Improv Notes: April 2013
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  IMprov Notes:News of the Moment April 2013
Guelph Tribune Community Guide Features Article on Guelph Jazz Festival
The 2013-2014 edition of the Guelph Tribune Community Guide includes a positive review of the Guelph Jazz Festival and its twenty years as a mainstay of the Guelph community. The article, written by Ned Bekavac, includes commentary from GJF Artistic Director and ICASP Project Director, Ajay Heble, who remarks on the festival’s commitments, “I’ve often said that the festival is about the music, of course, but for me it’s more about reinvigorating public life with the spirit of community and dialogue.” The Guelph Jazz Festival will be celebrating its 20th anniversary this year and attracts many ICASP researchers and colleagues as performers, colloquium presenters, staff, volunteers, and audience members. To read a copy of the article, please click here.
The 2013 edition of the Colloquium will take the form of a global summit for improvisers. Bringing together a diverse range of creative practitioners, scholars, arts presenters, journalists, policy makers, jazz activists, and members of the general public, it will provoke consideration of a wide range of issues related to cultural activism and social responsibility. We invite papers and creative presentations that will help focus public attention on the role that jazz and improvised music have played as catalysts for social engagement, as pivotal agents of change. The summit seeks to raise questions about appropriate models of artistic responsibility as well as to offer a unique forum for musicians to discuss, develop, and showcase new works that will add immeasurably to the body of existing activist art. What does it mean to be an artist in the world? How can we best assess what it means for performing artists to be socially responsible? How might that responsibility most purposefully and most creatively manifest itself in practice? How does sound translate into knowledge, into obligation, into social action? How have jazz and improvisation been used to create greater understanding and cooperation between cultures? What is the role of translocal contact and cooperation—not the undifferentiated movement of music around the globe, but particular links between specific places as in Brazilian music in New Orleans, Cuban rumba in New York, Mexican son jarocho music from Vera Cruz and Seattle, Indigenous Zapotec music in Fresno? How do indigenous communities across the world improvise, translate, transform, and indigenize the form of jazz (or of other arts practices)? How might institutions concerned to advance transcultural understanding make use of jazz and improvisational arts? Has the globalizing impact of mainstream jazz on world markets (and the festivals that use “jazz” in their title and marketing) led to a homogenizing of the music?
We invite presentations that address these questions and concerns, as well as case studies focusing on any issues of jazz and musical improvisation in relation to broader questions of social responsibility and transcultural understanding, historicized studies of material practices, practice‐based research interventions, and analyses of exemplary sites of political and social transformation keyed to music. We are particularly interested in interdisciplinary work that speaks to both an academic audience and a general public. We also invite presenters to submit completed versions of their papers and presentations to our peer‐reviewed journal, Critical Studies in Improvisation/Études critiques en improvisation (www.criticalimprov.com) for consideration. ORAL HISTORIES PROJECT Oral Histories is a showcase of interviews, performances, and articles by and about improvising musicians, artists, writers and scholars. This monthly feature offers an intimate look inside the minds and practices of some of the many dynamic, innovative people whose energy and ideas make improvisation studies such a vibrant field of inquiry. The Oral Histories project provides a space for improvising artists to be heard in their own words, often in dialogue with other improvisers, scholars and practitioners. DAVE CLARK of THE WOODCHOPPER'S ASSOCIATION Dave Clark is an esteemed studio musician, drummer/multi-instrumentalist/vocalist, composer, improviser, writer, educator, live performer, and the leader of The WoodChopper’s Association Improviser’s Orchestra. He has collaborated with a diversity of artists, including Charles Spearin (see The Happiness Project), Gord Downie, The Inbreds, Jane Siberry, Julie Doiron, and the Sun Ra Arkestra, among many others. Clark is perhaps most known for playing drums—although he often contributed vocals and his own lyrics—in the indie rock band Rheostatics from 1980 until 1995. After departing from the group, Clark focused his energy on his own band, The Dinner is Ruined, and formed The WoodChopper’s Association, a multi-genre, often improvised, artist collective. Led by Clark, The WoodChopper’s are a collective of musicians, often augmented by dancers, painters, photographers, poets, writers and filmmakers (from Toronto and beyond), who specialize in freestyle improvisation and multi-disciplinary presentations. Based in Toronto, The WoodChopper’s have an engaged and vibrant focus on developing and strengthening community ties vis-à-vis the mentorship of young artists and through a series of music education workshops at all levels of schooling, in art galleries, and in their varied, daring, and exciting performances at music festivals.
This month’s Oral History interview is conducted by Steve Sladkowski, who at the time of the interview was an Undergraduate Researcher for the ICASP project. Steve has an active interest in musical improvisation, jazz historiography, and the development of musical aesthetics in Western culture. Steve remains an active performer, bandleader, and session musician in Toronto where he is presently based and where he is currently part of the indie-rock band, Topanga (now called PUP). When asked what he is up to today, Steve replied with his wry sense of humour that he is “a musician and recovering scholar currently misbehaving in Toronto,” and that when he is not touring he “can be found making noise with guitars, digging in vinyl crates, and hustling to learn more about the rap game.” In the interview Steve asks probing questions, while generally remaining off camera, about the various origins and influences of the WoodChopper’s Association. The interview is principally focused on The WoodChopper’s Association, and covers everything from the origins of the association, including past and current members, the multitude of influences upon the association, various aspects of improvised performance, as well as on Clark’s own approach to music, pedagogy, and his perpetual interest to maintain vibrant active musical communities which are united through the dialogue of improvised performances. The interview is amplified by the interspersed fine musical chops of The WoodChopper’s Association throughout.
Quote of the Month: -Cecil Taylor qtd. in Alfred Willener, The Action-Image of Society 255. 
Cecil Percival Taylor is a classically trained American pianist and poet; Taylor is also considered one of the major innovators and pioneers of the free jazz movement. His piano playing has been associated with percussion, described as “eighty-eight tuned drums” (Val Vilmer, As Serious as Your Life 45), and his physical approach to playing piano is very energetic, producing intricate improvised sounds involving tone clusters and dense polyrhythms. After first playing in R&B and smaller swing-styled groups in the early 1950s, Taylor formed his own band with saxophonist Steve Lacy (recording Jazz Advance in 1956). Taylor is also a poet, with diverse stylistic influences, including Charles Olson and Amiri Baraka. Poems are often integrated in his musical performances, and they are often found in the liner notes to his albums. In 1987 he recorded the excellent spoken word record Chinampas, reciting several of his poems while accompanying himself on bells, timpani, and other small percussion. In 2008, Germany’s Free Music Production label released The Dance Project, a live recording (with Taylor, bassist William Parker, and percussionist Masashi Harada) of a multimedia performance of perceptive improvisational accompaniment for four dancers.
Photo Credit: Charles Rotmil |
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