Back in 2007 I was working one week a month in Victoria, missing my family and needing to cleanse myself of some of the really difficult work we were doing while working on big systemic Indigenous child and family services issues on Vancouver Island. My evenings were spent trying to find things to do that would bring me joy and one of those was packing my flute and whistles and trundling along to one of Victorias vibrant Irish music sessions for a night of traditional tunes.
One of those sessions was led by Daniel Lapp at the Irish Times Pub. Daniel is a most generous session host, welcoming, encouraging, curious and full of joy. I remember a few evenings and Sunday afternoons where we shared tunes and variations and talked about the difference in repertoire between the Vancouver sessions and the Victoria sessions. It’s rare to meet a musician that treats everyone, from beginner to experienced hack to absolute monster professionals with kindness, encouragement, and fun.
Although I don’t remember playing with him, one of the kids that hung out there was Lapp’s student 10 year old Quinn Bachand. Quinn started playing with Lapp and had a meteoric rise, quickly becoming known as a prodigal young Celtic guitar player, and he’s only gotten better.
It has been 19 years or so since I saw Lapp, but last night he and Quinn graced the stage at Tir Na nOg on Bowen Island, as part of Shari Ulrich’s “Trust Me” series.
It was possibly the best show I’ve seen in the ten years or so that Shari has been curating that series.
Lapp and Bachand are a magical duo and are celebrating the release of an album of music they have just recorded together of a bunch of Daniel’s original tunes. The first set of the night was tunes from the new album written for friends and family members in styles ranging from traditional jigs and reels to cajun two steps and Normandy waltzes. Both players are virtuosos but it must be said that Lapp’s compositional range is incredible and Quinn brought a dense palette of harmonic exploration. These are tunes that seem straight forward on the surface, but can at times be complex and colourful, dippingg through unexpected key changes with Quinn’s reharmonization flying around beneath. All set on top of impeccable timing and groove.
From the very first set of tunes, the audience was hooked and the energy in the room was locked on intense joy, from which is never wavered. barely minutes into the show I think everyone could tell this would be a special night.
After a break, the second set of the night was looser, more tunes called on the fly, more improvisation. Daniel got to talking more about his life going project to gather and publish his collection of the extensive BC fiddles tunes repertoire, which consists of more than 3000 tunes. He drew on much of this tradition in teh second half, which began with Quinn and him playing tunes on harmonica and which also featured a lovely new song Daniel composed, in which he accompanied himself on trumpet. A firy collection of BC tunes followed before Lapp called for an Irish set that meandered through tunes that he and Quinn played together 20 years ago. They explored these tunes together at pace, barely holding on, drifting into improvised patterns, calling up snippets of memory that put me back on that stage with their session at the Irish Times. It was like watching clouds fly past a mountain top. Hints of melody, a tunes started and then abandoned, the pair carried by spirit and flow.
The verdict at the end of the show was the loudest round of applause I’ve yet heard in that theatre which elicited an encore of gypsy jazz, showing of the Berklee-educated Quinn’s swing chops.
The room was full of Bowen Island musicians last night and we all filed out into the night infected with astonishment and joy. Nights like that make you simultaneously want to give up music altogether while inspiring you to go home, pick up your instruments and play all night long. Nights like last night remind you what music is for.
Carmina Bowena warming up before our concert on Monday
I sing in a choir here on Bowen Island called Carmina Bowena. We focus our attention on Rennaisence European music, singing sacred music, madrigals and modern inspirations of the same. We also sing folk music and more traditional music from Italy, France, Spain and the British Isles. We are an impressively eclectic group of people, under under the leadership and joy of our director, Nicole Thomas Zyczynsky.
We like to craft an atmosphere with the music we sing. It’s already transcendent music to begin with but when we perform we want to make it less about a concert and more of an immersive experience. We usually perform in small theatres or churches with good acoustics, from a stage, to an audience.
Monday night though was the first of what I hope will be a series of contemplative experiences that we co-created with the congregation of Cates Hill Chapel here on Bowen Island. We sat in a circle in the centre of the room, which has phenomenal reverb, and around us were a couple of circles of chairs. Candles lit the room and the participants were invited to be in silence for an hour as we sang four sets of music interspersed with poems about light and dark. It was not explicitly a religious experience, but for a contemplative person like me, it was a very good way to be in Lent.
The program began with a couple of Gregorian chants and went through songs by Byrd, Palestrina, Duruffle, Rossi, Lauridsen and Gjello. There was no applause between pieces, just a transition from one to the next, as we stood and sang in candlelit darkness. My friend Kathy played a beautiful clarinet solo a set of variations on a theme by Kodlay. I played a slow air one my flute from the Irish tradition called “The Fire in the Hearth” from an album by John Skelton.
The experience was co-created. Asking the audience to hold silence throughout the hour or so, in a resonant room light by candles, created an atmosphere of deep compilation. More importantly it was an atmosphere that was held by all of us, the choir, the readers, the hosts and the “audience.” It doesn’t;t even feel right to call them an audience.
To me this is the high art of participatory container work: when people all have a role in creating something together. To paraphrase Christina Baldwin, it is not one person’s job to create a container, but a group creates a dialogic container together. And when there is some coherence in that group – perhaps some shared experience, or a shared aspiration or even a shared curiosity – the container can be one in which transcendent experiences happen, where beauty emerges, or novelty, or flow. When we get out of our own way, feeling that it is our job solely to host and create, something else becomes possible. These are communal experiences can be full of beauty, like our concert, or of intense emotional joy like I have experienced when my teams have won important matches. They can be collectively healing, as my friend Linda Tran has begun to discover in her sound bath practice. Today we were talking about the way in which a sound bath session – where she plays crystal bowls and offers gentle meditative and awareness guidance – becomes a powerful collective experience when the participants have all done it before and have set aside their anxieties and worries and deeply rest in the experience. Something else is possible.
We live in a world of performance and consumption. Being an audience member in most places assumes a detachment from the experience. The fourth wall is intact. We passively consume what is put in front of us. We forget that we are also participants. It is becoming more and more clear to me that we NEED to find places of the participatory and collective practice of beauty, even in what is traditionally thought of as as an audience-performer context. May we never lose that ability.
As a tenor in two choirs, I do find this article: “How to solve the tenor shortage” to be funny, but perhaps also true. At any rate, it’s a fanciful speculation with some excellent turns of phrase, published in The Economist of all places.
Ideally the stock of tenor singers would be larger, not merely allocated more efficiently. It would help in the long run if schools made singing more of a priority, especially among teenagers. Many boys stop singing after their voices break, not only because they struggle with a new instrument but also because they are rudely thrown from singing the tune into singing harmony. In the short run, choirs that can afford it would do well to consult voice coaches. They might discover that some of the men who have assigned themselves to the bass section can sing tenor, as can some of the women who sit with the altos. Tenor voices are like gold, and not only because they are rare and valuable. They need to be dug out of people and worked on.
Everyone should remember that choirs do not demand singers who sound like Mr Bocelli. An ordinary tenor in a chorus is seldom if ever called upon to reach a high b, or to sing with anything approaching his power. Of course, a tenor might briefly imagine that he or she sounds just like an Italian opera star, when hitting a tricky entrance correctly and when—miracle of miracles—the rest of the section gets it right, too. It is not the world’s most harmful fantasy
Ted Gioia remembers his first ever jazz show, seeing Yusef Lateef in LA. It changed his life.
17 seconds into the performance by the Yusef Lateef Quartet. I honestly wanted to jump up, and tell everybody in the nightclub:
This is the moment I’ve been waiting for.
I knew in that instant that everything in my life had been leading up to this. And I’d been wasting my time with rock and pop and classical music. My destiny was jazz.
I had a similar experience with jazz. It was perhaps 1986 in Toronto and my friend Winston Smith, who worked at my local bookstore, Writers & Co. Invited me to go see Mal Waldron and Steve Lacy at The Rivoli on Queen Street. Winston fed me a steady diet of novels and poetry by African American writers like John Edgar Wideman and Nathanial Mackey and he turned my head when it came to music. And while the records he leant me were one thing seeing two master improvisers at work live was another thing altogether.
Waldron and Lacy were a phenomenal duet. Together they spanned the history of the genre. Waldron was one of Billie Holiday’s accompanists and Lacy played with the likes of Cecil Taylor. Their set was full of Monk tunes and original compositions that strayed wildly from the head as they entered into free music together. It was my introduction to this kind of jazz.
Unlike Gioia this performance didn’t make me want to play the music. I found it raw and intimidating and had no way in with the limited guitar technique I had. There were no guitar players making this music other than Sonny Sharrock and so what it did was light a fire in me for this music and art that approached this kind of intensity and thoughtfulness.
Life changing.
Go read this amazing blog post about these two musicians and their long history together.
I am using Patti Digh’s title for this post. She posted today on Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert, in which he had to perform on a piano that was far from ideal. But he accepted the constraint and played one of the most enduring and transformative jazz concerts of all time.
It reminded me of the time that Geoff Brown and I played with two Turkish musicians at the Applied Improv Network conference in Portland. The image above shows us in full flow.
I had just met Geoff, and we were beginning a friendship that has lasted nearly two decades despite having been together only three times – in Portland, working on a sustainability conference in Melbourne, and doing one on Indigenous Housing here in Vancouver.
The show in question was the gala improv show, held I believe at the Portland Schweitzer Concert Hall, which is a big venue. The four of us were invited to be the band for part of the show. Geoff had his guitar with him and the Turkish musicians had their instruments, but I had nothing. The show organizer said “my son has a really nice guitar. I’ll bring it for you.”
We showed up on the evening ready to go (this was an improv show remember, no rehearsals!) and the organizer handed me the guitar case. I opened it up and instead of “a really nice guitar” he handed me a battered beginner classical guitar that was missing the A string. “Oh shit,” he said.
His son had evidently swapped guitars at some point and dad just grabbed the case without checking and left.
“I’m so sorry,” he said.
I took one look at the guitar and, after three days of accepting every offer that came my way, I said “it’s good. I’ll play it.”
And that’s how I found myself playing onstage in a soft seat theatre in Portland in front of hundreds of people on a battered old five string guitar with an Australian blues man and two Turkish musicians. You can tell from the photo above that we had a ball.