SuddenlyLISTEN lets the moment create the music
Musicians craft astonishingly integrated, spontaneous composition
By STEPHEN PEDERSEN
Wed. Feb 10 - 4:53 AM
A singing cello note here. A starburst of tone clusters from the piano there. A short, rhythmic melody rising and bouncing about from a series of cymbals. An electric guitar being scraped with a pick in a sustained, high-speed, whisper-quiet strum.
How does this series of seemingly unrelated sounds hang together in a musical design?
How do you listen to it?
They are unanswerable questions.
But looking around, you see that the audience is intensely quiet, snaring even the tiniest tones with rapt attention.
Something unaccountably binds together these four players, Norman Adams (cello), Tim Crofts (piano), Jerry Granelli (drums) and Geordie Haley on guitar with an array of foot-switches sticking up from tiny wired boxes.
They are playing a concert in St. Mary’s University Art Gallery for Norman Adams’s highly original and inventive suddenlyLISTEN series. The program is called Timeless Pulses, a literal description of the music being invented in front of us.
We hear four sets before it is done. Not a single note from nearly two hours of playing is written down, not a single note anticipated except in each individual player’s formless imagination.
It is the closest thing, not only to spontaneous composition, but to letting the moment create the form and the colour of the music, or rather of allowing the form to perfect itself in the moment out of the conditions set up by putting together four, experienced, creative musical masters — each with a long pedigree of improvised composition.
The two long sets in the first half are marked by an astonishingly integrated performance. Virtuosic solos, and there are many, are not really solos at all, but part of a total astonishing sound. These four players play with the entirely co-ordinated sound of a classical, professional string quartet.
They complete each other’s gestures; fill them out with accompaniments, while duets and trios as well as solos also arise. When all four sense the climax of the piece coming there is an invigorating damn-the-torpedoes ferociousness about the sound that carries all before it.
Great stuff. Much of it breathtaking. Crofts is a two-handed player with Lisztian chops. Adams is an inventor of new sounds on the cello using not just fingers and bow but percussion mallets, an orphaned piano hammer, various scrapers and pickers. Granelli is an uninhibited Paganini of the drum set whether using mallets, sticks, his hands or re-purposing cymbals. Haley subtly colours the guitar sounds with signal processors like a painter with a palette of pigment and a quiver full of brushes.
Only once on the second half did things falter. A set started off well enough in the piano but after awhile it sounded like the four players were in a different corner of the room doing their own thing. Still interesting, but kind of marking time. Shortly, the music petered out and stopped. It seemed like it should, but fell short of suggesting a real ending. When they started up again after a brief hiatus, they were all on track, illuminating shapes and forms like a car driving through a forest trail in a pitch-black night, the rise and fall of the headlights freeing shapes and forms to flare and, just as suddenly, vanish back into the formless dark.
It was an extraordinary musical experience for suddenlyLISTEN’s devoted audience, requiring of them only to listen without conditions, without wanting the players to play something like everything else, without being unwilling to let everything go and suddenly listen to the sounds of silence.
( spedersen@ns.sympatico.ca)
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http://exclaim.ca/musicschool/whatiplay.aspx?csid1=136
cool article regarding t the process of "SCULPTURES"
http://www.exclaim.ca/musicreviews/latestsub.aspx?csid1=138&csid2=870&fid1=42251,a recent review of sculptures in canada's leading new music magazine
Geordie serves up another improvised masterpiece. Equipped with his guitar and his studio, he produces another impressive effort.
Daniel Bishop
Kootenay Co-op Radio
www !earshot
Geordie Haley
Sculptures
Independent
The inside cover of Sculptures shows a photo of Geordie Haley’s red Telecaster with various sillinesses crammed at various angles betwixt the strings - chopsticks, a cigar tube, a chunk of dowelling, and one of those alligator clip thingies you’d find at the office supply store. Ahhhhh… the air of experimentalism in creative expression is always refreshing! Although this is a guitar album, don’t expect shredding virtuosity. As the album title implies, Geordie Haley uses the guitar - and the recording studio - as tools of aesthetic to create impressionistic snapshots of some alien vibratory realm, somehow elevated from the humdrum of mainstream perception. The range of sound is at once fun and mysterious. While not exactly ground-breaking in concept or performance (what ground has not already been broken in this day and age?), this disc serves as a tasteful and relevant collection for those who appreciate experimental guitar music.
By Sean Luciw
Feb 28, 2009
Geordie Haley is a guitarist/composer/improviser living and playing music in Toronto. Moving from New Brunswick in 1997, where his regular bands Sameboat, The Exploding Meet and Ujamma were festival favourites, Geordie has established himself in Toronto as a group leader and performer. His Everytime Band (Christine Duncan-vocals, Evan Shaw-sax, Jean Martin-drums, Paul Donat-bass, Eugene Martynec-computers, Ryan Driver-flute and synth) was a featured act in 2005 at both the Toronto and Halifax jazz festivals, and in 2007 at L’Off Festival in Montreal performing material from their debut "The Green Suite", a new music work of environmentally themed compositions and improvisations.
Co-producing a monthly event called Strange Folk, Geordie was able to interact with many of Toronto's improvisers, including Bill Grove, Rhonda Rindone, John Oswald and international drummer, Roger Turner. Geordie is currently a co-curator of the Leftover Daylight series, a weekly, live music presentation with an emphasis on improvisation (produced in association with AIMToronto and Arraymusic). Dancer Shannon Cooney (also featured in a quick time video on POLAR BEARS, the debut album of the Geordie Haley Trio with Nick Fraser-drums and Scott Thomson-trombone); dancer Susie Burpee; videographer June Pak (see www.joesorbara.com for a video called “geo’s fast trip” under Joe’s PROJECTS file) and sound artist Sara Peebles are some of the artists from other disciplines with whom Geordie has collaborated.
Other Toronto based groups Geordie leads or performs with include: East Delta Trio (with Vineet Vyas-tabla and Evan Shaw-sax), Sea of Song Trio (with Rob Clutton-bass and Brandon Valdivia-drums), the Liquidaires, the Bill Grove Quartet and the Eve Brown Quartet.
www.myspace.com/geordiehaley
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