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.