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Guelph Jazz Festival & Colloquium 2009
Guelph, Ontario
September 9-13, 2009
The Guelph Jazz Festival and Colloquium devoted itself this year to trying to unpack an idea so common that it is at once crucial and cliché: whether the practice of music-making might have world-changing implications. Through presentations on (for example) gang intervention in South Africa through drum circles to "workshops" (in a
Charles Mingus
bass, acoustic1922 - 1979
The annual Guelph Jazz Festival (which ran this year from September 9-13) invites musicians from around the world for one of the more adventurous weeks of improvisation and exploration in North America. But unlike many such festivals, there's an academic side to the schedule, with three full days of papers, panels and presentations, this year under the heading "Improvisation, the Arts and Social Policy."
And if it never got to the point of a "One World" sing-a-long, bringing together players from across North America, Europe and Africa made a philosophical perspective more than apparent.
One of the workshops combined musicians from Toronto and Vancouver, Chicago and Vera Cruz, The Netherlands, Ethiopia and Mali, making for a pretty respectable global representation (at least, within a gathering of nine). Built largely around the presence of saxophone legend Getatchew Mekuria, the assemblage represented not just different musical traditions but the ways those traditions have cross- pollinated between folk musics, improv, punk and jazz, with drummer 
Hamid Drake
drumsb.1955
The conversation covered varied grounds, with every one alternately (and not all at once) contributing to West African jazz and European open improv. Terre Ex on guitar and Abdoulaye Koné on n'goni made an especially subtle, bilingual point. The visiting Malians (Koné and singer/kamelan n'goni player Jay Youssouf also joined Toronto's Woodchoppers for some sometimes goofy groove jazz, the improv outfit containing itself into more structured frameworks than usual.
Mekuria's main gig at the fest was an appearance with the longstanding Dutch punk band The Ex, in one of a handful of Canadian (and no U.S.) appearances. The middle ground they've found has much in common with a lot of great hybrid musics, from Kingston reggae to British ska, borrowing from jazz while retaining a punk angularity.
With aggro guitar, persistent vocals and Joost Buis's plunged trombone, it was more than a little reminiscent of vintage Specials. Vocalist GW Sok was missed to be sure, although it's hard to imagine as fitting a replacement as Arnold de Boer, who comes off as a younger, burlier Sok (and also plays trumpet). French clarinetist Xavier Charles played a couple shockingly hard-edged solos.
While Mekuria was the impetus for this most recent phase in the adventurous band's career, the show wasn't all about him. Several songs did feature him playing a mean alto somewhere between Fela Kuti and 
Maceo Parker
saxophone, alto
b.1943
The workshops also included a musical gathering of members of Montreal's Ambiances Magnetiques, starting off a day devoted to the pivotal Quebecois collective. Under the heady umbrella, "Musique Actuelle: A New Social Policy for a Distinct Society," they put forth a model of collective discovery, challenge and harmony that could be used as a prototype (as Prof. George Lewis has been promoting at Columbia University) for conflict resolution, investigative research, consensus building and other endeavors. In short, they were 11 people working with the understanding that everyone should be heard (a rarity in improvised music as well as everyday life).
Or maybe it was just a gig, but they made their point beautifully by all answering in an overlapping spoken improvisation the questions posed by the session's moderator, with Lori Freedman bringing it home into the microphone: "I mean, contemporary music, government funding—it's all ridiculous."
That afternoon, the younger generation of the collective appeared in guitarist Antoine Berthiaume's Rodéoscope. Lacking pedal steel and Dobro guitars, the sextet sounded a little less entrenched in Americana than on their recent CD, shining a light instead on the sonorous sounds of the violin, cello and hollowbody bass guitar for an Aaron Copland-cum-
Bill Frisell
guitar, electric
b.1951
Jean Derome, one of the prominent figures within AM, appeared three times—during an outdoor street festival with an expanded version of his 
Thelonious Monk
piano
1917 - 1982
The ensemble presented two long suites, the first feeling something like a street scene played out primarily by Derome and Freedman's reeds, Joane Hétu's wordless vocals and Martin Tetrault's soft turntable scratches. The second piece was lighter and was an excellent spotlight for trombonist Tom Walsh and included a beautiful (if pretty) solo by pianist Guillaume Dostaler built around interruptions of wrong sounds (an unplugged patch cable, an abrupt turntable scratch, for example) giving way to an noisy concerto. Pierre Tanguay was, as always, modestly propulsive ad perfectly supportive.
Representing the northern reaches of Canada was vocalist Tanya Tagaq from Nunavut. She had just played at New York's Lincoln Center Out of Doors festival a few weeks prior, but her dervishes apparently hadn't made that trip. At Guelph, she swam through long vocal improvisations, a technique she developed based on her native Inuit throat singing (a style similar to the better known Tuvan throat singing, but employing less drone and more humor and caricature). She is frighteningly raw in her performances, embodying wrenching sorrow and ecstatic bliss, sometimes within the space of a couple minutes.
While her accompanists—drummer Jean Martin and violinist Jesse Zubot—used a variety of loops and delays, Tagaq (for this appearance) didn't employ any electronics, yet she would sometimes get caught in her own analog vocal loops, carried in nearly flawless time and intonation even as she interrupted and augmented.
The festival organizers smartly make the most of musicians they fly in, so booking the Stone Quartet meant they got one more gig out of bassist 
Joëlle Léandre
bass
b.1951
Marilyn Crispell
piano
b.1947
Roy Campbell
trumpet
1952 - 2014
Playing without a drummer, the group leaves wide spaces, expanses filled with the slightest gesture. Violist 
Mat Maneri
viola
b.1969
It was well into the set before Maneri broke the trio-plus-horn foundation, refusing to let go of a resolute ending, holding on to a slow, three-note motif that built, slowly again, to his first out-front solo of the night, which invited Crispell to do the same, which brought the quartet back as an entirely new group, solid and heavier. It was a graceful and remarkable reinvention. That new band played less than 10 minutes and they, too, were fantastic.
Léandre appeared again in a matinee concert at the Guelph Youth Music Centre, the warmest and acoustically most satisfying of the various venues the festival employs. Playing alone, she can manage a deeply intimate connection with her audiences. Her rich arco, her resonant vocals, her laughter and dramatic flair managed, as always, to achieve what might be said to be the highest goal of improvised music: to express emotion, immediately and spontaneously, easily understood without relying on words. Few can deliver such musical monologues to as high a standard, and the series of emotive eruptions she delivered was, as always, enormously satisfying.
Where Léandre's presence is too enormous to miss, Crispell's unassuming approach to the piano makes her easy to take for granted; she's a wonderful player with a talent for complementing whoever she plays with. In Ottawa-based bassist 
John Geggie
bass
b.1960
And with her playing getting, occasionally, heavier again, and saxophonist 
Fred Anderson
saxophone
1929 - 2010Hamid Drake
drums
b.1955
David Murray
saxophone, tenor
b.1955
World Saxophone Quartet
band / ensemble / orchestra
Jimi Hendrix
guitar, electric
1942 - 1970
Milford Graves
drums
1940 - 2021
There are a couple of givens in considering the World Saxophone Quartet: a rhythm section has never improved them and they've been unstable for a long time anyway. So while the WSQ brand is theirs to sell as they choose, they probably set the bar too high on themselves by continuing to employ it. The same music under a new name would likely meet with less resistance. 
Oliver Lake
saxophone
b.1942
With 
James Carter
multi-instrumentalist
b.1969
Jamaaladeen Tacuma
bass
b.1956
While the record includes such well-known Hendrix hits as "If 6 Was 9," "Foxey Lady" and "The Wind Cries Mary," they stuck to more obscure arrangements of lesser known (or at least less recognizable) songs, playing long versions of "Hey Joe" and "Machine Gun" and encoring with "Little Wing," a beautiful, complex song given a wonderful lead by Bluiett on B-flat clarinet.
With the exception of a closing party, Murray and Graves played the closing set in what was a small triumph for Artistic Director Ajay Heble. The two have only played together once since their 1992 duo record, in a brief quartet set at a memorial for 
Don Pullen
piano
1941 - 1995
The two didn't rehearse before the show, but they didn't play pure improv either. They picked up themes from their record of 17 years ago and played a surprising 
Albert Ayler
saxophone, tenor
1936 - 1970
And if music can, perhaps, bring social change, it might represent electoral politics as well: Murray met with enthusiastic applause introducing his "Yes We Can," dedicated to President Barack Obama.
Photo Credit
Hal Schuler
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