Home » Jazz Articles » Interview » Fran?ois Houle: Insider Listening that Makes You Clever
Fran?ois Houle: Insider Listening that Makes You Clever
Courtesy Sheldon Suter
...Beno?t would just come in and just float on top... to do his magic... Beno?t is an integral part of it. But even the compositions were really influenced in some ways, by the way Beno?t plays.
—Fran?ois Houle
Francois Houle
clarinetHoule's meditative solo improvisatory project, Aerials, was a fascinating delve into all things mysterious and solitary, evoking a spiritual solitude; and it's become like a timeless favorite to those fond of his work.
As one of the globe's top and most-loved improvising masters of the clarinet, Houle's exploration and concept of timbral colors in a new soon-to-be- released recording based upon the book entitled, The Secret Lives of Colour is so exceptionally impressive. (Houle do not forget has seven recent album releases.) This release concept again reminds of Houle's shockingly advanced timbral and extended approaches. The Secret Lives of Colour is a creation that may be viewed in the future as one of Houle's most adored and signatory works. Some critics are viewing Houle's prolific and fascinating creative work as in the 'special,' category, or genius realm, worthy of praise and celebration.
Many have particularly completely loved and been in admiration of Houle's work with his close friend and collaborator,
Benoit Delbecq
pianoDelbecq has designed a creatively elite prepared piano syllabus, set by his improvisatory and compositional example, for future generations to come with exceptionally exciting, innovative work. Mysterious, sonorous, percussive hues emerge from various objects inserted in the strings of the piano; mainly from pieces of wood that Delbecq sources globally. The genius of Delbecq is unlike anything you have ever heard. Listening to brilliant artists like Houle's and Delbecq's music and long-term collaboration on such releases as Because She Hoped (Songlines, 2011) is a riveting experience. In fact, if you investigate their duo work, there is never ever any going back. Once you have experienced their exciting work together you will be a forever fan of Houle and this fine duo.
They have just released the Fran?ois Houle Genera Sextet project entitled In Memoriam, honoring the memory of Vancouver International Jazz Festival Artistic Director, Ken Pickering. Pickering was highly regarded by musicians and his peers, and this tribute helped define closure for the jazz community.
Francois Houle was born in Lachine, Quebec, in Montreal, Canada. He has been residing in British Columbia, Canada, in Vancouver for several decades and was in winter 2022 suggested for Canada's prestigious Polaris Music Prize.
After Houle having released more than seven albums from 2022-2023 as a leader, AAJ was excited to chat. Freelance writer, guitarist, film and past Houle-Delbecq Nanaimo concert producer Kerilie McDowall captured a pleasurable and long conversation about Houle's music projects in summer 2023 in the living room of her Vancouver Island mountain home and was happy to share the album's intricate story and interview with AAJ.
All About Jazz: You have been creating numerous albums, your output recently, has been prolific.
Francois Houle: The short story is that if you don't document your work, there are so many missed opportunities to, to disseminate your practice, to get it out into the world.
I mean, I feel that at this point, I'm turning 62 this year. I've done over 100 recordings, most of them as a leader, a lot, as a sideman, whatever. I haven't barely made a ripple on the scene in some ways, you know. But what I did do, I feel was the best that I could do at the time. And I'm at this point now where I look back on all this stuff. And I was like, Okay, how can I do better? That's part of the process of documenting, talking about the music, writing books, writing articles, getting it out there. That becomes the artist's pursuit, you know, not just writing music, but making sure that you take care of your babies. And that's sort of where I am at right now.
AAJ: Yeah, telling the story.
FH: Yeah. People want the story.
AAJ: Agreed. The story needs to be told. So that's good that Lara [your partner,] is helping you get the material together.
FH: Immensely. So, because if it was just for me, I'm so clumsy with all these things. And then there are people like Igor who recorded Beno?t and I a number of years ago...
AAJ: He's great.
FH: Igor Juget did a great job, you know. Like this last album that I just did.
AAJ: Because She Hoped, was just fascinating, it drew you right in. It's true, it's very powerful, film you know, you may not realize it, but even those couple of people that you influence, can be very powerfully affected.
FH: Yeah, I believe that. Yeah. But I look back at it I haven't looked at it and I should look at it again.
AAJ: It's really good. You seemed like these really hip, sort of French guys you know you were both here like this, (crosses legs in a relaxed fashion) you know. Just talking really casually, being you. You know, it was fascinating. Because you guys were being so French, speaking the language. It was so nice. You are also very brilliant musicians. Right, but also seeing that French side in your actual language of the two of you made it even more of an interesting dimension, you know?
FH: Yeah, because you don't in Canada, I don't show that. Oh, most of my work is in English. Yeah, but I'm Francophone.
AAJ: And you guys were translating it, but it was so good that way seeing you speak French because you could just speak the way you would normally. It was like how you would really be with your friends.
FH: What I remember from those clips from that film trailer, was that, like we're thinking so like... we're so connected musically, that and this the way we would describe our music is that we were completing each other's sentences.
AAJ: Yeah, like ESP. Right?
FH: Like yeah, totally.
AAJ: You guys were like that on that album too.
FH: Totally connected. Totally.
AAJ: You really were. Yeah, you could hear it.
FH: And it was like that from the get-go, the first time I met Beno?t...
AAJ: But he's not like that with everybody. Like he's like that, like, you know what, like you and he can play with anybody. But you guys have this really weird connection. Like, it's just this really interesting thing. Yeah, don't you think it's great?
FH: Yeah, it's an incredible complicity and a huge amount of trust. Yeah. And a deep friendship. I mean, we've known each other for almost three decades.
AAJ: Wow. And how's he [Beno?t Delbecq] doing?
FH: He's writing a lot. Yeah. Yeah. I just talked to him. Like, couple days ago, we had a ZOOM call, and a little FaceTime. And, you know, every time we talk, it's like, it's like family. Yeah. Like he's really like a brother. Yeah. Just like
Joëlle Léandre
bassb.1951
AAJ: Really amazing, really.
FH: So we have a lot of connections in so many different ways. Right. And I think it all ultimately manifests itself in our music making.
AAJ: Well, okay, so let's just get talking about your recent album, In Memoriam, so we'll start the interview. Okay. We that's just the back part that's just kind of leading up to it.
Okay, so let's talk about your album. And then the conclusion, which is a stunning track. Oh, wow, phenomenal. And then Ben was being brilliant. Beno?t, you know, like, that beginning part when he starts comping. Mindblowing. And then you start doing some of that beautiful, ethereal, mysterious clarinet with the reverb later. So many fans will love that, that you did that. Because it's so spiritual. So maybe you can just talk about what your intent was.
FH: Well, when Ken Pickering passed away, just a few years ago, the band got invited to play at his memorial service. And they all flew in on their own dime to come to Vancouver to play together. Because the band initially was put together. I wanted to put a new band together to do a special project that was really international in nature. And I would get together with Ken every Monday morning to start our week we'd meet and I have a coffee at Milano's. That was our sort of little drinking hole. And it became a thing that was not every Monday, but we would meet on a regular basis, you know, just touch base. Talk about where we're at, talk about our frustrations. You know, things that were coming up that we were excited about. And I told him that I wanted to put a new band together. And I want to write this music and I have a sextet in mind. And definitely with Beno?t. Initially it was a quintet plus Beno?t [Delbecq], where I would write all the music, and organize the rehearsals and everything. And Beno?t would just come in and just float on top of everything, To do his magic. Right. And, of course, as soon as we did, I realized, well, it's a sextet. Beno?t is an integral part of it. But even the compositions were really influenced in some ways, by the way Beno?t plays.
So Ken picked all the musicians and said, Oh, do you know
Harris Eisenstadt
drums
Michael Bates
bass
Samuel Blaser
tromboneb.1981
AAJ: Those guys everybody knows... all those guys.
FH: You know, and same thing with
Taylor Ho Bynum
cornetb.1975
It was a wonderful band. And it grew and grew and grew as the tour unfolded, you know. And that was 2012. And then the next time that we put the band together was at Ken's memorial. Because of, it's so impossible. It's so difficult. It's so complicated and expensive to tour, a six-piece band.
AAJ: Or an international band for that matter. Logistically, that travel is difficult.
FH: So the memorial service was the first time that we could get together again, in like, eight years or something. And we played the old charts, we played three tunes. And it was kind of like, 'Oh, my God, I I'm so inspired, I have to write more music for this band.' So I decided to do that.
And I applied for some grants to do some writing. And I got a grant again, luckily, and I started writing some music in and this was during the pandemic or towards the end of the pandemic. Two summers ago.
So, 2020. Yeah. And I was writing the music. I was in my studio. And the more I wrote, the more I realized that there was like, a narrative that was unfolding in the music, and I couldn't quite put my finger on it. And eventually, it dawned on me, I woke up in the middle of the night with a tune all pre-composed completely figured out from beginning to end. So I woke up that morning, and I worked feverishly for like 16 hours and I wrote it all out. I basically transcribed what I had in my head.
And that was the first piece and I called it "Requiem," because Ken's spirit was so present when I wrote it. When I compose, I work on a whole bunch of tunes at the same time. I don't write one piece at a time. I just work a little bit on this, a little bit of that. Oh, that idea should be in that piece now. I move things around quite a bit. It's like a big puzzle. And it doesn't make any sense. It's convoluted. It's complicated. And it's painful and frustrating. But I've learned to trust the process because that's how I've always composed.
But what I realized this time was that there was a connection between every musical thought and I wrote a chorale, I wrote these really beautiful kind of minimalistic, rhythmic things that evolved and I came up with all these different melodies, almost the whole album is based on the blues. It's also based on motets like, like church hymns and things like that. So very spiritual.
And I was thinking like a requiem, what's a requiem, you know, like to pay homage to a person that moved on to the other world, right. And all the compositions were connected that way somehow. And in the end, I just thought, "I just wrote a requiem for Ken Pickering!"
And when I, when we finally put everything together for the album, and we recorded in Switzerland, I changed the title. I just felt that the term, 'Requiem,' that was too generic. When you say a requiem and everybody thinks about Mozart. Or Verdi requiem and very classical. So I changed it to In Memoriam, in memory of Ken Pickering. And that's what it really is. It's not about Ken Pickering's writing, it's in memory of. It's what we got from the guy, it's this aura of spirit and generosity.
AAJ: What was his [Ken Pickering's] spirit to you?
FH: The way the way he connected people together, the way he brought, the way he helped support the scene, in a very elegant, very...
AAJ: Graceful.
FH:Yeah, you know, he almost made it look easy, how he would say, Oh, you gotta meet such and such. And next thing, you know, you've got this amazing collaboration for life. That's how I met Beno?t, that's how I met Joelle. Well, that's how I met Steve Lacy. And Taylor, the band, and so on so forth. He had this special skill of bringing people together, knowing that something would click. And he did that for me. He did that for so many other people.
And I think if you ask anybody who had any kind of connection, with Ken Pickering, they will tell you the same thing. It's like, oh, yeah, this guy had a gift for networking for making things happen. Right? He was very creative in that way. His main concern was to make great music happen. And I feel that this album is a testament to that.
I feel very strongly about the music, but I don't think that that music and that band would exist if it hadn't been for him.
AAJ: So everything about it is all Ken-related.
FH: It's all connected.
AAJ: It was inspired.
FH: And then yourself to the idea that there's something, there's an energy or a power that be that dictates or help guides you, not dictates, but guides you through life. I mean, you get it in a religion, Buddhism is about that it's like you adhere to certain ideals about how you want to be as a human being. And you follow that moral code through your life and you improve on it, you adjust, you make mistakes. You learn from your mistakes you grow. I think that music is so much like that. It's about energy.
AAJ: Dissonance, consonance.
FH: Tension, release, really all that stuff. And to me, that's where music is because there's a connection to the universe via music, because you're dealing with vibrations, vibrational powers, and the more you understand and trust, how you feel about a certain order of notes, and when what needs to happen next.
AAJ: Yeah, you're going by intuition. Totally. Yeah, totally.
FH: Always, always, always. That intuition has been sharpened by years of experience and a lot of bad music, you know, to arrive at a point where I actually can pen some things that are pretty decent. I came to composition very late in my musical upbringing. I was always an instrumentalist and an interpreter of other people's music. So that when I started composing, it was by a desire to find a deeper sense of what music is about for me. And I didn't have sufficient theoretical knowledge and the confidence to understand what I was doing.
I started applying myself. I made a rule to write music every day. I started studying, looking at other people's scores and trying to play the chords on the piano and trying to hear what's going on. And there's some things on recordings, listening to
Steve Lacy
saxophone, soprano1934 - 2004
Gil Evans
composer / conductor1912 - 1988
Duke Ellington
piano1899 - 1974
Anthony Braxton
woodwindsb.1945
You get sort of absorbed in this vortex of thinking like him, just the same way some musicians get absorbed into
John Coltrane
saxophone1926 - 1967
Charlie Parker
saxophone, alto1920 - 1955
Thelonious Monk
piano1917 - 1982
The range of influence is so powerful that you can never divorce yourself from it.
AAJ: Yeah. And that's what's so great about someone like you or Beno?t, because you guys really are those unique original voices.
FH: But we also have very strong fundamentals in how we listen to music, what we gravitated towards, and how we rationalize that.
AAJ: Okay, if you were going to sum that up, or if you were going to try and explain it, how would you explain it?
FH: Okay. Here's a very concrete example, when it was the first time I met Beno?t. We're in the backyard at
Tony Wilson
guitarAnd within five minutes, we're talking about French film, and rhythm. And how we both were trying to do a very similar thing.
And we both were trying to figure out a model of writing rhythms so that it flips on itself and goes backwards. So depending on the speed at which you play it, and the metaphor was that in film, when you watch a car, because of the time frames, and the speed of the car, the spokes on the wheels, or on a bike, the spokes are moving forward. And all of a sudden, they become standstill, and then they start spinning backwards. Right again, we've all seen that in movies. Yeah, it's kind of a cool effect. Right? Where is that? How can you recreate that musically?
AAJ: You both were thinking about that?
FH: That was our mutual concern. We're thinking the same shit. And was like, Okay, we have to do some playing. And I told him so, well, listen, I'm coming to Paris, I have some gigs. I can stay for a few days. And I can come and visit you if you're free. So a few months go by, actually almost a year. I go to Paris, and he invites me over to this place and then actually on my way there, he calls me and he said, 'actually I booked a studio.' And I was like, 'Why not? And we just can improvise.' And we played a few tunes of his, a couple of tunes of mine. And that became our first CD, Nancali.
AAJ: Yes, it was an exceptional release.
FH: And it's a magical document. It's so special. We did the first part of the recording that year, then it took another year before we recorded the rest of the album. And that was just the beginning of this whole conversation that we've had for almost 30 years now.
That relationship constantly evolves around our concerns about music, texture, timbral (timbres), rhythms, and how our two instruments are so different in nature, and they complement each other. Because they're made of wood mostly. And? It's been a very rich conversation. And in the midst of that we've got to know each other humanly like, as family, as fathers, as you know, as artists, as well.
AAJ: But were you always into extended techniques? You have been doing that forever.
FH: From the get-go. I mean, the second I put the clarinet mouthpiece. The first time I put a clarinet together, I started squeaking away, trying to understand why, you know,
AAJ: What about all those upper ranges that you're getting into, like, with harmonics and the varied explorations?
FH: All the overtones and everything. I mean, that's just in my background, and It's part of what I do. My approach to the clarinet has always been sort of like a process of discovery, of trying to understand how this instrument works. And to not be limited by its physical construct and its cultural construct. Because a clarinet was created, invented, so, so-called invented in Mannheim, by Johann Christoph Denner. Okay, And he was a recorder maker. And he made oboes. And he made all kinds of instruments. And, and then one day, he had the idea of putting a single read mouthpiece on a recorder. And basically invented the clarinet.
The point that I'm making is that the instrument historically was meant to be a melodic instrument. When I started playing the clarinet, I discovered that if, if you had a bad reed on a bad day, and you would try to play a normal note, the note would come out, but you would get all these harmonics, and it would be very hard to control. And I became fascinated by that.
I remember I was 11 or 12 years old. I spent a whole summer just experimenting with fingerings to see what would happen. And I didn't really know what I was doing. I didn't realize that all this stuff was already catalogued or most of it was and that there were composers and instrumentalists who were fascinated by that. I didn't know that repertoire. I was just playing classical music.
But eventually, I discovered new music " data-original-title="" title="">Olivier Messiaen, " data-original-title="" title="">Pierre Boulez, " data-original-title="" title="">Karlheinz Stockhausen / Ives Ensemble so on so forth, right the whole European 20th century music tradition. And that's when I finished my studies. As I was trained as an orchestral player, I got a gig in an orchestra.
And after two months, I realized oh, no, that's not really what I want to do after 10 years of studies.
AAJ: Oh, no.
FH: And, that's the year that I went to Paris to try to find myself. Okay, I studied for 10 years. I'm 25 I don't know what I'm doing. Like, what's going on? And that's when I heard
Steve Lacy
saxophone, soprano1934 - 2004
Gil Evans
composer / conductor1912 - 1988
You know, when I was in Paris, I was hanging out with a French composer named " data-original-title="" title="">Gérard Grisey. And he's the father of spectral music. It's about the overtone organization as a basis for a truly unique musical language.
Spectral music. So, when I started composing, after that experience in Paris, I traveled around Europe, and then I moved to Vancouver in 1990. And then I started composing. Like experimenting.
AAJ: This is before the computer age, too, this was before computers took over everything.
FH:I was writing pencil to paper, and everything. And when I started composing, I realized that oh, I'm writing mostly melodically. I discovered that I was not interested in playing melodically. I wanted to play textures. I wanted to play more experimental approaches, you know, toying with a lot of different ways of playing the instrument, right. And so, eventually, that led to my first solo CD Aerials where sort of like a point in time where I felt like I had enough of a language in place to be able to document it.
AAJ: You had your whole vocabulary like you had this whole thing happening. That was really beautiful. Such a memorable release. Many thought that you could really hear your thoughts like how you were thinking through things and just how you were just improvising, you know, 'in the moment,' but coming out with this, this incredibly profound stuff. For some fans it was really deep, even heavy.
FH: Yeah, part of me knew what I was doing. And a lot of it was left to chance, you know, and in the studio, I would hear something and I would just go with it and experiment with it again, I left it on the floor.
AAJ: Aerials, was special, too. You were doing a little bit of... electronics. You were using the piano sustain pedal, you were amplifying it somehow.
FH: I used the piano as a resonating chamber to amplify the harmonics and sustain the notes. When you play a few notes together, the piano resonates if you press the sustain pedal down. And you can then hear there's a harmony, like normal overtones, you know, harmonic overtones that happen depending on what type of sound I make, or a combination of two notes, or a run. And so I wanted to use the piano as a reverb, rather than using digital reverb.
But then you hear the piano resonance, and you go, Oh, that's an augmented chord. Right? So I started playing with that, that duality of how I play the clarinet, my vertical thoughts as opposed to melodic thoughts. And so basically, it was the sort of the midway point of me really thinking of my instrument through as a sound generator, more than as a clarinet. I don't play the clarinet like a clarinetist. I play it the way a composer would think of it.
AAJ: Kind of like a textural player, a lot of textures. You and Beno?t both are into a lot of really textural exploration.
FH: Well, you know, there's a part of Beno?t's playing that's very, very highly virtuosic. He always warms up playing J.S. Bach. So, I know he's very concerned about technique and proper piano, language and stuff like that. But, his compositions, apply all of that. But his concern is not about pianistic approaches. His concern is about sound. And that's why he does the preparations and everything.
That's the beautiful thing about the parallels between what he's doing and what I'm doing with my instrument. Our concerns, ultimately are about transcending the limitations of our instruments.
When I hear
Benoit Delbecq
pianoI would like to think that I'm trying to do some things on the clarinet that, you know, nobody else has tried or has conceived of.
FH: Yeah, there's a design behind it? Or...
AAJ: Yeah. Remember that
Miles Davis
trumpet1926 - 1991
FH: And the idea is that the sentence that I'm quoting, it's not my thought, but I embraced it, is that space creates rhythm. Without space, you don't have rhythm, you would have just a continuous tone, right? But you split that tone up with silence, then you get a rhythm. It's that basic. It's so silly, in some ways, but then the more you think about it, pop culture has totally ignored space.
That you always have a back beat. You always have a pad, you always have a melody, you always have harmonies, and a song starts and it ends and the rhythm hasn't changed, you might have a little bridge that contrasts but for the most part, the [pop] formula is that there's never any space. It's like, there are sounds happening from the beginning to the end.
AAJ: Yeah, there's no breaks even usually.
FH: There might be the occasional artist...
AAJ: Once in a while a break. Yeah.
FH: There's a really great example it's " data-original-title="" title="">Metallica. They do a song called 'All Nightmare Long.' And, then in the middle of the song, boom, there's a break of about two or three seconds. And it's so freakin' powerful. Yeah, you know, and then they launch into the rest of the tune. But I remember hearing that thinking, that's a creative use of space.
That's the ultimate rhythm right there. Yeah.
You know, and it's so charged, its electric, right? There's so much gravity in that silence.
And I think, it's very simple to imagine how people like
John Cage
composer / conductor1912 - 1992
AAJ: But were you consciously thinking about minimalism? Were you?
FH: In Memoriam. There's one tune. It's called, "Ekphrasis.'"
AAJ: It's very minimalistic.
FH: Yes, one little pattern, but if you listen closely, there's so many things happening within it. You know, that it's just a basically it's a system. Yeah.
AAJ: Palindrome? James Tenney was so into palindrome. Absolutely.
FH: So this piece, yes it's a palindrome. And it works its way backwards from the midway point all the way to the end. It starts and ends with the piano. Is it minimalistic in concept. But there's so many layers and little things that happen and a lot of space in between events, that maybe it's not minimalistic, or at least it's not my intention to make it minimalistic. My intention was just to create a shape that was almost like a palate cleanser. And between all the heavy stuff. Yeah, I'll say you get this little piece that really doesn't do a whole lot.
AAJ: Okay. It is the time to to interrupt you a bit, because it's always great to hear you speak. But so we talked about the project, we talked about what the project was, but how did you create it? When you were writing it? Where were you creating it? How were you doing it? Was it you said that you were in Sibelius on your computer? Was this in your office? Where was this happening?
FH: My studio in Vancouver. It was about four years, five years ago, four years ago, I was in Switzerland when he passed away. So it would have been 2019.
AAJ: Right, and that was when just the beginning of the pandemic too like, yeah, just like kicking in with all that would have made things difficult to make it happen.
FH: The pandemic was raging, yeah, drove across the country. Before I left, when Ken passed away soon after my, my older brother died of brain cancer.
And I went to see him in Montreal, and he was very sick, was doing all the treatments and stuff, but the tumor just kept coming back.
And I told him, it's like, well, I'm gonna drive across the country and play a little concert in people's backyards, because I can't do concert halls or anything like that.
And all the money I'm going to make; I'm going to do a fundraiser for the BC Cancer Society for brain cancer research in my brother's name. So that's what I did.
So when, when my car died, I had this dream, I thought it was about my car. But what it really was about was my brother's and Ken's passing away.
But it's a convergence of energies. So you know, it's about it's about the circumstances, the car represented an amazing feeling of freedom, of mobility of being able to travel at a time when people were told not to travel. And I did that I'm a bit rebellious.
When you lose, when you see your own... can go through this horrible disease. Emotionally, it's... You start thinking about life, you think about the fragility of it, and everything. And Ken's death, was all mixed in all these feelings and emotions that I was living through. And I think the music is maybe not necessarily just about Ken, but about all these different things.
It's about ultimately, it's about the fragility of life. And the important message that comes out of it is that there's so much beauty in life that goes by unnoticed because we don't take the time to really look at it and to see the details. And I think when I was composing the music, that's what struck me was that I was so into the detail of the music and listening to the music, not just from a technical standpoint, as a composer, as a musician, but also what is it saying?
What am I trying to say? How does that do that?
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