chris wong in sync
ON A PLEASANT SUMMER EVENING, I'm drinking home-brewed beer and chatting about the allure of Brazilian music with Ray Piper. It's a topic he knows well. Piper has travelled to Brazil eight times to soak up the sounds. He picks up a guitar and starts strumming a samba. I make a request: Luiz Bonfa's "Manha de Carnaval," from the soundtrack to the classic 1959 film, Black Orpheus. Piper plays a snippet of the enduring melody with an intuitively authentic delivery. Clearly, he's learned a lot about his music of choice.
I also have a soft spot for Brazilian sounds. While some dismiss the music for being too pop-oriented, I appreciate the genre's exhilarating rhythms and interesting harmonic approach. As a guitarist/composer, Piper can relate to the latter aspect. "The harmony never goes where you expect it to," he says. "There's something really special about how they put the chords together."
Piper's fascination with music from Brazil began in the '60s, at the height of the bossa nova craze, when he was a teenager in Melbourne, Australia. But Piper's first musical pilgrimage wasn't to South America; he went to Los Angeles to study with the great jazz guitarist Joe Pass. After L.A., Piper ended up in Vancouver, where he enrolled in the Vancouver Community College jazz program.
His classmates included pianist Michael Creber, bassist Chris Nelson, drummer Phil Belanger and saxophonist Graham Ord. These players, and others, became part of Piper's group dedicated to Brazilian music: Fantazéa. They encouraged Piper to document Fantazea's music.
He worked as a house painter to raise funds for a CD, which took two years to record. Aside from money, one reason it took so long was the "nightmare" of getting the in-demand musicians together. Piper's VCC buddies, Celso Machado, Campbell Ryga, John Reischman, Rene Worst and Jennifer Scott all contributed to the album released in June.
The wait was worth~it. The collection of tunes, composed entirely by Piper except for one (by Creber), exude warmth and passion for the Brazilian styles that inform Fantazéa. The songs involve a diversity of these styles, ranging from samba and bossa nova to choro and baiao. What's distinctive about the music is how Piper interprets the styles from a Jazz musician's perspective. His compositions provide rich harmonic space for strong improvisers like Ryga and Creber. They also lend themselves to infectious rhythms, well-maintained on the disc by Machado and Belanger.
Piper wrote many of the songs while travelling throughout Brazil, where the 48-year-old has studied with important musicians like guitarist Marco Pereira. Going right to the source of the music has been crucial to Piper's conception. "To watch 300 guys marching down the street playing drums (during Carnival) - the power of it is just phenomenal," he says. Piper and Fantazéa succeed in gently capturing the essence of that power on their worthy debut release.
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