As I Opened The Window AL NEIL - Part III - A Story of Interdisciplinary Art

Part One | Part Two

"If you should see a man walking down a crowded street talking aloud to himself, don't run in the opposite direction, but run towards him, because he's a poet. You have nothing to fear from the poet — but the truth". (Ted Joans)

History is often inaccurately documented, the facts only seen from a blinkered point of view, the actual movement and creation of original concepts neglected in favour of the obvious. It would be difficult to find, in those glossy-paged coffee-table books, any references to what has seriously happened in Canadian culture. Sure they are full with wonderful sepia-tone photographs of old buildings, accompanied by 20 word cut-lines; visits by dignitaries from back home, and the top-ten "cultural" and "political" icons, but where is the information pertaining to the artists that, in every generation, have expunged the banality of our metropolitan centres. How many times, and for how long, is it to be the same poet, musician, film-maker, dancer, actor, painter… that represents our country, wins the awards, garners the acclaim. Why is it that each newly celebrated prodigy is a feeble copy of someone more important?

Before the event of corporate buildings clogging the skyline of downtown cities, there existed a myriad of small independently operated stores, filled with unique goods and information. Before the era of designer labels, boring music awards, lists of top selling books, there was the action of the community, action motivated by enlightened members of that community, whose purpose was not simply a profit based ideology, but a system of sharing, a passing on of the inspirations and discoveries generated among themselves. A personal and often local phenomenon that also existed in other Canadian cities, especially Vancouver and Montreal. My own personal era as a music-artist began in Toronto in the middle seventies, an era that cultivated new concepts toward what became known, for the sake of grant applications, as multi-disciplinary performance art. A small group of us, though too large to mention everyone, were interested in a variety of disciplines, a love of not only music in its numerous forms, but literature, poetry, dance, film and theatre. Our downtown society was made up of artists that practiced all of these art forms. So it seemed quite natural that to mix these interests and present them to a willing public was required.

The first recording from Toronto of the so called new music, that achieved any international recognition, was a duet of myself and pianist Stuart Broomer, which was originally a CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) radio broadcast, recorded on May 11th, 1976, one day before my 38th birthday. In 1979 a newly formed trio with myself on reeds, violinist David Prentice and my editorial partner at Coda Magazine, David Lee, on bass and cello, found ourselves at the beginning of a very productive era that took us on tours across Canada, through the eastern United States and to England and Holland. It was also a time of performance with a variety of poets; Victor Coleman, Paul Dutton, Maya Bannerman, Steve McCaffrey and Ted Joans among them, and a time to invite musicians outside of our immediate circle to participate in our projects. Paul Cram, Lisle Ellis and Greg Simpson came from Vancouver, Jon Rose once on a visit from Australia, Misha Mengelburg and Barre Phillips each for a month's residency at the Music Gallery, and from the United States Julius Hemphill, Roscoe Mitchell, Joe McPhee and Leo Smith. The latter two we made recordings with on the Sackville label. There was also throughout this period the formation of other groups including the CCMC (Canadian Creative Music Collective), Air Raid with John Oswald and the late Maury Coles, the All time Sound Effects Orchestra with once again my old mate Stuart Broomer and drummer/artist John Mars, the Avant Garde Revival Orchestra (AGRO) and events with the Artists Jazz Band. A decade or more of spectacular creative activity.

It was a pleasant spring afternoon in 1983 and Marc Glassman, the proprietor of Pages Bookshop, and myself had planned to meet in the back room of Drummond's which was located next door to his book shop. The front part of the building was a delicatessen and in the back was a restaurant that did not open until the evening. Frank Drummond and Marc were next-door-neighbour friends so we were afforded the privacy of the deserted restaurant and also able to purchase a bottle of good red wine, which in those days in "Toronto The Good" was quite illegal. I had left the Jazz & Blues Centre a tad early with the intention of perusing some of the secondhand stores situated between our two locations. The Jazz & Blues Centre was on King Street at John and a handful of blocks north on Queen Street was Pages. One of the stores on King Street sold what they described as antiques, although a good deal of it was simply old. Among the piles of useless scratched records was an album which contained a set of 78rpm records in individual envelopes and bound with a hard cover. A book of records it could be described as. The recordings were by the popular vaudeville entertainer Sophie Tucker, and the album set was titled "The Last of the Red Hot Mamas". It was such a charming set — reasonably priced and in fairly good condition — that I purchased it. I tucked it into my shoulder bag and continued my stroll through the back streets to Frank Drummond's establishment for my 3 o'clock meeting with Marc.

Marc and I only knew each other casually, and mostly because we were both part of the Queen Street art community and were often in attendance at the same events either at the Cameron or the Spadina, both hotels in which the owners allowed us to present our events, or at the Rivoli restaurant that had a splendid performance space at the rear. Marc and I had worked together previously at The Rivoli, which had opened in 1982, and had that first winter presented a wacky film series called Le Jazz et Cine Hot, which consisted of some jazz-film nights, with films culled from my personal collection, and some nights of French New Wave films. The idea was that the French New Wave used jazz soundtracks, and Queen Street in the 80s was a jazzy, cafe and wine environment. He was also a part of a group which programmed Sunday nights that was called the MACADAMIAN film society. At our meeting in the back room of Drummond's we discovered that we both had a similar love of literature, surreal films, Dada philosophy and improvised music. We also had a friend, one Martin Heath, who owned or had access to a number of surreal silent films, and had built a projection booth at one end of the Rivoli back room for the MACADAMIAN film nights. I suspect the wine invigorated our fledgling friendship and we became excited at what we were imagining our event would be. I remembered, in my shoulder bag, the set of Sophie Tucker records I had purchased earlier and showed them to Marc. We now had a title, inspired by that chance purchase, and the Last of the Red Hot Dadas was born. Surrealist silent films accompanied by improvised music.

Oddly, the Macadamians rejected the Last of the Red Hot Dadas: they thought we had gone too far out. The only one who supported us was Martin Heath. So we decided to present the idea ourselves. The first presentation took place on May 25th, 1983 which was Marc's 33rd birthday. We went around saying "33? Same age as Jesus Christ." The price of admission was $5 and if the audience arrived wearing a bowler hat and carried a furled umbrella, an image that appeared regularly in surreal films, they were then given $2 off. We — Marc, the band which was yours truly, David Prentice, David Lee and Arthur Bull, and Martin Heath all wore bowlers. That night Martin showed classic Dada films by Fernand Leger, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali. It was a roaring success. The back room of the Rivoli was completely packed. The celebration cake was provided by Dufflet a legendary bakery, which is still a going concern in Toronto. One of the audience members, an elderly gentleman, approached us at the end of the evening and rather pretentiously told us he knew the Dadaists, and that our event was in full keeping with their spirit. In our excitement of the success of the event we were barely polite to him. Afterward, someone came up to us and said, "That's not a nice way to treat Sorel Etrog." Mr. Etrog it turned out was a famous multi-talented artist whose career had spanned 50 years and had collaborated with the likes of Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, John Cage and Marshall McLuhan. He had also designed the Genie statuette. Over the next few years, we developed the Last of the Red Hot Dadas as a performance idea, and presented it at the Music Gallery, The Royal Ontario Museum and the Art Gallery of Ontario. Once we did an evening with Sorel Etrog's film "Spiral" at the Toronto Dance Theatre.

At that time, more than twenty years ago, I had no idea that the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, a Greenwich Village legend it appears, used the moniker the Last of the Red Hot Dadas. We actually believed, on that spring afternoon in 1983, in the back room of Drummond's, that we had invented a truly original name for our project. Oh well!

Of course with age comes wisdom and the realisation that very little of what one discovers in life is actually original. In this exciting period we were already aware of poetry being performed with jazz music, had heard the recordings of Charles Mingus' "Scenes in the City" (1957), Amira Baraka with the New York Art Quartet reciting "Black Dada Nihilhismus" (1964), Archie Shepp's "Malcolm, Malcolm semper Malcolm" (1965), and were incorporating into our own performance pieces by Amira Baraka, Gregory Corso, Laurence Ferlingetti, John Sinclair and even at Christmas time Dylan Thomas' "A Child's Christmas in Wales". All this among original pieces that I had written.

How easy it is to carelessly neglect a Canadian artist of the stature of Al Neil, who half-a-century past was already doing what we so foolishly were thinking we were inventing, a man who was developing a history unparalleled in Canada. A promoter of new music forms including Ornette Coleman with Don Cherry, interdisciplinary projects with poets, participating in the presentation of plays by Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco and Fernand Arrabal, and on February 17th, 1959 recording for the CBC the first integrated jazz and poetry performance broadcast in Canada or possibly the world. This recording which was originally on Folkway's is now available again as "Kenneth Patchen reads with Jazz in Canada" and released on Locust Music. The "Jazz in Canada" of the title is the Al Neil Quartet with himself on piano, altoist Dale Hillary, Lionel Chambers on bass and drummer Bill Boyle.

Al Neil and Kenneth Patchen were born a decade apart, Patchen in 1911 and Al in 1924, and it would be convenient to think of Al as a continuum of the ideas that Patchen had pioneered. Both of them being artists who contributed to more than one discipline. Kenneth Patchen's talents, beginning in the late thirties as an "experimental" poet, included novels throughout the forties, the most famous being "The Journal of Albion Moonlight" (1941), "Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer" (1945) and "See You in the Morning" (1948). He was also a playwright, painter and graphic designer. His philosophy, reflected in his many works, reveals a combination of idealism, an intense aversion to violence, especially war, and a disappointment in the mainstream America that he found himself isolated in. His early investigations into poetry recited with jazz music was with records, and in 1957 he recorded with Allyn Ferguson and the Chamber Jazz Sextet (Discovery DS358). This recording however is similar in idea to him reading with records, as the group and Patchen were recorded separately and mixed together afterwards. In my investigation, mostly through the web, it is disappointing to find that there is little reference to Kenneth Patchen with regards to jazz and poetry, the names that keep reappearing being Kerouac, Ginsberg, Rexroth etc., the "legendary" beat poets, who were obviously influenced by his work and for whom Patchen seemed to have had little time — describing them once as "A freak show worth every Madison Avenue penny of the three-dollar-bill admission".

"Patchen is one of America's great poet-prophets. The range of his work holds the wildness of America's productive energy and all the horror implicit in the need for self-destruction. His work continues [Walt] Whitman's large and generous vision of the U.S.A., voiced with urgency. Patchen's works reveal his effort to make sense of a people bent on destroying the human spirit and the planet, in true poet-prophet outreach, his work continues to forgive man just as Whitman would bind the wounds and heal the mad and maimed victims of America's paradox". (David Meltzer)

Prior to this recording session — which was supervised by Robert Patchell, who should be lauded for producing this important document — they had performed on a number of occasions at colleges, a couple of nightclubs and on a television show, so they were prepared for this significant event. The rhythm section of bassist Lionel Chambers — a math teacher, and drummer Bill Boyle who played rock & roll for a living, were both young men in their early twenties. Unfortunately I have been unable to find further information on them. However the phenomenal 18 year-old altoist Dale Hillary, who had already studied at the Lennox School of Music in Massachusetts, is not so invisible. Throughout the sixties he travelled extensively and played at the Cellar Club in Vancouver, a club at which Al Neil was the original house pianist, the First Floor club in Toronto and had played in New York with Philly Joe Jones. In the latter part of the sixties, out of necessity, he performed with a number of R&B bands in Denver and San Francisco, and in 1970 returned to his home town of Edmonton to form his own rock band called Hourglass. In the early seventies he was a member of the well-known Toronto jazz-rock orchestra Lighthouse, with whom he made two recordings. He also recorded with the legendary bop pianist Sadik Hakim's (Argonne Thornton) 1974 tribute to Duke Ellington. In the eighties he once again returned to Edmonton where he performed with, among other local players, the singer Big Miller. He died, at the age of 52, in 1992.

The recording, somewhat brief at 27 minutes and 13 seconds — presumably designed to fit into a half hour radio broadcast — has ten poems spread over four tracks, in combinations of 4, 4, 1 and 1. What strikes me most about this document is its wonderful period feeling, conjuring up, as it does, a time when jazz was an uncluttered lyrical art form, a form with which Kenneth Patchen is completely familiar. His talking lyrics, whether they be with a blues or ballad form, benefit from his rich resonating unhurried baritone voice, which interweaves with the music in soulful aplomb. The first four poems, the blues section, has Hillary's bright Charlie Parker inspired alto moving it along, giving a certain hope to the somewhat sad lonely words alluding to human rejection. The next four poems, described as Four Poems as Songs, uses a lyrical George Wallington ballad for accompaniment, and includes a beautiful elegant word portrait titled "Do I Not Deal With Angels". The gorgeous Dale Hillary original night-time song, "As I Opened The Window", is a vehicle for an absurdly humorous story of a last minute invitation to a party. One section of the text that tickled my fancy is — "When you come to think about it, a wise man, sometime or other, seems to have said just about all there is to say about everything". The CD concludes with the old tune "Glory, Glory" (arranged by Al Neil) as a backdrop for a speech from "Don't Look Now", one of Mr. Patchen's plays. Perhaps the most energetic of all the readings.

In a paragraph from Al Neil's account of the session he wrote: "We went through the numbers with one break (maybe 2 or 3 minutes) just before "Glory, Glory" — Kenneth drew on a cigarette, stretched his legs, refused coffee, and nodded that he was set. And during that last number I don't think he looked down at the paper once. We had all been caught up in the reading from the start — we knew that something was happening, this was "something else" — but now he really went for it, he wailed! With our nerves, our hearts, we heard him coming on, ringing the changes, threading and pulling us in and out of the light — the King Cat making his scene! And on his face we could see that what we had to say back to him was making the same kind of "heart-sense". It was there".

I've known Al for a long time, first meeting him in 1969 at the University of Toronto, where as part of a cross Canada tour with his trio of Marguerite Neil and Greg Simpson, they performed at a brown bag lunch-time concert to an unsuspecting and startled audience. His curiosity and brilliance has been an inspiration to many of us over the years, and this winter, his contribution to Canadian culture is to be acknowledged with a production simply titled "The AL NEIL Project". The four events all take place in Vancouver. The grunt gallery's fourth LIVE Biennial of Performance art is presenting four evenings of interdisciplinary work by, and inspired by, him. The venues and dates are:

October 15th @ Western Front
October 21st @ Vancouver Public Library
November 10th @ Roundhouse Community Centre
November 25th @ Vancouver Art Gallery

I would like to thank Marc Glassman (www.pagesbooks.ca) and Mark Miller (The Miller Companion to Jazz in Canada by Mercury Press), for their help in writing this article/review.