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Al Neil Trio / Retrospective 1965 - 1968
CD Release
March 23, 2002
by Jamie Reid
Black Swan Records at 3206 West Broadway was the
scene on March 23, 2002 of a launch of the new double CD by the
Al Neil Trio, featuring music first recorded in the 1960s (Retrospective
Al Neil Trio: 1965-1968).
Among the attendees: local jazz piano master Paul Plimley, poets
Renee Rodin and Sharon Thesen, Brian Nation from vancouverjazz.com
and North Vancouver artist, Fred Douglas. The CDs themselves, and
the liner notes by trio members Gregg Simpson and Rick Anstey, constitute
a record in musical and documentary form of the consciousness and
sensibility of the Vancouver art community in the turbulent times
and disturbed social situation of the mid-sixties.
The Sound Gallery on 4th Avenue and the Motion Studio on Seymour
Street where some of these musical investigations were performed
in the 1960s were the staging places for some of the most creative
of Vancouver avant garde artists at that time. The album notes offer
renewed public recognition to the film work of Sam Perry, the musical
composition of Jerry Walker and the work of the Helen Goodwin dance
ensemble, all of whom collaborated in various productions with the
Al Neil Trio, and all of whom produced significant if unrecognized
art during the middle sixties.
It was very important to Vancouver artists in those days that we
should have our own self-made art, influenced as it was bound to
be by different international trends of the period. In my opinion,
these two CDs are a sample of the finest and the most original art
of this or any other period in the history of the Vancouver art
community.
Gregg Simpson, Al Neil, Rick Anstey
Black Swan Records, Vancouver March 23, 2002
Photo: Brian Nation |
Even in the midst of the rock and roll hype machine of the middle
60s, the Al Neil trio enjoyed a strong local following. And the
music was by no means "easy listening." Built on Al Neil's
roots in bebop with the addition of a Dadaist mentality which tore
up jazz conventions as much as all other musical conventions, the
Al Neil Trio created a challenging and demanding music with a sharp
critical edge, filled with wit and verve.The attraction and excitement
of the music, its immediacy and relevance was such that people who
had never heard this kind of music previously, attending performances
at the Motion Gallery and at the old Vancouver Art Gallery west
of Burrard on Georgia Street, sat willingly and without complaint
on the floor through three hours of intense performance, rivetted,
absorbing every second. Five-hundred people once attended a performance
of the Trio at the Vancouver Art Gallery, surely a near record for
any avant garde performance in the city. All the musicians on this
album are multi-talented: musicians, writers and visual artists.
In my own opinion, these musical investigations represent some
of the highest levels ever reached in any genre of Vancouver art
in terms of their complexity, originality, commitment and intensity.
The kind of musical investigations heard in these albums may sound
commonplace today, but they were very far from commonplace in the
1960s. Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra and Albert Ayler were some of the earliest
proponents of this wide-ranging music, but the members of the Al
Neil Trio embarked independently upon their own investigations of
a similar kind with a distinctive local flavour and sensibility.
As Gregg Simpson, the trio's percussionist testifies in the (36
page!) album booklet : "I know, however, that Al hadn't yet
heard the work of a musician he superficially resembles, the tumultuous
New York pianist, Cecil Taylor, whose music was just beginning to
be known in 1965. But Al at this time had come up with his own lyrical,
yet cataclysmic style quite independently."
The extensive and informative album notes for the CDs include illuminating
reminiscences and descriptions by trio members Gregg Simpson and
Rick Anstey (who acted as the producer of the album). The notes
outline in ample and often amusing detail the way the music and
the surrounding rudimentary technological elements were assembled.
The album notes also contain reviews and notices from the music
critics of the Vancouver mainstream press at the time of the actual
performances, photographs (by Michael de Courcey) of the trio in
action, amusing copies of their early publicity, reproductions of
visual art works by all three trio members and other goodies. Taken
together, all these elements come together to provide a very welcome
retrospective evocation of the creative atmosphere of the time,
very professionally and convincingly put together. This is decidedly
not mere memorabilia. It is a true record of the best avant garde
musical art of that time and place. An invaluable contribution to
the reintroduction of some of the most valuable moments in the history
of Vancouver art and music.
My warmest compliments and thanks to Gregg Simpson and to Rick
Anstey for putting this production together, it is so obviously
a labour of love. If you want to know where the heart and soul of
the art movement of the sixties in Vancouver was to be found, this
is one place to look for sure.
Buy this album!
While you are at it, you might also check out part of Gregg
Simpson's web site, which features a factual history of abstract
impressionism and other art schools in Vancouver during that period,
the only account of its kind that I have seen. Ardent post-modernists
beware!
Also of interest:
 Born
in Timmins, Ontario in 1941, Jamie Reid moved to Vancouver at the
age of twelve. He attended King Edward High School and the University
of British Columbia. While still in high school Jamie discovered
the writers of the beat generation and was introduced to modern
jazz. At UBC his love of poetry was encouraged and nurtured at the
undergraduate writers' workshops. As one of the original editors
of Tish magazine, founded in 1961, Reid helped establish
Vancouver as one of the main centres for poetry in Canada. In 1968,
his first book, The Man Whose Path Was on Fire, was published
by Talonbooks. That same year he began a long detour away from poetry
into politics. The detour ended in 1987, when he returned to the
west coast and to poetry.
Other works by Jamie Reid available online:
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