{"id":559,"date":"2011-01-25T20:16:53","date_gmt":"2011-01-25T08:16:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/misterioso.org\/?p=559"},"modified":"2013-01-30T23:07:12","modified_gmt":"2013-01-31T07:07:12","slug":"jazz-em-agosto-lisbon-portugal-august-3-8-2004-the-vancouver-presence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/misterioso.org\/?p=559","title":{"rendered":"Jazz em Agosto, Lisbon, Portugal August 3-8, 2004: The Vancouver Presence"},"content":{"rendered":"

Texts \u00a9 Stuart Broomer & Laurence Svirchev,\u00a0Photography \u00a9Laurence Svirchev<\/p>\n

Jazz em Agosto\u2014Jazz in August\u2014is a festival with any number of differences, an event that in recent years has spanned a few days or two weeks, presenting both the celebrated and the little-known with the emphasis on innovative work. The festival is sponsored by the Gulbenkian Foundation, part of the extraordinary legacy of Calouste Gulbenkian whose name adorns the museum and art gallery that house the festival and also the park that surrounds them all. The festival\u2019s concerts are scaled to the available halls, ranging from a small, almost vertical, lecture hall to a concert hall extraordinary for both its physical beauty and acoustics.<\/p>\n

What makes all of this most remarkable is the creative vision of artistic director\u00a0Rui Neves, who often programs the festival to emphasize a single country\u2019s music. This year half of the festival\u2019s 12 performances were devoted to Canadians, including four performances that provided an international forum for groups from the fertile Vancouver scene. The festival was bracketed by big bands from Canada\u2019s opposite coasts, opening on Tuesday with Vancouver\u2019s NOW Orchestra conducted by George Lewis and ending on Sunday with the Paul Cram Orchestra made up of musicians from Southern Ontario to Nova Scotia. The symmetry was highlighted by the two concerts taking place in the Gulbenkian\u2019s stunning concert hall, the only night-time performances brought indoors by the threat of rain. The evening concerts in between took place in the outdoor Anfiteatro, another gorgeous setting for music and one taking advantage of Lisbon\u2019s balmy August evenings.<\/p>\n

For at least three decades starting with the innovative pianist Al Neil, Vancouver has created a continuous stream of highly collaborative, idiomatic music. Yet that scene has been largely isolated from the rest of the world, its scope never represented outside the city. In a prescient and audacious programming move Rui Neves may have broken that isolation by presenting four Vancouver-based bands at the 2004 festival.<\/p>\n

Literature and music are potent forces in the culture of any country and Neves\u2019 recognition of the Vancouver scene might have its roots in the Portuguese literary imagination. In the nineteen twenties and thirties, poet Fernando Pessoa (d.1934) hung out in Caf\u00e9 Brasileira in one of the old quarters of Lisbon. There he wrote under four names, his own and three heteronyms. These heteronyms were neither contrived or pseudonymic; each existed as a dissimilar, idiomatic poetic voice.<\/p>\n

The concept of heteronymity fits the Vancouver musical scene perfectly. No singular voice or style dominates, musicians float among established working bands and come-as-they-may improvising assemblages. Lisbon has had its Caf\u00e9 Brasileira for poetry (and \u201cbica\u201d, Portuguese slang for expresso); Vancouver has its old Glass Slipper, Studio 1016, and the Western Front as cauldrons for new music. Both cities are continental endpoints before oceans loom as the edge of the world. Perhaps it is the edge of the world syndrome that provokes the imagination to heightened creativity.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Jazz em Agosto\u2019s programme started with a big bang, the NOW Orchestra<\/strong>\u2019s complement of 16 musicians playing a constellation of five intricate compositions from George Lewis and Coat Cooke.<\/p>\n

After 25 years of continuous activity, free improvisation and tight ensemble playing come naturally to NOW. With Lewis on-board as conductor, composer, and soloist, NOW enters a hyper-realm that levitates the stage, becoming a polar star of large improvising ensembles. The performance began with Lewis conducting his \u201cConcerto for NOW\u201d (adapted from his \u201cVirtual Concerto\u201d). It opens with a simple three note motif from the reeds, followed by a silent space and then a one note ensemble sound. After six cycles and variations, the band dropped out and Kevin Elaschuk (trumpet) and Clyde Reed (bass) began articulating extended notes against each other. Section two was a funk section, the entire band swinging behind a trombone solo. Section three was an conducted improvisation backing a Paul Plimley solo. The next three sections had cellist Peggy Lee warping and weaving through improvisations by piano, Kate Hammett-Vaughn\u2019s voice, and the reed sections, it all ending with a group improvisation.<\/p>\n

Cooke conducted an elegy, \u201cBroken Dreams.\u201d It began with two basses voiced in the lowest register, then ascended into a high velocity Plimley piano. A series of reveries were then suggested by Hammett-Vaughn\u2019s voice. The composition was about the supercharged and discordant emotions that come from the erratic pulses of a confused mind, ending on a saxophone solo suggesting acceptance of unfulfilled aspirations. While Cooke\u2019s compositions tend toward autobiography, they are also complex works containing a broad range of color.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The audience in the outdoor\u00a0Anfiteatro\u00a0looks down on a well-lit stage, the backdrop of which is a grass field and a pond containing ducks among the reeds. The tall trees that surround it muffle the sounds of the city. It\u2019s a magical setting for a stage. The Peggy Lee Band<\/strong>\u2019s concert was no less magical than the setting. The band has a unique sound: Lee\u2019s voicings of trombone (Jeremy Berkman), trumpet (Brad Turner) and cello can be mellifluous. With bassist Andre Lachance holding the swing chair, the flip side of the honey is the raucous ability of Lee, guitarist Ron Samworth, and guitarist Dylan van der Schyff to project an edgy contemporary sound.<\/p>\n

The band played material from her latest CD\u00a0World\u2019s Apart. The opener was a composition by the same name in which Turner and Berkman stated a beautiful mid-tempo melody\/improvisation. The composition segued to an extended cello and drums improvised introduction to \u201cSoft Scrape.\u201d I particularly enjoyed \u201cBeekeepers Club.\u201d Just before the first note was hit, the quacks of several ducks settling for the night sounded through the calm air. And just as Brad Turner launched into his take-flight solo, the sound of a landing jet-liner provided a roaring throttling-back turbo-charged engines. Berkman provided the antipodal voicing to Turner, the sounds that trademark this band.<\/p>\n

Lee\u2019s music provokes the purest of emotional responses. From my Vancouver listening experience, it is difficult to come out of a Lee concert without feeling a deep inner peace from the her music\u2019s grace and warmth. I suspect that the Lisbon audience felt the same way.<\/p>\n

Fran\u00e7ois Houle<\/strong> opened his Electro-Acoustic Quartet set with a slap-tongue and ended with a misterioso shakuhachi-like whistle. In between those two sounds was encapsulated a brilliant display of electro-acoustic improvisation, composition, and soloing by the quartet. Much of the music was an enhanced reprise of his radio-phonic CD\u00a0Au Coeur du Litige\u00a0about the devastating Qu\u00e9bec ice-storms of 1998. That initial slap tongue was immediately followed by a bass drum hit and a symbol tap by Dylan van der Schyff. With the drum kit electronically linked through Houle\u2019s processing units, these three simple actions unleashed a sequence of digital processing which turned a single clarinet into a symphony of sound.<\/p>\n

In marked contrast to the hospitable Lisbon night air, we heard poet Catriona Strang\u2019s processed voice calling ice \u201cthis mountain of despite\u201d and other poetry from the original work. Later in the concert, Houle worked a piece around a Morton Feldman stand-up comedic-satiric routine which discusses the relation between musicians and audience. Feldman quotes Boulez: \u201cWhen people applaud they are really applauding their own good taste.\u201d New music permits such provocation.<\/p>\n

What I hear from Houle in recent years is a music delving into the realm of social commentary. This can be a danger zone for artists, but Houle chooses his statements wisely. Immediately after broadcasting Feldman\u2019s voice, he and van der Schyff launched into a high-velocity improvisation of processed clarinet solo and drums, a nice contrast between thought and music. In a pleasant relief from ice storms, satire, and electronically-enhanced double-clarinet playing, bassist Chris Tarry played a beautiful solo from Au Coeur du Litige accompanied by van der Schyff\u2019s cymbal splashes that captured nature healing itself after the storms abated.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The\u00a0gelato\u00a0of the west-coast Canadian sets was the Paul Plimley-Lisle Ellis<\/strong> duo. Plimley and Ellis have been playing together for over two decades and have achieved an elegantly synchronous musicality. Their set was a confluence of improvisational and jazz history as they wove their way through free-compositions and then executed stop-on-a-pixel turnarounds. The opening composition, an Ellis-Plimley tale called \u201cIn-Situ,\u201d had a slippery eel quality. Just when you thought the melodic fragments were purling, the music slid away in another direction. The Mingus composition \u201cSelf Portrait in Three Colors\u201d was sight-read at a slow cadence, rendering it tender and loving. Fragments of Charlie Parker\u2019s \u201cRelaxing at Camarillo\u201d appeared out of nowhere and several in the audience laughed when Jimi Hendrix\u2019 \u201cUp from the Skies\u201d laced its way into the closing composition.<\/p>\n

Jazz em Agosto\u00a0provided the opportunity for not only a Portuguese audience to hear some of Vancouver\u2019s strongest bands in an other-worldly setting. Pessoa\u2019s heteronymic consciousness seemed to pervade the musical atmosphere and I couldn\u2019t help but wonder how a master poet from the first third of the last century would have appreciated today\u2019s musicality.<\/p>\n

Editors note: This review was originally published \u00a0in Coda, The Journal of Jazz and Improvised Music, November\/December 2004\u00a0by Stuart Broomer and Laurence Svirchev. In this edition, the texts have been separated into independent reviews.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Texts \u00a9 Stuart Broomer & Laurence Svirchev, Photography \u00a9Laurence Svirchev<\/p>\n

Jazz em Agosto\u2014Jazz in August\u2014is a festival with any number of differences, an event that in recent years has spanned a few days or two weeks, presenting both the celebrated and the little-known with the emphasis on innovative work. The festival . . . → Read More: Jazz em Agosto, Lisbon, Portugal August 3-8, 2004: The Vancouver Presence<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays","category-reviews","odd"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/misterioso.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/misterioso.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/misterioso.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/misterioso.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/misterioso.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=559"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/misterioso.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1252,"href":"https:\/\/misterioso.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559\/revisions\/1252"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/misterioso.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/misterioso.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/misterioso.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}