focussing on. Though I have said that I'm a changed musician, that is something that I will have to continue to strive for for the rest of my life, hopefully getting a little closer to my heart each time that I play.

2006-05-22T08:34:00.000-07:00

Departure

I woke with only two hours sleep. I had a decision to make. I was totally out of clean clothes, and either I had to do laundry or go home. So I packed up.

Rather than sleep in, I wanted to spend my last few hours there connecting with people one last time, and just making my farewells to the place. Very few of the musicians were around, small wonder given the previous night's excesses.

My roommate Ken Hoffman left before I had gotten up, as did several others. I had hoped to see some of the regular staff to say goodbye, but again many were not there. The was a subtle but significant change at the music and sound building as the next round of musicians were about to arrive. All of the signs and notices for our program were removed. I went to the studio that had been my home for the last two weeks and there was a sign on the door "Don's room". I was history.

I had hoped to run into some of the people who had worked in the studio recording program. They were on extended residencies up here. In previous years, these people seemed more like aloof tekkies to me, but this year was much different.

The recording engineers had become part of our extended team. We got to know each other fairly well and they were totally charged up by working with us, just as we were with them. I realized that the night Ken and Robin and I did that surround sound recording. They would ask us to do something and we would run with it. They were also totally pumped about our marathon orchestra recording session. I had hung out with them quit a bit during the final after party - it was just another indication how there had been a confluence of events during this program.

In the end, I saw mostly Vancouver musicians, all of whom were preparing to leave. I had been keeping an eye out for some of the arriving people, but didn't see anyone. I left a note on the bulletin board for Greg Sinibaldi, a great sax player from Seattle and a fellow member of Paul Rucker's Large Ensemble. I was also looking for Marilynn Crispell, who was part of the incoming faculty. I think I saw her arrive as I pulled away in the airport shuttle.

Every year I swear that next time, I'll stay a few extra days so I can connect with the next bunch of musicians, but it never happens.

The return to Calgary passed quickly as Jeremy Price and I talked a lot about what had happened. He was also a partcipant in the Maria Schneider and Kenney Wheeler programs, so we have share a lot of great experiences at Banff. He too had been blown away by Chucho.

As has been my habit in previous years, I spent a few hours visiting some dear friends in Calgary before departing for Vancouver. Visiting Angie Parkes and Rob Penner has always been an important part of my Banff time. Angie was my girlfriend in grade 11 (another fairly significant time in my life) and we have always been cherished friends, though we rarely get to meet any more. Her husband Rob is a violinist with the Calgary Philharmonic and has been on a long path of shamanistic spirituality. They have two lovely boys, Justin and Jonathan, who were startling in how much they had grown in the last two years. Visiting them gives me a chance to ease back into the real world. They have seen what I've gone through at Banff since 2002 and I value the short time we get to spend together. They are also just a few minutes from the airport, so everything dovetails nicely.

I scanned the airport for any musicians that I recognized, but found none. I did meet somebody I knew, and we flew home together. Rob is a good friend of Mia Weinberg, from whom I bought the laptop that I took to Banff and upon which I wrote most of this blog. Another non-coincidence in my books.

Homecoming was as it was meant to be. I love my family dearly and I missed them greatly.

But this blog is entitled 14 Days in May, and those days have now passed. I will probably add some pictures and a few supplemental entries as things happen that pertain to this experience.

Thanks for taking the time to share it with me.

2006-05-21T21:16:00.000-07:00

Saturday #3 The Finale

This post has been somewhat delayed, as there has been no break in the action for a while.

The afternoon's sound check went relatively smoothly, other than a bit of persistent feedback in the monitors which took way too long to correct. Robin Jessome took a photo of Chucho and me together. He should be able to recoup his Banff expenses by charging us top dollar to get our pictures from him.

In previous years, my habit had been to have a glass of port at the pub before retiring for the night, but this year, other than the very first night, I had not had very much at all to drink, which resulted in a considerable saving of money.

So on this final full day at Banff, I took about half of the money I had saved and bought a very nice bottle of vintage port, something I would not normally do, but dammit, I had worked hard and deserved it, just like the three desserts each meal on the final day. I also located some decent souvenirs for everyone at home, no small feat considering the mountains of kitschy crap for sale in town. It was time to get ready for the gig.

Altoist Don Berner had dubbed the concert "Bay of Gigs" earlier in the week, possibly fearing that we would be massacred by impossible Irakere charts, which never manifested themselves. Had the gig not gone well, this would have been the title of this posting.

But we all knew that we were about to be part of something very special. The program Hugh and Chucho worked out started with Chucho playing solo, then add Hugh, next the faculty plus rhythm section, then the bones would do Manteca, and finally the trumpets and saxes and flutes would come out for the last four numbers, about 90 minutes in total. It turned to be simple yet very effective programming.

Many of us stood in the wings to watch Chucho play two solo pieces, the first being a medley of jazz standards, the second being more traditional Cuban folk melodies. Chucho played with mastery and again had some standing in the wings reaching for the Kleenex. Hugh then joined him in a duet of Body and Soul. After that the faculty and rhythm section entered for a rousing rendition of Billie's Bounce. Manteca was next and then the rest of us walked onstage. We then played the three tunes that Chucho had brought.

Everyone was very focussed and all of the tunes went extremely well, each building the excitement in the room. Hugh opened up the finale, Mambo Influenciado, and we all got several choruses to solo. I had debated whether or not to play it in the pocket, but finally decided to go for it in a much freer manner, as that is when I am best able to access my most emotional core. I had intended to look straight at Chucho and direct my solo to him. When it was time to blow, perhaps out of habit, I faced the audience so I could not personally guage his reaction. I did receive compliments from quite a number of people, sufficient for me to believe that I made the right stylistic decision.

The Mambo went on for quite a long time, until everyone had worn themselves out. Then the show was done. The Eric Harvie Theatre holds about a thousand people and it was totally sold out. The house erupted in an extended standing ovation. An encore was out of the question as the show clocked in at almost 2 hours and Chucho's limo was waiting to leave for the airport as soon as he was off the stage. He stood at the stage door and individually thanked each of us as we exited, and then just like that, he and Lorena were gone.

The arc of the show was just right. Chucho had played brilliantly and the band had given it their all, most likely the finest concert that I've ever been part of.

In rereading this before I post it, I realize that this is a fairly dry recounting of a concert performance, and in no way imparts what sort of feeling that was there. I just can't adequately write about the experience that I had - does that qualify me to become a critic? Put it this way - there have been concert experiences in my life when everything lines up perfectly and certain moments a captured in a crystalline memory, seared permanently into my few remaining neurons. There were many such moments at this show.

Chucho's playing was stunning and yet I now realize that he did not recreate his Giant Steps performance onstage. That was his private and very personal gift to only us in the orchestra. That memory resides in my heart.

I have never seen an artist deeply inspire so many people in such a short time, and cause so many to be overcome by emotion. Hugh and Lorae knew that Chucho was capable of this. They had extreme difficulty in making all of the arrangements to bring him here this year, but I would venture to say that the results exceeded any reasonable expectations.

Just before playing the concert, Chucho gave Marianne a handwritten page of manuscript paper with a special montuno for her to play, with a very personal and appreciative message to her on the bottom. Over the three days, he had inspired her playing to even higher levels. She constantly amazed us with her progress, and she's always been a formidable pianist. She rarely took her eye off him and his piano the whole time he was here, absorbing as much as possible. It was her turn to lose it after he left for the airport.

We retired back to the Music and Sound Building and had an afterparty that went into the wee hours. That bottle of port was an excellent way for me to send off this latest year at Banff, and much of the evening's proceedings will have to be permanently filed in the "What Goes On In Banff, Stays In Banff" folder. A lot of goodbyes were said and the general concensus was that it was a totally mind-blowing experience for all concerned.

I got back to the residence around sunrise.

2006-05-20T13:24:00.000-07:00

Saturday #2

I've had it much more together over the last few hours.

Sombody who might have just started reading this blog starting with the last post may get the impression that I'm some sort of a weepy wimp into self-created drama - that's not how I operate on a daily basis. I consider myself to be a very logical and calm person most of the time. Some of you who know me may take either side of the wimp/non-wimp argument - that's your call.

I came up here to develop as an musician and a creative human being. I could have chosen to hide out behind some cool facade, or I could have filtered what I wrote in this blog. But that was not my choice. I did not want to cheat myself of one iota of this experience.

Despite obstacles which at the time seemed insurmountable, I made my way up here. I decided to go for the total experience, good, bad or otherwise. Like everyone else in the program here, I invested considerable time, money and energy into this time here, and I was determined to get maximum results, even if I didn't have a clue as to what those results would be.

It has been said that how you do one thing is how you do everything. I could have not partipated to the fullest possible during the run of this course. It would probably have increased the chance of getting lukewarm results. But I would have been depriving myself of a rare opportunity to grow.

I am very glad to have gone through what I did over the last two weeks, particularly the last couple of days. It has created an experience that will stay with me forever. It is too early to say for sure that Giant Steps changed my life, but I have a very strong feeling that it has. Hugh has already publicly proclaimed that after listening to Chucho play that yesterday, he is a changed person. It was that heavy.

Giant Steps is a rather apt summation of my four sojourns at Banff.

2006-05-20T09:11:00.000-07:00

This is going to be one fuck of a day to get through.

I don't quite know how I'm going to deal emotionally with everything going on inside my head. I also don't know how much of this I should be writing in this blog today, because I know a number of the other people in the orchestra are reading it. Perhaps it is best for them to come to their own conclusions about what this program is all about. Perhaps it is best for them to get a read on what I'm going through.

I don't know.

I do know that when I've talked, really talked with the other people who I am close to up here, they are often going through the same process inside. But each of us has their own path to discovery.

For me, the gravity of my insight gained as I was writing the last installment of this blog has been enormous. I played for about another hour after I finished writing, trying to express through my horn what I was feeling. I have no idea what it sounded like, but it was me.

I wondered if I dare play that way tonight. Actually the answer is obvious.

I got up at 9:00 and took a long walk in the woods, reflecting on the events of the last two weeks. As I've written a couple of times before, there are no coincidences at Banff. It was no fluke that Hugh asked me to be one of the soloists for the Love Supreme performance and that Chucho played Giant Steps for us yesterday. I'm not talking about knocking off Coltrane licks, or Trane's technical prowess, but something way deeper, the passion and raw emotion that made him one of the great artists of the twentieth century.

I was wandering deeper into the forest, off the trail, and eventually my spidey sense told me to turn around. I finally composed myself enough to go get my morning caffeine fix. As I approached the cafe, I immediately recognized Kent Sangster's son sitting a table outside. That pushed more buttons for me and I wished again that Clara and Cassandra were here with me. As I was about to go inside, Kent walked out and introduced me to his wife and son and daughter. Then he said that Chucho was inside. I caught sight of him as I spun around and fled. I'm pretty sure he was looking at me, but there was no way I could face him at that moment. I would have totally broken down on the spot, as it was I managed to get around the corner of the building before losing it in private.

I'm sure Chucho knows he can have this effect on people.

The challenge for me will be to be part of the program here for the next 24 hours and be totally involved in wringing the last drops of learning from this rare experience. It means walking around holding my head high even though I'm on the verge of losing it at any given moment.

This is what is means to me to be an Artist in Residence at the Banff Centre. At least that's what it says on my ID card.

2006-05-19T22:42:00.000-07:00

Friday part 3

This is the penultimate evening here and it's been heavy.

The talk at dinner time was how Chucho played today. Later in the evening, Hugh mentioned that although he had seen Chucho do it years ago, it was nothing like today. It was pretty well unanimous that we had witnessed one of those indelible moments of sheer musical brilliance. There were a number of people near tears by the end of it. We were indeed blessed.

We had another evening's worth of music to perform at The Club tonight and it was another full house. The music ranged from straight ahead jazz to wind octet to blues and full-out funk. I was part of the octet on bass clarinet. Gunhild Seim from Norway is just a beautiful composer and it was a lovely piece, like a sorbet between courses of a fancy meal. Ken Hoffman's funk unit tore it up at the end of the night.

Last night it was Jon "Bunny" Stewart's time to shine. Jon's been playing great from the get-go here, but when he presented a set of his own music at The Club last night, it was at another level, deeply personal and intense from the heart. Marianne was as brilliant as ever on piano, and Jon McCaslin and Joe Libinsky were superb on drums and bass. Afterwards, Chucho asked Bunny for a copy of his charts. What an honour.

Emotions have been running high here. We are nearing the end of this program and lots of stuff comes to the surface. On reflection much of the angst about repertoire could be attributed to this emotional intensity. People are also beginning to make preparations to leave on Sunday and that feeling of impending separation is also palpable.

I had inadvertantly offended the lead sax player in our section when I made one of my usual flippant remarks at the dinner table a few days ago. It was totally unintended, but he took it personally, a good reminder for me to think before I open my mouth. We ended up getting into it at the club last night and I was very quick to apologize again. I really respect this guy as a player and a person and truly felt bad about the whole thing.

The thing is as I mentioned quite some time ago, is that up here, after a few days in this intense environment, a lot of people, myself included, drop many of the emotional barriers that we use to shield ourselves in daily life in the real world. We do this because we feel safe in the environment that Hugh has fostered here over the decades. It helps us to perform from a very emotional place, and that can only make the music better.

So things naturally just become more intense. And that's a thing that I very much enjoy when I come here. Interestingly, I have always attributed a lot of that to the ball-busting music that makes up the final concert.

This year is different. We were looking for heavy salsa charts, but what Chucho brought instead was music that on the surface appears simple but is very, very deep. Hugh knows what it's about and I'm starting to get a sense of it, but it will probably take a long while to sink in. He told me that what Cubans really appreciate when they come here is not how well we may be able to play montuno, or what sort of chops we have; no, what really gets them is when music is played from the heart. According to Hugh, Chucho has heard that in this orchestra and he is very impressed and honoured to be a part of it. It may explain somewhat why he played Giant Steps the way he did.

He is leading the way for us.

Damn those epiphanies.

2006-05-19T16:37:00.000-07:00

Friday part 2

There may be several postings today, as it will shorten the length of time I spend at the computer later on this evening.

After my initial post this morning, I got down to business with the song room piece, as we basically had the morning off. The chord changes started to sound alarmingly like Kenny Wheeler's Gentle Piece (damn, I wish I could write like that!) so I had to be very conscious of where this piece was going. I eventually got something that was original. I suddenly became aware that the building was very quiet, so I went to check out the cause. Much to my chagrin, an impromptu Q&A session with Chucho was going on and people were peppering him with questions, which he answered through his wife who translated for him. It was an extremely rare opportunity to hear this man's views on so many things - not the sort of thing you could expect if you happened to be travelling to Cuba.

At lunch, we had a barbecue out on the courtyard. It had rained briefly, just after I mentioned the great weather in my last post, but it was fine by the time we were ready to eat. I asked Chucho to autograph one of the cds that Patrick Dubois lent me and it turned out to be a very rare and special recording, so that was even better. I am reconsidering giving it back to Patrick now...

In the afternoon, we had a full rehearsal and Hugh masterfully addressed the concerns of some the band regarding the music selection for the show tomorrow night. I was one of those people and I was satisfied by what he said. One thing that probably nobody knew was that all of the Irakere charts are property of the Cuban government, regardless if Chucho wrote them. I guess that's communism in action, and a pretty damn solid reason we weren't playing that music.

After the rehearsal, Chucho had another lecture session, specifically about how the rhythm sections of a Cuban band basically work together. He explained about the difference between basic song form and montuno, and what usually would happen in the rhythm section when that change took place. He talked about different claves and tumbao and many other things.

I slightly derailed the strict rhythm section talk when I asked at what age to the kids start learning this stuff. This led into a long explanation on his part, but this is something that is very important to him. Apparently, kids are tested at the age of 7 for musical aptitude and if the authorities deem them to have some talent, then they a enrolled at a musical school. Musical education is conducted in addition to their regular school studies and they have to do well in both. If they fail a year either on the music or the academic side, they are out of the program. They have to learn percussion in addition to their main instruments. Percussion studies are initially done by example or orally, but eventually, they have to be able to write all of the figures that they play. This goes on to grade 12, at which time they can apply for university. There is another set of tests and only a small percentage of applicants get in. The rest have to continue learing "on the street". University is for 5 years and they must study classical in additional to jazz and traditional Cuban music. In years past, it was strictly classical and guys like Arturo Sandoval had to leave school in order to play jazz. We were all shaking our heads in disbelief at the rigorous study regimen.

I hope I got all of the above correct - we were all listening the translation very carefully.

Hugh asked Chucho to finish off by demonstrating his take on a classic jazz standard - Giant Steps. I don't know if anyone in the room could coherently describe what happened next. It was the most masterful solo performance I have seen in my life, and I may also be speaking for most of the people there. Chucho has a magnificent sense of time and fabulous keyboard technique, and he immediately took the piece from a very straight-ahead reading through possibly dozens of Cuban (and other) variations, switching midstream with accuracy, confidence and soul. It was from another dimension and we just happened to be lucky enough to be in the same room.

Dinnertime!

2006-05-19T08:46:00.000-07:00

"The sun rose, as is its wont, in the east." Is that a line from Harvard Lampoon's Bored of the Rings? Old School is the forum's resident expert on obscure pop culture references - perhaps he can elucidate from his tweedy confines at Tulane.

True to form, I start getting a bit reflective in the waning days of the program. This melancholy feeling is combined with excitement for the upcoming concert, making for an interesting emotional mix. It will be hard to part with this particular ensemble.

It's the time when I wish I could take pretty well everyone in the orchestra home with me, and just keep this magic going. We all know that it's back to the real world on Monday, save for those staying on for the International Jazz Workshop, usually known as the "Dave Douglas thing". Hugh has scheduled his annual lecture for tomorrow morning, the topic being reintegration back into the real world and ways of keeping this vibe going.

Typically I've always been last out of the building and first one back in the next day, but this time round I've been having late breakfasts. What can I say - I'm slipping. But for sure, I've closed the building most nights. Yet I still feel that I haven't done enough here. I've spent at least an hour a day blogging and checking e-mails, etc. This is the first time I brought up a laptop and I have spent a lot of time on it, some days more than practicing. I'll have to reflect on that.

Anyways, I did get up earlier than usual and was the first person through the music building's doors at 7:00am, having left just six and a half hours earlier. I took a short stroll through the woods to a nearby cliff overlooking the Bow River and watched the sun rising over the mountains, hence the purple prose at the start of this entry.

Here it is, yet another beautiful day up in Banff. Good weather seems to be just as certain as the black panties that have been hanging on a tree branch above the door to our residence since the day after I arrived. (Disclaimer: I had nothing to do with them!) It's nice to have some constants in your life.

This time round at Banff, I am one of the senior repeat attendees as well as being one of the oldest participants. More than ever before I have a sense that I am part of the tribe. I certainly don't have that huge feeling of insecurity that I did during my initial time with Maria Schneider. Also, I am much more secure in my role as being the "free player" of the group, as some people are approaching me to play with them, or pick my brains about this style of music. I know it's not everyone's bag, but there seems to be a greater acceptance of the genre on the whole. I also know that I am a much more accomplished musician that when I first came here. Even this year, I have really heard a big improvement in my sound.

This whole sense of comfort leads me to question whether or not I will do this program again. So much of the initial experience was about playing way over my head and having the guts to present a new music composition. It may be that it's time to look at some of the other programs that Banff has to offer, the Dave Douglas thing, or perhaps a group residency with ion Zoo. Maybe I need to look at programs elsewhere, but frankly, walking around this morning, looking at the majestic mountains and reflecting on the last 12 days, it's hard to think that this isn't the place to be.

Of course, a lot of it depends on whom Hugh may get as a guest artist in future years. I would come back for Maria Schneider in a heartbeat, as would anyone who has had that privelege in the past. We all said as much at the dinner table last night.

I've been giving thought to the concept of accountability, in the personal development seminar sense. Accountability is the concept that I attract that which happens to me in life. Good, bad or otherwise, I have the choice to react in a way that can enrich my life.

Under the concept of accountability, I attracted that initial phone call from Lorae to come do the session with Maria Schneider, just as much as I attracted comments at the end of the session that I took poorly at the time. In the end, after I set aside the self-defeating thoughts, I emerged a changed musician.

Since I'm still in the program here, it's too early for me to pronounce what I will eventually take from this time round, but I am starting to get curious about just what that will be.

2006-05-18T11:41:00.000-07:00

Expectations part 2

Earlier, I'd written about expectations and how they may get in the way of results. We are now on the lunch break of our very first session with Chucho and I must say that I have mixed feelings. My anticipation was that we were going to get a load of ball-busting charts along the lines of Chucho's great group Irakere. Instead, what we have been presented with is three high school simple big band arrangements at medium to slow tempos which basically function as a solo vehicle for Chucho's amazing playing. The only uptempo tune is Mambo Influenciado, which I have played numerous times, and which we performed at a faster tempo in concert last week.

From the sounds of it, these are the only four charts of his we will be playing in concert on Saturday. There will also be a couple of solo piano pieces and then maybe a mass trombone arrangement of Manteca. That's it.

Hugh did not know until Chucho arrived what he planned to bring, so now the challenge for Hugh is to pull a concert together out of this material that will be satisfying for everyone. The pieces will be reworked and expanded to make them more concert oriented.

I had expected to be in the practice room from this point up to the time of the concert working my ass off just to cover my part, but frankly they're dead simple to play and due to the size of the band, I'll be laying out half of the time. So basically my initial reaction to the morning session was disappointment.

I don't want to sound insincere here, because it is an honour to have the opportunity just to share the stage with him. Chucho is a gifted pianist and having the chance to hear and watch him in person in something very special. But the title of today's entry is "Expectations".

So now it's time to shift gears and focus on making the material sound as good as possible. Stan Karp had a great quote from his mentor Bill Green when young Stan got overconfident with his assigned studies "If you're so bored with it, why doesn't it sound better?". So we can always improve our playing of a passage of music no matter how simple. Even if we are just a support vehicle for Chucho's soloing, the only professional thing to do is to honour the music and make it sound as great as possible.

I already told Hugh last week, that I felt like I'd gotten my money's worth up here this year, even without the Chucho experience, and I need to bear this in mind. Yesterday's recording session was an exceptional group achievement and perhaps a bit of a letdown is natural. I haven't talked about my feelings with anyone else here yet, but I'm sure many of the young trumpeters here came to Banff expecting a mega-burnout Latin workout. That's not going to happen.

The next few days will be interesting. I have to take advantage of the opportunity to spend time with one of the greatest masters of Cuban music, regardless of what music is put in front of me, and absorb as much as possible. As in all of the previous years here, my greatest learning has come from unexpected sources. I have to keep open to all eventualities.

This will also allow me to spend a couple of more nights composing, which is one of the primary reasons that I'm here.

2006-05-17T22:01:00.000-07:00

Studio marathon

Today was the day that Chucho arrived. He had a long flight from Cuba and missed a connecting flight from Toronto due to a Caribbean storm. We generally gave him a lot of space to rest up for tomorrow. Hugh got a nice cigar to puff on, so he was happy.

The rhythm section loaded in at 10:00 am and the horns at 11:30, then soundcheck. Marianne's piece was first up and by the second take, it went quite well. That set the tone for the day. The second was Carl Anderson's - he had heat stroke, now recovered - and I was a few minutes late for the setup, as the start time was advanced by 15 minutes. I was still 15 minutes ahead of when tape started rolling, but I felt bad about not being there right from the jump, and I think my playing sufferred a bit as a result.

We kept gaining time throughout the afternoon and we took an early dinner break. We got a bit bogged down with Jon "Bunny" Stewart's tune, as Jon has rushed putting the arrangement together, and had never heard it played before Banff, but everyone really wanted to make sure we got a good take of it because it was a great piece. Jon asked Mike Herriott to conduct (it was in 5) and take the solo, which was quite an accomplishment. Because we were still all working hard to nail the piece, I suggested to Mike that someone else conduct while he soloed, a suggestion he didn't take particularly well, as he was more focussed than anyone to make this piece work. But after the supper break, a variation of that did happen, as Marianne took part of the trumpet solo on piano, enabling Mike to conduct us through the tempo changes. Bunny also gave direction from the sidelines. In the end, I think we got a really good take of the piece.

After that was a period of pandemonium while the extra instruments for my piece were set out, miked and sound-checked. We did two takes and I was quite happy, particularly with the second one. Again Mike was very helpful in pointing out some clams being played in my notated sections, while I did all I could to make sure my conducting went well. I need a lot of work in that department. The subsonic rumblings at the beginning were astonishing. Every band should have an alphorn. I will have to wait to hear a mixdown of this - the studio guys will also do a 5.1 surround sound mix for me. BONUS!

After that, things lightened up for me and I could focus more on playing. We wrapped the final piece at 10:30 pm, with about 260 minutes' worth of music in the can. If anything, the orchestra's focus increased as the night progressed, and the rhythm section kept kicking it until the last note. If any of them had started dragging, the whole evening would have been a disaster, but it was just the opposite. This was quite a feat and the whole band is now as ready for Chucho as we will ever be.

Tomorrow awaits...

2006-05-16T21:19:00.000-07:00

Radar Quebecoise

The new works concert was originally planned for tonight, but due to some snafu, it ended up being advertised by the Banff Centre for last night. An unexpected result of this was a decided drop in the collective energy level today. People played well and kept their focus for the second round of rehearsals for the original music, but outside the rehearsal hall, many asses were dragging, mine included.

I took my piece to "Defcon 2" and went over it cell by cell, and it sounded much better for having done so. Even though this is a graphic score and so-called free improv, I reminded everyone that just like straight-ahead jazz, this music only really works when it is played from an emotional centre. That is the message that I will repeat when we get into recording the piece tomorrow evening.

I am quite happy with how this piece has gone, but I know it's time to move my writing beyond this particular style of graphic notation. This is the fourth grid-based piece I've written, definitely the most ambitious, and I feel like I've finally added some original modifications to the format. Some time ago, John Korsrud had suggested that I consider laying out the individual parts of my compositions and physically move the pieces of paper around, considering the flow and content of each segment, and that way find the final form. This is exactly what I did this time round, sticking each of the individual cells of the piece up on the bulletin board of my studio, going over them again and again, until I got a satisfying flow of events. I just can't let Reno know that he had such a good suggestion.

One of the other fine composers here, Carl Anderson, got lightheaded at the start of my piece and was feeling unwell for the rest of the day. In fact, he eventually went into town to the medical clinic for a checkup. They couldn't pinpoint anything in particular, but he has been pushing himself hard since arriving here, so a good night's rest may be the ticket. I certainly hope it's not more serious than that. I joked with him that it was the goal of my piece to take out one trumpeter at a time. It starts with a faux-Tastee Bros. screech trumpet bit. You can go to www.tasteebros.com for some clips of the most obnoxious screech trumpets ever recorded. Most brass players secretly dig that sort of stuff, though many will deny it in public.

Marianne and I went into town for sushi for dinner, and we ran into Mike Herriott, Kent Sangster, John Korsrud and Melissa Hubert just leaving the sushi bar. Sometimes you just have to get away from that big buffet table. Message to Malcolm: keep away from the buffet!!!

In the evening was a session on the business of music, a seminar that I have already heard Hugh give quite a number of times, but there is always something new to be gleaned, especially in the digital age.

I think I have forgotten to write about the bear attack that happened here last weekend. I mentioned a few days ago that Marianne and I had taken a stroll in the woods. I had wanted to take her along a trail I had done a couple of years ago, around the backside of Tunnel Mountain beside the Bow River. She said she didn't have a good feeling about going that way and sure enough that was the exact trail where a malnourished black bear took out a cyclist within the next 24 hours. He ended up in a Calgary hospital with some head lacerations. The bear paid for it with its life. Had it been a grizzly bear, the biker would have been dead, too. So I'm going to pay attention to Marianne's intuition from now on.

I complained to some of my associates today that I'm not getting any dirt from them to spice up this blog. Everyone has been relatively civil and well-behaved, and we are all getting along quite well. There have been no inter-sectional dustups, booze-fuelled barf-o-ramas, furtive couplings or any other sordid gossip to report. It makes for good music, but relatively dry reading.