VIX Sound+Light+Motion

A new venue, a new collaboration and much excitement is planned for August 12th – 8:00pm – 10:00pm.

You are invited to join Paul Plimley, Tommy Babin, Phil Emerson, Victoria Gibson, T Crane and guests at the Auditorium of the Jules Verne School, located at 5445 Baillie Street (between Oak and Cambie off 41st Ave), Vancouver, BC.

COLLABORATIONS will usher in a series of projects directed by
…PAUL PLIMLEY with musicians TOMMY BABIN, VICTORIA GIBSON and PHIL EMERSON. Guests include Poet T Crane.

“An improvisational feast sure to stimulate on a molecular level!” posted T Crane in his facebook event invitation.

Other poets will also be appearing to interact with the real-time improvisation of the musical ensemble.

COLLABORATIONS is a part of L’ÉTHÉÂTRE, a summer festival that celebrates cultural multidisciplinary experience.

L’ÉTHÉÂTRE runs from the 5th of July until the 15th of August, featuring films, live performances and visual art produced by Visions Ouest Productions.

Tickets are available in advance or at the door. Check the official website – www.rendez-vousvancouver.com for more information.

Here are some photos of Paul, Tommy and Phil taken from their performance as part of the Olympic Cultural Events on Granville Island.

[Show as slideshow]

The piano trio is where my friend Paul Plimley really lives. Yes, I can interest him in electronics; and he does play guitar, vibes and percussion — but he really lives his most joyous moments with bass and drums.

The trio with Barry Guy, Paul Plimley and Lucas Niggli was one of my personal highlights from the 2010 Vancouver International Jazz Festival. They reached the highest levels of improvisation in ensemble performance where they meshed into a texture of beauty and complexity that shone with emotion.

Lucas Niggli is a Swiss drummer who plays with style and delicate strength. He stretches the boundaries of percussion while playing in the pocket for the band. This balancing act displays the greatness of a drummer; too much steady time keeping and the innovative spark fades, too much of stretching one’s own personal boundaries and the connection with the ensemble is lost.

The photos show the level of communication and emotion present in the Ironworks as each of these expert musicians wholeheartedly joined their considerable individual talents into a cohesive whole.

Barry Guy (below) is a bass player living in Switzerland, who plays with Lucas often. This evening of music allowed him to display many extended techniques and timbres. He played with intelligence, skill and unrepentant emotion. His composition, Fixed, Fragmented, Fluid; had been played as one of the festival opening works in a larger ensemble that included this trio. That was structured improv, but this was free and he was able to fly with his fingers and bow with authority.

There was a Canadian pianist who completed the trio named Paul Plimley. I must admit to being biased when I write about Paul, but I have seen him play in Vancouver many times, and grace the stage of the Ironworks with other trios. This was one of the best performances I have ever witnessed from the maestro. The combination of Barry Guy and Lucas Niggli challenged, supported, encouraged and battled with Paul in the most delightful way possible. There was always a spirit of fun and several times the joy crackled in the air like electricity.

I was a photographer that evening, soundless and motionless focusing on the light and motion as I was transported by the music.

[Show as slideshow]

There are other photos of a larger ensemble concert featuring these three musicians taken by Chris Cameron posted on the Coastal Jazz website here.

My first trip to NYC ever — so everyone — tell me

WHAT SHOULD I DO IN NYC?

I am making a list – unfortunately I am just going to miss some of the best events I have found. I am posting them anyway. I wish I had known about the gamelan performance!

I will also visit Providence, RI for a day or so at the end of August 30-31. I will miss the bonfires on Aug 29th.

————————————

Lincoln Centre Out-of-Doors Festival

Kronos Quartet with Gamelan Galak Tika; Friday 13 August 2010 at 6:00pm;Broadway Plaza; New York; August 13; 6:00: Gamelan Galak Tika: Kecak workshop and Belaganjur (marching gamelan)
Broadway Plaza; Fri August 13; 7:30; Kronos Quartet with Gamelan Galak Tika; Kenge Kenge; Damrosch Park Bandshell

Larry Harlow’s La Raza Latina, A Salsa Suite (New York Premiere) Conducted by Larry Harlow, starring Rubén Blades, with guest vocalist Adonis Puentes + Bobby Sanabria Big Band; Saturday, August 14 at 7:30; Damrosch Park Bandshell

‘In Other People’s Skins’ Interactive, Multimedia Exhibition to be Displayed at Cathedral of St. John the Divine – The exhibition is free and open to the public. It will be on view at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine through August 31, 2010. For more information, please visit www.stjohndivine.org.

Solo dance performances by international butoh artists. Dance by Mari Osani. Dates: 28 & 29 August; Time: 8 p.m.; Cost: $18 for adults; $15 for NYBK students, students with valid ID and seniors. + LECTURES/INTERVIEWS 24 August at 7:30 pm: Mari Osanai interview with Ximena Garnica. CAVE | 58 GRAND STREET, BROOKLYN, NEW YORK 11211 | 347.838.4677 | info@caveartspace.org |

Summer Stage

The Charlie Parker Jazz Festival :

McCOY TYNER, JASON MORAN AND THE BANDWAGON, THE JD ALLEN TRIO and REVIVE DA LIVE: CHARLIE PARKER REVISTED; Part of the NYC Revolutions series

Marcus Garvey Park, Manhattan
Saturday, August 28
3:00 – 7:00 p.m.

JIMMY SCOTT, VIJAY IYER, THE COOKERS and CATHERINE RUSSELL

Tompkins Square Park, Manhattan
Sunday, August 29
3:00 – 7:00 p.m.

HERE 145 Sixth Ave. (enter on Dominick Street one block south of Spring), NY, NY 10013 – check back

Meer Festival, Sunday afternoon from 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm for lakeside music at the Charles A. Dana Discovery Center in Central Park’s beautiful northern end. August 29: Cocomama (Cuban Salsa) + September 5: Sounds of Deliverance (Gospel)

Jazzmobile, a concert in a park every day in summer

MoMA is open late every Thursday in July and August, with live music presented in two sets, at 5:30 and 7:00 p.m., in the Sculpture Garden.
MoMA PS1′s historic Warm Up music series begins July 3 and will take place every Saturday through September 4, from 2:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.

Hudson River Park’s Pier 84 (44th Street), the perfect site for you to take in a sunset and the sounds of an eclectic mix of bands that perform everything from bluegrass and Americana to jazz, cumbia and funk. Concerts begin at 6pm. Get directions to Pier 84.

Other Dimensions in Music – Monday, September 6, 2010  at 8:00pm – All Ages with Daniel Carter-reeds, Roy Campbell-trumpet, William Parker-bass, Charles Down-drums and

Fay Victor -voice.  The Local 269 (map) 269 E. Houston @ Suffolk Street.

Harvestworks, 596 Broadway, Suite 602, (between Houston and Prince Streets in SoHo) New York, NY 10012

[Sep 11] KonicLab/Barcelona: Gesture Following with Max/MSP

The Official Guide to NYC

My last shift as Crew Chief for the Ironworks is this Saturday, July 3 — come down and see two great shows: The Brad Turner Quartet at 8pm and The Michael Zilber  Group at 11pm.

This time has been very busy for me and I have not been keeping up with my news posts. After the festival I will post photos, but as always, Chris Cameron documents the festival with precision and grace. His selected photos can be found on the Coastal Jazz website and the most current ones are here. This is the 25th anniversary of the festival and of Chris as the official photographer — his work has preserved “the decisive moment” (Henri Cartier-Bresson) of many festival performances. Cameron’s body of work is an enduring legacy that captures the emotions that resonate long after the vibrations in the air have stilled.

The highlights of the festival for me so far are: Fixed Fragmented Fluid, featuring a large ensemble under the direction of Barry Guy; Paul Plimley with Barry Guy and Lucas Niggli; The Mario Pavone Trio with Tony Malaby and Gerald Cleaver and the Unity Globe Orchestra.

I have heard and been inspired by many of these shows. I loved the energy of Hiromi and Stanley Clarke; John Scofield spoke to my blues heritage with his Piety Band; Mike Stern mellowed out and got ambient;  outstanding moments of great playing at each one of my Ironworks shifts will be discussed in future posts.

Today and Sunday the music is open to the public with free concerts at the Roundhouse Community Centre Complex. I don’t want to miss any more of the music. Later!

Guru Mandala -- Victoria Gibson

EMPAC — Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York.

The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media & Performing Arts Center

My application to attend the summer intensive workshop has been accepted. August will find me in New York at one of the most advanced media arts centres in the world learning sophisticated control technologies. This workshop is intensive, going from 10am-10pm for 7 days on campus in residency.

LIVE.MEDIA + PERFORMANCE.LAB

8/16 – 8/22

The workshop addresses emerging and professional art practitioners, scientists, researchers, and students from different backgrounds in performance and new media committed to sharing their interest in developing a deeper understanding of composing work focused on real time, interactive or time-based experiences and multidisciplinary collaborative processes (video, sound processing, projection design, lighting, choreography and directing).

This workshop will assist me in realizing my Immersive Environment Instrument (IEI) and possibly lead to collaborations with other media artists that attend. An opportunity that has come along at exactly the right time to help me create my vision requires some pre-production consideration.

A Macbook Pro looms in my future, but I will still try to program and control my sensor array with Ubuntu.

The Voxy Improvising Choir concert is tonight at 8 pm. Admission is by donation.

Works by Jay Habuyashi, Steve Bagnell and me will be performed. My piece is titled “Human Geometry”.

Kate Hammett-Vaughn, the choir co-organizer with Carol Sawyer, has posted the info on Facebook.

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=125675927458667

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.

Kate and I have known each other since I used to write reviews and the Women In Music column for Nite Moves magazine in the late 1980’s. More recently, I recorded, mastered and co-produced her CD, So Lucky To Be Me. Kate is a great vocal teacher and very well connected in the Vancouver and Canadian jazz community. This enables her to bring in a variety of talent to lead workshops with Voxy Choir such as her long time musical collaborator, Ron Samworth.

I only met Carol Sawyer recently, but she impresses me with her diversity in artistic practice that encompasses video, photography and other fine arts as well as her imaginative performance art.

Workshop leaders outside of music have included Jay Hirabayashi, best known for his work with Kokoro Dance and  a young man from the theatre, who I was introduced to as Paul. This Saturday, May 8th;  the workshop was at The Western Front with NY performance artist/composer Shelley Hirsch.

Shelley Hirsch was in Vancouver to perform on the Friday evening as part of the Voice Over Mind Festival. Some members of the Voxy Choir, including me, had also participated in part of the festival at the Chan Centre on Wednesday evening under the direction of DB Boyco and Christine Duncan. Shelley will be continuing to perform locally in Seattle, WA and Victoria, BC.

The mixed choir was drawn from Voxy and DB’s students, including members of the Roundhouse Senior’s choir. We sang an adaptation of Songbird, written by Vancouver performer/composer Takeo Yamashiro for the Songbird Oratorio, a homage to the plight of birds surviving the encroachment of urban development. This composition was followed by a conducted improvisation led by both choir directors. I sang in the low section, as most of the choir could only sing in the upper range and I have worked hard to expand my range in the low part of my voice.

(continue reading…)

Photo Credit: Jimmy Katz

The evening of May 1st I experienced the Orchestrion Project, conceived and directed by Pat Metheny at The Centre for the Performing Arts in Vancouver. I obeyed the request not to take photos or make recordings, so I will offer the readily available ubiquitous You Tube examples and links to official sites where some images are available. Pat Metheny has provided some photos by Jimmy Katz on his site (left). The first part of this post is a comment on the memorable guitar collection and the second part on the automated Orchestrion. (continue reading…)

Now I have chosen to go with Photoshelter to host some of  my galleries, I will be uploading more events that I have photographed. Now I have completed the Canadian League of Composers event that occurred at the Western Front back in January. See my progress on my Photoshelter  homepage here.

Soon I will have other galleries hosted. I realized after I started this account that I could easily host this level of  photo storage and slideshow view on my own site. So here is a slide show of the Canadian Composers I photographed in January. If you are pictured and you would like a copy, please contact me. You are welcome to copy the image off the site but please credit me if you use it professionally. Most of these photos are untouched and would benefit from an application of graphic design skills. I am willing to trade or accept an honourarium for the work.

[Show as slideshow]

1 2 ►

I attended several events during the Vancouver 2010 Cultrual Olympiad and my friend Paul played with Phil Emerson and Tommy Babin in the trio, “String Stories”. The light was very tricky and I am still getting used to my new 50mm 1.8 lens. My Nikon D50 did the best it could in my hands and this is the result. I learned a lot from taking these photos, but they still preserve some great moments.

[Show as slideshow]

One of the other really cool shows was Umalali, a group I had connected with at the 2009 Folk Music Festival. I have yet to obtain permission to post images from this concert, but here are the pictorial  examples of Olympic Security – Belize style.

[Show as slideshow]

Have to get back to music now.

My photography has moved to the level where I am being paid for photos and several of my friends are interested in the documentation of their concerts and events. It is a lot of work to process RAW photos and develop them with a degree of individual care that they deserve if they are not going to be used. They should also be custom formatted for print or web publishing and there are a number of other considerations. Now I take a lot of photos, processing was becoming too time consuming. I had to find out what other photographers were doing to manage this situation.

Welcome to Photoshelter, a very cool photo host that is as professional as you want it to be. This is a custom search box to check if you  are listed in a photo on the site. Here is my homepage – VIX.

Right now, I only have one gallery of Viviane Houle, Stefan Smulovitz and Dider Petit playing as a trio at the Light Gallery on Monday. I have posted a couple of the photos with their permission. In the top photo Didier was acting tired and critiquing Stefan’s laptop offerings (below). It was all in good fun and the concert was amusing.

Their intent was humorous, right from the start, as the first piece was an accompaniment to the performed text of the clause in the artist’s contract that restricts their right to criticize the Olympics, the sponsors or anything else about the “Big O”. The rendition was quite sardonic, but did not constitute a violation, as they were just reading the contract. There are some rumours that the Olympics have copyrighted our year, so that it is an infringement to use Vancouver 2010 in this sentence. I guess this is permitted use because I am talking about this concert that was held as part of the Cultural Olympiad.

I have to confess I did not watch the hockey game, but I love the Cultural Olympiad. There is more, yes, much more. HIVE3, one of my favourite theatre festivals is part of the fun and John Kosrud strikes again with the Ice Age March 20th in North Van. I have been busy this weekend with concerts by Paul Plimley and a new music group from Taiwan at Performance Works on Granville Island. I am getting into the action while I can because with the Arts cuts after the Olympics leave town, it is going to be a lot quieter than usual in Vancouver.