Cyber Space Jam

Around the turn of the century, the internet was a very exciting place to be. For musicians, the place to be was mp3.com. An amazing thing sprang from that site. There was a lot of networking going on with fellow independant musicians and at some point we started jamming with each other. Commonly, it would involve sending mp3s back and forth of each other's music, adding parts, glueing them together to make finished productions. My first cyber collaboration was with Tapani Suomela, a tuba player in Finland. Ironically, through the internet I also connected with musicians to collaborate with right here in my hometown of Calgary: Darren Morley, Judee Plourdee and Bob Doble. Within a short time I had jammed with dozens of people around the world, including Mathias Claus in Germany, Minoru and Cari (Shigero Toonoka) in Japan, Bill Farrish and "Nool" in New York and this one with a group in Los Angeles led by Al Daniels:


One of my favourite mp3.com collaborations was with Cari in Japan. We really "resonated" with each other musically. I had recorded a rather spacey little fanfare which I overlaid and looped, creating these spacey echoes that harmonized with themselves in a kind of canon. I sent this to Cari and he very sensitively added his guitar chord progressions, slightly altered each time the loop repeated bringing out a wonderful new dimension and creating a wonderful feeling of harmonic movement. I loved what he did:
We continued to collaborate, sharing music files back and forth through the internet. In this collaboration he first sent me a track of his playing an Oud (an Arabic instrument). I responded with a lot of improvised phrases on my flugel which he arranged and produced back in his studio in Japan to come up with this very spacey peace piece:

music in the trenches

In spite of a lot of time spent digging into learning the military marches, marching militarily and machinating everything militaire, I did find some time for a bit of jazz, even Fijal Space Jazz in fact. I was invited by my superiors to form a lunch time jamm band and here we play one of my more spaced out jazz doodles called "Augmental". Videoed here are Chief Warrant Officer Don Cox on bass, Warrant Officer Floyd Hall on piano, Private Phil Lucy on alto sax, and Private me on military trumpet (with Private Jim Edwards checking out my Fijal Space Jazz chart):

CWO Cox and WO Hall invited me on one of their jazz gigs too. I'll always remember blowing some cool space jazz on "Old Man River", on a little stage in a park in nearby Alliston, Ontario on a beautiful summer evening. But I digress; although these years were somewhat lean in terms of time spent space jazzing, I did manage a little doodling for strange combinations of instruments playing my original compositions. One group consisted of a bass clarinet, flute, trumpet and two french horns complete with a jazz rhythm section (drums, bass and guitar). Here's a version I made overdubbing my trumpet and flugelhorn:


In 1992 I was posted to the PPCLI band in Calgary. As a stark contrast to the structures of musical operations in the band, I joined a local group of fearless musical explorers who called themselves the Living Hell band (Danny Graham, Lynn Hauer and Korey Krissa). It was a great release for me and an opportunity to start playing with free improvisation again. As well, I started playing with my electric guitar pedals: a chorus and a delay pedal, on my trumpet. Improvisatory space jazz in the trenches; non-stop no rules, just listening and responding; Swimming through a sea of sounds, fishing the depths for the lost chord.
After a few years of experimenting, we took a gig at the local jazz club called "Chaos Café" for a CKUA benefit. We bravely assaulted the audiences ears with our own special brand of the musical chaos theory and courageously played on in spite of varying responses on faces from horror to humour.

Continuing my play with FX pedals, I found this cool sound with a looped and echoed flutter effect on my horn. Called this one: "It Came From Outer Space".

Space Jazz

I found another musician who was keen to explore the kind of improvisation I was experimenting with. A kind of mood writing for musicians. The idea was to simply respond to each other. Yes, we might resort to patterns, chord progressions, or "licks" that were familiar and in our "vocabulary", but we would attempt to fall on them spontaneously without a preplanned form.

His name is Ed Patterson, an established "Roots" guitarist in Edmonton. He got us a gig at a nightclub called "The Point" and we actually did this mood playing thing live:


All that time spent out in space, it was inevitable that we would gravitate back to a tune. We co-wrote the tune "And Life Goes On", which got airplay on CKUA. As well, I was invited to talk about our special brand of space jazz in a feature interview on CKUA's "Arts Alberta" program.



They were exciting times. Ed and I were even invited to play at the famous Edmonton jazz club, "The Yardbird Suite", but it came too late for me, as I took a full time gig with the Canadian Forces Band Branch and left Edmonton. But there was one last jam and it was at the Yardbird Suite to make a demo tape AND it was with Bill Emes, Jim Pinchin, Don Bradshaw and Owen Howard and they joined me in the the good, generous, creative spirit that I remember Edmonton musicians shared when I was there.

Tune writing

After much noodling, in space and over jazz standards, I ventured into doodling a jazz tune. Amazingly, my teacher and Jazz Dad, Rick Garn, at Grant MacEwan College in Edmonton, thought it was a Woody Shaw tune. I'm often pretty gullible, so I don't really know if he was just teasing me, trying to boost my confidence, or was actually telling the truth. In any case, we ended up recording it together with some of my fellow students at the college. Rick played his alto sax. It is a precious memory. Here is a recent remake of that tune: I continued doodling with the jazz tune thing and came up with a somewhat spaced out composition that had a 14 bar form and a few unstandard chord changes. This tune I managed to record with Andrew Glover on keyboard, Gregg Dunstan on bass, and Tom Foster on drums. I played my flugelhorn, which quickly became my favourite horn. I love the mellow spacey sound.
Having learned a few music business tricks from Tommy Banks in his Music business class at Grant MacEwan, I shopped my tune around and managed to win a University radio station contest, get a few reviews written in local newspapers and get some airplay. John Beaudin at CKXM was the first to play my tunes on his new age/space jazz program. I called the prize winning tune "Whitemud", after the little creek that I lived by where I used to walk.
Jamie Philp played bass and all the spacey background sounds on this one, and helped record and produce it as part of the prize I won for the CJSR real to reel contest. I played my flugel and classical guitar. I call it Blue as the Sky.

Doodlers and Noodlers

"Artists" doodle. Musicians noodle. But can a musician be an artist?

A composer of music usually writes down his creations, so again, he becomes a doodler, abstracted from his medium of sound. I studied classical guitar for some years, but abandoned it for jazz trumpet and flugelhorn, because I wanted to explore more of a creative process with my instrument.

I'm grateful for the time I've spent basking in the inspiration of Ponce, but sometimes I think the much glorified act of "interpreting" a composer's music by musicians is no more creative than a house, or sign painter, worse, painting by numbers. There is a lot of room for high craft, but truly creating something new musically, not substantially. For me, it makes a wonderful solution to explore the world of music through improvisation. To create music spontaneously, viscerally connected to the instrument being "played", as intimate and naked as my breath. Breathing my soul into every moment. If I can only bring a Zen like inspired mindfulness to every moment of music, calling a more profound muse from the depths to guide each musical nuance. I've read of Zen monks practicing their meditation with brush in hand, the gestures of every brushstroke an expression of their internal state; true mindfulness indicated by the purity of forms drawn by their hands, on the paper before them.

Yah right! Sounds great, but in the end we want a picture of "something", and a song needs a melody, which necessarily, at some level, is contrived. The compositional contrivance I used in this little improvisational exploration employed a "pelog" scale interpreted from Balinese gamelon music. Also, I over-dubbed my trumpet 3 more times over the original improvisation, to provide even more opportunities to create sounds that hinted at harmonic structure, though I don't really call this a tune.

Last Post for Rememberance Day

I joined the military as a musician in November 1983 and at some point, that I no longer remember, I started playing "Last Post" for Rememberance Day ceremonies. I remember at first, needing a tiny photocopy of the music for Last Post taped on to my trumpet lyre (a small attachment for holding music while marching). Now, the music is tattooed on to my memory, and in no small way, a precious part of my identity as a musician. The performance of Last Post has certainly provided some of my most profoundly memorable musical experiences with the military.

This year's performances have been particularly profound. I fell on the opportunity to play Last Post for the Nicola Goddard memorial concert on Nov. 7, which was organized by Jean-Louis Bleau, involving a large combined choir and the U of C orchestra performing at St. Mary's Cathedral a composition by Welsh composer, Karl Jenkins, called "The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace". By the time that it came time for me to play Last Post, in the deafening silence provided by the composition at that moment, in that cavernous cathedral, I was dizzy from hyperventillating in my brave attempt to breathe slowly and deeply to remain calm and prepared. I played it out loud and clear and with all the air that my lungs could muster.

On November 10th, I was given the honour, for my second time, to play Last Post for a Spanish immersion elementary school in Canyon Meadows. This time the choir consisted of children singing Rememberance Day songs in Spanish and English. It was another emotional event in a completely different way.

Finally, on November 11th at the 11th hour, it was my honour to perform Last Post at the Museum of the Regiments, standing at attention on the dias in front of 12,000 participants. Simple dutiful trumpet calls packed with powerful emotion. It has been a great honour to "serve" musically in this way.