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Tens of millions of people around the world love Céline Dion. Many millions more can't stand her. Why? Carl Wilson, by no means a Céline fan at the start of his quest, searches for the answer on a year-long 'Dionyssee.' As Wilson strives to understand Céline's global popularity, he faces the question of what drives personal taste - and whether it's possible to change it.

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Live Notes in the Rearview: Tagaq, Conrad, McPhee, Jandek, Guelph Jazz

I've had various monkeys on my back this week so my ambitions to fire off a long sequence of live reviews for you have been thwarted, but here's the capsule version, in reverse chronological order: Tanya Tagaq with Kinnie Starr; Tony Conrad; AIMT with Joe McPhee; Jandek; and the Guelph Jazz Fest. (Click on each name to read the reviews.) Over the next few days, I'll be blogging live from the CopyCamp conference on artists and intellectual property, and next week reporting from Pop Montreal, so we'll try to make up a bit for lost time. Tomorrow, because their website is a bit of a headache to navigate, I'll also try to steal a few moments to tell you my picks-to-catch in Toronto's first-ever Nuit Blanche overnight art orgy, which takes place Saturday night/Sunday morning. (Meanwhile there are good features on the subject in Eye and Now.) [...]

Tanya Tagaq and Kinnie Starr, Lula Lounge, Monday, Sept. 25: She's very personable on stage, but I couldn't really abide Vancouver's Kinnie Starr's hippie-hop -- it's better than her faux-blues-folk, but the beats are mostly weak and the slam-poetry diction very hard to bear, in an accent that would give reams of material to critics of modern minstrelsy. Not that she fronts on the content, which is pure hemp-seed-wise-grandmother-look-at-the-trees west coast whatevs. But none of that mattered when Tanya Tagaq Gillis took the stage and began singing in three separate voices (one guttural, one breathy, one high and piercing) simultaneously, demonstrating her throat-singing techniques a capella before being joined by the jungle-informed beats of laptop-and-mixer-wielding partner DJ Michael Red (whom she playfully called her substitute for the second vocalist that would normally be involved in the traditional, social form of Inuk throatsinging, which she described as "a game of fuck-up"). It was a bravura performance, with Tagaq in a slinky dress and dramatic fur stole, dancing and exploring the space of the stage even as she explored all the levels of her vocal possibilities, mainly the sensual ones. And even Starr's guest spots as a second vocalist didn't detract from the trance. (Though I could have stood with a little less reverb, which made Tagaq's tone sound more "trance" in the generic world-music sense than necessary.) After a standing ovation, Tagaq explained that she would have to cut the encore fairly short because she was dying for a cigarette - as a still-unreformed puffer myself, I was completely flabbergasted that she can do all that with her lungs as a smoker. Just imagine if she quit!

And on the subject of trances, I've seldom been drawn as deeply into one by live music as I was at Tony Conrad's performance at the Music Gallery on Saturday, Sept. 23. He and Toronto cellist Anne Bourne were separated from the audience by a long white sheet hung from the ceiling, and backlit so that you saw them in silhouette, Conrad whirling and jiving around with his violin with the spryness of a man half his age, Bourne mostly stationary -- which was apt, since she mostly played a grounding drone while Conrad moved through a panoply of rich harmonic variations. It's the kind of show that doesn't lend itself easily to description, mainly cultivating a kind of full-body buzz of altered awareness. By the end I felt spent, but cleansed - I left thinking that if there were a weekly service that consisted only of this rite, I'd join that congregation. File under "yoga for people too lazy to do it."

The previous night at Arraymusic was the "company night"-formatted middle evening of AIMT's Interface series with Joe McPhee. The "company" included Michael Snow on piano, accordionist Tiina Kiik, trombonist Scott Thompson, drummer Jesse Stewart, bass reeds and toys from Peter Lutek, and guitarist Ken Aldcroft, who called on members of the ensemble to form smaller units (duos, trios, quartets), with McPhee getting worked the hardest, playing at least half the numbers. Highlights included the McPhee-Stewart duet, which somehow became a fully realized gospel-inflected composition that I'd be happy to have on record. (Did anyone see their duo show in Waterloo? Feel free to pitch in with a description.) The brass duet between McPhee on pocket trumpet and Thompson on trombone was equally heavenly. But overall it was just great to watch McPhee interact with this familar set of local players, and vice-versa, to hear them all stepping up their games in excitement over what he brought to the improvisations. This is the genius of the Interface series, that it forces Toronto musicians to live up to a set of standards that the cooperatively-minded local scene might not demand - playing with someone like McPhee, who has no tentativeness to his contributions, who thinks compositionally in every improv about what the underlying thread of the piece in progress might be and how its form and content might be developed for both emotional and cerebral cohesion, is the kind of experience I wish these musicians - and of course Toronto audiences - could have more often. Come back soon, Joe.

Next in this backwards travelogue through concertland, the Jandek concert the previous weekend. The space, the Zero Gravity Circus's headquarters Centre of Gravity, was magic - clearly promoter Gary Topp has been keeping this one in his back pocket for a special occasion. There were trapeze ropes overhead, gant colourful balls propped up in the corner of the stage. And on the platform, the representative from Corwood Industries himself, with double decks of Korg synthesizers set to a Lionel Richie-reminiscent strings setting, and local musicians Nick Fraser, drums, Rob Clutton, bass, and Nilan Perrera, guitar. I'm not sure if this was the first Jandek jazz set in history, but jazz-improv it certainly was.

Reportedly, the man was a bit taken aback by the sounds of the Korg when he got it going - he had intended to have them sound more like a church organ, but the setting didn't work. So that explains a little of the "smooth" sound that put off some audience members (perhaps a quarter of them walked out in the second half of the 90-minute set), although the heat and stuffiness of the room was another cause. It certainly wasn't the squalling, discordant kind of music most people associate with the Jandek name, as he played basically the same little figures - mainly just ascending and descending bits of C-major scales - over and over, so it was left to the musicians to give it variety and shape (especially Clutton, whose constant flexibility and versatility was truly put to the test). He opened with a kind of overture and finished with another instrumental, which served as a sort of coda, both weirdly stately and formal. But the lyrics and their passionate delivery went a long way to make up for it: He delivered a long interconnected story that centred on split personality, internal disturbance (many references to "the sick bed") and the city (it was all written in Toronto over the previous few days). While it was in the mode of the recent remarkable live recording The Cell, it even went beyond that - it was by far the most meta-Jandek music I've ever heard from Corwood, dramatizing the struggle for control and artistic decision between one persona and another: "Was he really me?/ We didn't want the world to know we were two/ It was our secret." And later: "I decided to make him do what I wanted/ I grew tired of the years of regret... The moment had simply arrived/ Bursting through all the blockades/ The whoosh of a torrent... I took responsibility/ He was mine..." (transcription courtesy of Seth Tisue). That last part, whether or not related to the "sickbed," certainly seems like some kind of account of the decision to step partway out from behind the mask. I was hanging on every word.

No, it wasn't all good music - though some of it was, thanks to the band's sensitivity and talent - but it was unexpectedly powerful writing. And you know, what the hell? This is Jandek music. The idea of expecting it to be "good," on whatever arbitrarily predetermined set of terms, seems crazily forgetful of all that's gone before (not to mention an annoyingly inappropriate level of consumerism). Isn't hearing a slightly new-agey Jandek improv-jazz suite actually more odd and striking than it would be just to hear the splattered guitar stuff and moaning, available on several dozen records? There decidedly is a deliberate and artful approach going on. While there may be some blind spots, there's also an awareness and manipulative intelligence I think no one would have been able to diagnose before these live occasions began to take place. He didn't look very healthy - sunken eyes, stick-thin - but there was no shortage of energy and vitality, so it's hard to add much to the churn of rumour and speculation on that, though the lyrics felt more metaphoric than literal on that level. The sickbed was more of a kafkaesque coinage to me.

To my startlement, I was granted a backstage audience with the man from Corwood, for a brief period after the show, with a few other locals. There was an implicit contract not to divulge anything (and in that spirit I didn't ask anything very probing), but I will say that he was above all a surprisingly nice guy, very sociable, alert and engaging. Oh, and he had very positive things to say about Toronto, having walked around the city a lot over the preceding few days. Getting to shake his hand was kind of a mindblowing thing - the kind of moment one never expects to happen in one's life, and then does, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

And finally, so much after the fact that it's become difficult to recall, there was the Guelph Jazz Festival earlier in the month. I only attended one evening and the daytime performances on the Saturday, but heard plenty of amazing music. The Bill Dixon/Joelle Leandre show was one of the most mixed performances I've heard in ages: Dixon barely seemed present, playing a series of sustained tones, with I think some electronic processing; his performance was monochromatic and unremarkable. As a friend said afterwards, it wasn't utterly unlike the Sainkho Namytchylak performance that caused an ill-advised intervention by organizers at Guelph in 2004. Obviously, given the ensuing controversy, they weren't about to do that again, though it also seems to me that by dint of status, they'd never have done the same to Dixon, which only makes that earlier incident seem more reprehensible. In any case, it didn't much matter this evening, because French contrabass player Leandre took full advantage of the space and filled it in with a virtuosic bass improvisation that more than made up for Dixon -- so mobile, so various, so commanding. I've been a fan for a while, but I walked away from it convinced that she's in the very top tier of improvisers in the world.

Vancouver's Hard Rubber Orchestra was neither here nor there for me - a crowd-pleasing postmodern variation on big-band music with some okay compositions and a few fine soloists, but no longer the group it was in the early 1990s, when it featured the cream of the west-coast Canadian scene. No matter, though, because it was followed by Rob Mazurek's Sao Paulo Underground, which puts the Chicago cornet-and-electronics veteran together with some extraordinary young musicians from Brazil. Though I like his sound, I often find Mazurek's post-electric-Miles stylings repetitive and predictable in their gestural language, but the addition of the Brazilian drumming and digital drama elevated him to a new level, his usual ambient atmospherics gaining in tension by being pulled and pushed around by propulsive percussion and ferocity - I could have listened to them for twice as long. I picked up the group's recent disc, which is if anything better than the live show, one of my favourite instrumental albums of the year so far. (I like what Mazurek has to say about it in this interview).

The next day, I rose unaccustomedly early to catch the trio of Paul Plimley, Hamid Drake and bassist Tommy Babin. Wow, was I glad I did. I'm not normally a huge fan of Plimley's classically languid piano style, but this set was a textbook example of great improv, all three players listening and supporting and taking off on one another's ideas with gusto, pushing each other to height after height. That's expected from Drake - is there a more consistently compelling improvising drummer in the world today? - but I imagine even the musicians themselves were surprised at what they achieved in this trio. If Plimley's smart he'll get this group into the studio. Then, on the afternoon double-bill, came a chamber-style set by Miya Masaoka, Larry Ochs and Peggy Lee, which was pretty at the time but kind of hard to recall in detail now, twinned with a very rollicking, festive set by the FAB Trio (Joe Fonda, Billy Bang & Barry Altschul). Violinist Bang, who took centrestage much of the time, grandstanded the way a musician who's earned it can, playing to the crowd a little like a rock shredder. He's a longtime personal favourite of mine among the 1970s generation of post-free-jazz players, and this was my first time seeing him in person, so I was happy to indulge him. Then I headed back to the big city, sad to miss the music to come - notably the Mark Feldman and Sylvie Courvoisier set the next morning, which I'm told was exquisite, as well as the Leandre-Drake duo Sunday afternoon, which must have been a burner. But well satisfied. (For a review of the Saturday-night mainstage sets by Steve Coleman's Five Elements and Gyorgy Szabados & Vladimir Tarasov from Eastern Europe, check out my colleague JD Considine's blog here.) On paper the Guelph schedule this year didn't seem such a grabber, but in practice there was much more to appreciate than I'd expected.

Read More | | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, September 28 at 5:24 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (5)