Since its release last month, accolades for the Phil Dwyer Orchestra‘s release Changing Seasons have been seemingly unanimous. Writing for a large ensemble, especially incorporating strings is notoriously tough to pull off.  Most jazz projects with strings end up being star vehicles (like Charlie Parker or Clifford Brown “with strings”), head-butting exercises (Stan Getz or Ornette Coleman “versus strings”), sonic sweetening, or unnaturally forced third-stream amalgamations.  As a composer Phil Dwyer has managed to write an extended jazz orchestra piece which is not only an organic blending of all the members of the ensemble but profoundly democratic in its approach.

In fact, rather than being a star vehicle for Dwyer himself (whose talents on both saxophone and piano would certainly justify that role), the featured soloist is violinist Mark Fewer who straddles the jazz and classical world having performed with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra (as concertmaster from 2004 to 2008), as featured soloist with the Hard Rubber Orchestra, is chair of the Schulich School of Music and who has numerous recordings of contemporary music.

Phil Dwyer was my guest on the A-Trane earlier this month and after taking pains to ensure that pianist Chris Gestrin was properly credited for his outstanding solo in the Spring movement of Changing Seasons, he expanded on his sister’s comment:

PD: Sometimes when I listen to it I feel the same way.  When I listen to it, I can hear the results of all those years of hard work and studying and trying to decode some of the mysteries of the great players.

The string session was just magic, one thing I try to do every time I write something is bring the lessons of the previous projects to bear on whatever I’m working on.  So over the last number of many years of writing for string players in different situations, you start to learn how to speak their language and what kinds of things they feel comfortable doing. The same concept as writing for horn players but they tend to be different things, you can write for a great string section but sometimes it’s rhythmic issues that creep in and stop it from sounding really integrated.  I got lucky or I’ve been paying attention because the first few times I wrote for strings there were definitely some things that I just didn’t know and I went on a mission to try to learn as much as possible.  It continues, not really a process that I can see an end to …

ND: Let’s back up a little bit, can you talk a little bit about how the session came about?

PD: The piece came about as a piece that I had proposed to [violinist] Mark Fewer, he thought it was a good idea and we went through a few early drafts in terms of what instrumentation it would be.  Eventually we worked out a partnership between the jazz program and the string program at McGill University.  We did a performance there almost exactly a year ago with a combination of McGill students, some teachers and some members of the freelance community.  It went well and it really gave us an idea of what went well in the piece.

So from November of last year to July of this year [2011], I did anything I could to make the recording happen. I tried to figure out where to do it and I’m really happy that we decided to do it [at The Factory studio] in Vancouver.  I was on the floor with a bunch of musicians that I grew up playing with, and some of them were my teachers when I was younger like [saxophonist] Tom Keenliside and [trombonist/composer] Ian McDougall.  The comfort level between the musicians was really high.  There were a few people I wanted to bring in as special guests, Walter White who has worked with Maynard Ferguson and Jazz at Lincoln Center came and played lead trumpet, [trumpeter] Ingrid Jensen came in and did a cameo solo on one tune, her husband Jon [Wikan] was playing drums and [saxophonist] PJ Perry came from out of town.  But out of the 38-piece band, 33 of them were Vancouver musicians.

ND: I was thinking with Ingrid Jensen’s solo spot, she drops into so many sessions and does one tune that just lifts the bandstand.  Like her performance on Transit with Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society or the Diva Jazz Orchestra or Maria Schneider – always comes in and nails it beautifully, and her solo on Winter is so wonderful.

PD: We did six takes of her solo and each take was better than the other one!  But the one that’s on the record is so great, she’s ridiculous!  By the way, you’ll notice that Winter is the longest track which is a tribute to Canadian reality but in the middle of it we go south!

ND: The recording is marked as recorded in association with The Hard Rubber Orchestra which I believe both you and Mark Fewer have collaborated with and of course, John Korsrud and a number of other hard rubbers play on the recording.

PD: The Hard Rubber organization and Diane Kadota were absolutely key in getting this done from an administrative standpoint.  I had a bevy of very generous private sponsors for a very expensive project – I was really lucky in knowing people that believed in what I was doing and I was able to tell people with an absolutely straight face that this was the best work that I’d done ever.  So now that it’s out and it’s getting really well reviewed, I think that everybody’s really pleased to be a part of it.

ND: You don’t really do that many projects as a leader, even the trio recording [Let Me Tell You About My Day] is a few years old now.

PD:  That’s almost ten years ago, I’m trying to be the least recorded as a leader ever!

ND: But on the other hand as a sideman, you’re incredibly well-recorded …

PD: Well that’s my thing, I could make records all the time I guess but I played on – I wouldn’t even know where to start counting – there are about 50 records that I could unreservedly recommend to people to listen to that have my playing on them.  I worked as a freelance sideman for so long in Toronto that I never really got that leader mentality. I worked as musical director jobs and that sort of thing but this project was just one of those things that popped into my mind and before I could even start thinking about all the reasons why if wouldn’t be possible, I was well underway!

If you’re looking at recording a 35 minute piece of contemporary art music for a 40 piece band, you wouldn’t have to think too hard to find reasons why not to do it.  But I’m sure glad that I hung in there, it was well worth it – I’m 45 years old, I joined the union when I was 16 and so 29 years into my career here I am …

ND: It’s funny this morning I was just thinking about the first time I heard your name, I started doing this very radio show back in 1986 at the old location of Coop Radio and you had recorded a cart for Coop Radio that I think I can still paraphrase as “when I’m at home I’m either practicing or listening to Coop Radio” and then you went off on some great long saxophone cadenza and I thought that sounds great, gotta hear more of this.  And you must have been all of 19 …

PD: Exactly, I did that for Les [Szabo] who used to do The Joint is Jumping [live from the Classical Joint] which I could get in Qualicum if I put my arm out at a 38 degree angle and held a wire coat hanger …

ND: and you probably still can … so how’s life in Qualicum Beach [on Vancouver Island] these days?

PD: Pretty nice, it’s kind of a sleepy town, it comes and goes – right now not so much time on the road but I’m enjoying that too, I’ve got a big two and a half acre yard and there’s always something to do out there. we have a big vegetable garden and we’re trying to eat out of the garden twelve months a year (ed note: Changing Seasons?).

ND: One of the things on my list (someday) is to come over to the Music and Culinary Arts Festival that you put on every year – is it on again for this year?

PD:  We’re trying to decide that right now – it looks like it’s going to be a pretty busy summer playing-wise so we’ll see.  Last year I did a few private camps for adult musicians that went really well, it was really fun.  We’ll probably do some version of it but two years ago, we did a month straight with about 25 concerts, had a hundred and twenty students and it was a big undertaking.  Looking after the administration myself, it’s a lot of work but a lot of fun, sure ate well though….

ND: Were you involved with the Bamfield Festival as well?  Some friends of mine went up to that and were talking about how wonderful it was – the setting and the integration between the chamber music and the jazz, the feeling that there no musical borders there at all, all put together so wonderfully.

PD: It worked well this year, more so than in previous years – right from the beginning this year, people were making plans to work together and I wrote an expansion of a piece that I’d written a few years ago that had almost everybody, I think about 25 out of 28 musicians, that was pretty fun.  But it’s an amazing spot, I just love the west coast!  I go out to Bamfield and I would live there …

ND: It sounds like there are more and more musicians who are based on Vancouver Island who travel for work but love to stay there, bassist Ken Lister who’s on the recording and a bunch of other folks …

PD: There are lots of well-known people that live on Vancouver Island but travel for work.

ND: So what’s upcoming on your calendar?

PD: I’m playing in Vancouver with my good buddy [drummer] Alan Jones and a bass player from Portland named Tom Wakeling (Wednesday Dec 7th at the Cellar also with Chris Gestrin, Brad Turner, and Steve Kaldestad) and Friday/Saturday (December 9/10) I’ll be at the Cellar again with my Great Canadian Songbook project (with Jillian Lebeck, Vince Mai, Dave Sikula, Andre Lachance and Joe Poole).

ND: Wonderful stuff, I know quite a few people who couldn’t get into the CBC show at the Jazz Festival last year because it was so packed so it’ll be great to have another opportunity to hear it live.

—

The Changing Seasons Suite really does mark a new stage in Phil Dwyer‘s development as an artist, an ambitious work that totally delivers on its promise.  As Phil Dwyer has described it, the theme running through the composition is change.  “Changing weather, changing climatic conditions, the changing economic structure of the world and some big changes in my own life.  It’s a call to acknowledge the fact of all these changes taking place and a query as to what are we going to do about it.”

In this case at the very least, the change is for the good.

—

This interview was condensed and edited from an interview on The A-Trane Radio Program recorded on Nov 4th 2011.

The full interview with excerpts from movements Spring and Winter can be heard here:

The A-Trane Friday November 4th 2011 3PM

The 2011 Vancouver Jazz Festival performance of Phil Dwyer‘s Great Canadian Songbook project is available through CBC’s Concerts on Demand, the full concert in audio and selected performances as video (under the Jazz tab).

As mentioned above, Phil Dwyer will be appearing at the Cellar in early December with two different ensembles, more information available at The Cellar website.

Changing Seasons by the Phil Dwyer Orchestra Featuring Mark Fewer, composed and arranged by Phil Dwyer is now available on the Alma Records label.

As usual, our jazz jam at Petra’s Arts Café was a great success, with kids and adults from the Workshop getting up to play tunes with faculty and musicians from the community.   It is truly magical to see people, many of whom just learned what a blues is that very morning, get up and play a few choruses with a band they haven’t met before.  Some of our more advanced students organized some surprise tunes and personnel combinations including a massive ten-saxophone jam on “The Chicken”.  Our genial host, Petra Tetrault, kept the lemonade flowing and made all the musicians and listeners feel right at home as always.

A really wonderful addition to the workshop this year was the Infinitus String Trio.  Infinitus is a professional group with an interest in playing jazz.  They signed on as students (some of the best students I have ever worked with!) but as we got to know them during the week it became apparent that we needed to get them involved with the faculty concerts.  Our bass faculty member, Rob Kohler, quickly wrote some arrangements for his noon-hour show on July 8 and the string trio was featured with various combinations of saxophone, guitar and rhythm section.   Look out for the Infinitus Trio.  These guys can play anything  with gorgeous sound and great time and I’m definitely planning to collaborate with them in the near future.   Here’s a candid shot of the Infinitus String trio (John Littlejohn, Alex and Anthony Cheung) with faculty members Rob Kohler (bass), Len Aruliah (sax), Stan Taylor (drums) and on of our TAs, Chris Peterson (guitar).

The next day brought more musical delights in the form of a visit from my good friend, Alan Matheson.  Alan has been a guest artist and teacher at the Workshop and Festival before, but it has been a couple of years since the last time.  As always, Alan brought in a fantastic book of original tunes and standards all cunningly arranged for cornet, alto, trombone and rhythm section.  The faculty band had a great time playing these arrangements and listening to Al’s beautiful cornet and flugelhorn playing.  Alan is a great musician and a true gentleman in every sense of the word.

Friday night featured theLen Aruliah Quartet in concert at All Saints Anglican Church with Stan Taylor on drums, Rob Kohler on bass and yours truly on guitar.  Len is a wonderful saxophonist who lived in Vancouver for a while in the 1980s and early 1990s, but has been based in London for a long while now.  We presented two sets of Len’s original music, plus a few of my tunes and one each from the books of Kenny Wheeler and Dave Holland.  I had a great time playing this show and the audience gave us a standing ovation. The church turned out to be a great venue for listening and playing and we’ll surely be presenting more shows there in the future. 

Saturday afternoon was our grand finale concert.  This is the moment for student combos  to present the material they work on during the week at a big outdoor show and picnic at the Delta Hospital grounds.  Residents from long-term care centre are brought out in their wheelchairs and get to groove along with all the parents and friends and folks from the community.  The students played wonderfully as always.  The highlight for me had to be our youngest combo of 12- and 13-year old kids playing a latin version of Justin Bieber’s “Baby” in a set with Mr. PC, Sonny Moon for Two, and C Jam Blues.  I overheard a very elderly lady in a wheelchair say “I like that Baby song! Why don’t they play that again?”. 

Here’s a shot of our advanced students playing at Diefenbaker Park in Tsawwassen.

After seven years of doing this, one of the most satisfying things for me is seeing the audience for jazz grow in this little suburban community and building a family of ‘jazz people’.  I have been doing this long enough now that most people think I live in Ladner rather than East Van and indeed, in many ways I feel like a Ladner native.  Folks like Willie Germann (our honourary patron saint), Roland Selby, Don Burkett, Bob Miller, Betty Tanney and so many others come back as students and audience members year after year and make me and our teachers and musicians feel so welcome.  We have watched kids who started with us as 7^th graders go on and graduate from high school.  Some go on to study music in college and some don’t, but all are lifelong jazz fans.  The adult students really look forward to taking a week off work to make music.  Many of our faculty members come back year after year and musical relationships grow and deepen.  At the end of each year I feel so exhausted from the organizing, promoting, recruiting, playing and teaching that I often wonder aloud whether there will be another year.  In the end it is this community of music lovers that keeps making it happen.  Many thanks to all the students, faculty, and audience members who support this event!

In 1955 Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff produced a remarkable book which documented the “Golden Age” of the early days in Jazz up to the heyday of 52nd Street.  Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya! The Story of Jazz As Told By The Men Who Made It was (as the subtitle implies) completely constructed from the artists’ own words edited and sequenced to construct a fascinating narrative.

Back in 1955 Jazz was about to enter another “Golden Age” – one which Nat Hentoff was well-positioned to document in other ways as one of the proponents of Candid Records.  But things were not all rosy, there were disagreements between the traditionalists, the swingers and the beboppers about what jazz actually was (and who got to define it), economics and the advent of TV were wiping out the big bands like dinosaurs, Charlie Parker would be dead within the year and Rock n’ Roll was just around the corner.

Fast forward to 2010 and quietly over the last couple of decades, a new golden age has emerged.  The technology has changed but the approach is the same – let the musicians express themselves through interviews, take that raw material and use it to build a coherent narrative.  The resulting film Icons Among Us: Jazz in the Present Tense does not try to tell a historical story as Hear Me...  did. Rather it uses interviews with contemporary artists with some select mentors and commentators to provide a snapshot of the state of Jazz along with the dilemmas and challenges facing its practitioners and its supporting community. And perhaps not surprisingly, the contemporary issues have many similarities to the ones that the music has faced and dealt with in the past.  (And as an improvement over the book, you get to hear the music too!)

The film itself is a labour of love and it shows; it was produced as a four part/hour documentary for the US-based Documentary Channel. Constructed from over 75 hours of filmed interviews and performances, it was then further edited down into this 90 minute theatrical release.  Before seeing the film, I asked co-director Lars Larson whether it was a rejoinder to the Ken Burns series which was criticized in the jazz community for giving short shrift to the post-1960 development of the music.  He pointed out that they had started work on this film back in 2003 before Burns’ series was released and that the creative team saw the two documentaries as complementary – I suggested that Imagine The Sound could probably nestle comfortably on the shelf between them.

The original four broadcast episodes were The Quiet Revolution, 12 Notes in Real Time, In the Spirit of Family and Everything Everywhere.  Although the theatrical film is not thematically divided in the same way, it manages to touch on many of the recurring issues that are discussed and argued over in the jazz community.  These include:

• The New Standards: contemporary jazz artists are moving away from the great American songbook and looking for inspiration in more current rock, pop and hip hop sources.  Bill Frisell plays Dylan’s Masters of War; Tineke Postma, Ernst Glerum and Han Bennink use the music of Villa-Lobos as a departure, Bugge Wesseltoft uses Norwegian traditional music and European art music, The Bad Plus use rock and pop tunes, Vijay Iyer plays M.I.A. hip hop tunes.
• The relevance of jazz to contemporary issues and its role in the wider culture: Paul de Barros points out that at one time jazz was tied to the civil rights movement and the music had a political component – the dilemma being ” how do you make jazz relevant in the wider society today“.  He points out that for all his controversy, Wynton Marsalis has made a convincing social argument for supporting and spreading the music.
• Definitions of Jazz which includes Jazz is an African-American music versus Jazz is a World Music: Robert Glasper looks to Europe and says that that music doesn’t have soul, that’s not jazz…  Courtney Pine says that he plays jazz with his soul and the essence of his UK and Caribbean experiences.  Bill Frisell says, “I just don’t like it when the name of something has the effect of excluding something. If you say it’s one thing then it can’t be something else and that doesn’t work for me. The words are always smaller than what it is you’re trying to describe. And for me jazz is infinite.“  (Personally I like the definition that Bill Shoemaker gave me a few years ago: “Jazz is whatever you say it is…“)

The importance of community; craft versus innovation; the role of jazz education – these are all issues that are widely discussed in jazz forums and roundtables, it’s good to see them presented in a coherent way onscreen.  And the film-makers are to be commended for not providing pat resolutions, there is a thought-provoking give and take where contrasting viewpoints are given equal weight.

At the screening on Saturday at the Vancity Theatre, the Q&A session provided a number of other interesting questions for B Dahlia, one of the producers, who was in attendance:

• Why weren’t there more women represented in the film?
• Why was there no jazz from Asia [or Africa]?
• Why was there no “hard-edged” jazz?  (The questioner declined to give an example but it would be easy to substitute Ken Vandermark, Mats Gustafsson or John Zorn here.)
• How do you reach out to new listeners?

Apparently a companion book is underway that can fill in some of the gaps and present the discussion and music to an even wider audience.

The film closes with a touching scene in which Donald Harrison is doing construction work on his New Orleans home post-Katrina.  He picks up a a cement pail and accompanies himself in a field holler – putting into reality Terence Blanchard‘s lesson “The music is not about you, it’s about the music; make it about the moment.”

On the cusp of the Vancouver International Jazz Festival’s 25th Anniversary,  it was heartening to realize that most of the artists in the film have performed at the festival (in fact, some were filmed at the festival) and that the festival is addressing many of these questions and in an ongoing way in the real world.

Vocals have always been a large part of my performance practice and I have been working on developing even more techniques in vocal improvisation. Every Saturday at 10am, I am now practicing with the Voxy Choir, directed by Kate Hammett-Vaughn and Carol Sawyer. This ensemble offers workshops every week to stretch our performance preconceptions by introducing us to teachers outside of the mainstream of music. Read more…

via VIX Sound+Light+Motion – Integrated Media:the nexus of art and technology.

Pat Metheny-ORCHESTRION PROJECT – VIX Sound+Light+Motion.