Bill in the Kootenays

A friend of mine said he listened to my music show Giant Steps on Kootenay Co-op Radio. He said the music was “out there” and he had a hard time listening to it.

An unfamiliar path

Actually as far as jazz goes the music I played is not really out there. You can easily find stuff that makes Vijay Iyer and Darcy James Argue and the Claudia Quintet (all of whom I played on that show) sound tame.

But I know what he means. The music does not follow the beaten path. The beaten track is Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue or any other kind of jazz that follows rhythmic or harmonic patterns that are familiar. On the beaten path, you can relax. On an unfamiliar one you have to pay attention to everything all the time, and you have to figure out whether or not you really want to be there at all.

Living not dead

I love Kind of Blue and Motown and Pink Floyd and the Beatles and the blues and Vivaldi, but I don’t listen to them. I am not really into musical nostalgia. I like listening to new artists that my daughters introduce me to, and to jazz players who are actually living, not dead, and who are respectfully and excitedly moving ahead of tradition.

Many people think the old music of the old days (50s, 60s, 70s, take your pick) was better, but I think they are wrong.  The quality and creativity in all areas of music these days is stunning.

Attracted

In at least one genre I am trying to demonstrate this on my show. But to hear it and decide whether you like it or not you have to be attracted to unfamiliar paths.

The thing is, you don’t have to be. I don’t mind if you aren’t. I’m just explaining what my show is about.

3-4 pm Mondays.

Music (Photo by Laura Metcalfe)

Tags: Claudia Quintet, Darcy James Argue, Vijay Iyer

I went to Blackberry Wood at the Royal last night. In Japan, they are having a tough time controlling the fire at the nuclear reactors.

Percussion

Blackberry Wood was pretty good but  one member  was excellent–a young women who had a table-full of little percussion instruments: shakers, scrapers, a little xylophone thing, etc. She was little and quick, with lightning-fast reflexes like an athlete, and she gave some real speed to the band. Before you realized she was doing one thing she was doing something else, and then moving on to something else, all instant, ahead of everything, on it.

Risking their lives

The lead singer said, “Here’s to all the people in Japan who are risking their lives to save the world!”

Right, we don’t think much about those people, the ones trying to put that nuclear fire out. We just think about ourselves, and we worry and blame, and feel sorry for the victims.

Honing

So let’s hone our reflexes like that percussionist and get more concentrated. Get quicker but more meditative. If we are going to have nuclear reactors around (and we will– calls to get rid of them will not convince the Chinese or the Americans) we will need to become nuclear reactors ourselves, of the spirit and soul. And this will include knowing about nuclear reactors, and about Libya, and about the oil sands (etc.), in detail.

The percussionist girl was fun because she was wearing a mask that made her performance look like a little circus.

Tags: blackberry, Blackberry Wood, nuclear reactor, percussion, The Royal on Baker

A note to Eileen Pearkes

Hi Eileen. Thanks for lending me Jon Turk’s The Raven’s Gift. When we heard Jon speak at Oxygen I was about half way through and I have just finished reading it now.

Reading the second half knowing what an animated and uninhibited story teller he is really changed the reading experience. I kept visualizing those physical swoops and huge gestures. In person he reminded me of a jazz musician a bit– it seemed like sometimes he would start a sentence having no idea where it was going, but trusting it to go somewhere. And it always did. It’s interesting how his writing style is much more conventional than his storytelling antics. I guess that his because he is such a physical person, his whole life given to physical exertion and precision in his various adventures, and he carries that physicality in to his story performance.

I was constantly amazed by his lack of fear of incredibly remote and downright threatening places, like on those huge treks across the Russian tundra.

And as for the shaman, well, I was very touched by his love for her. This book  is the most convincing argument for some other spirit world and the availability of magic I have seen for a while.

So thank you for bringing that remarkable man to town, for lending me the book and for writing that guest blog on Arts in the Kootenays, which I recommend that people read if they have not already.

Source: bitmask, Flickr, Creative Commons

Tags: Eileen Delehanty Pearkes, Jon Turk, raven, shaman, The Raven's Gift

I have been around long enough to remember early debates about nuclear power. Don’t build them in earthquake zones, don’t build them at sea level, don’t build them because no one knows what to do with the waste that will be lethally poisonous for many generations.

The developers and their fans replied, “Science will figure it out, don’t worry.”

Well, they haven’t.

Speaking of nuclear I don’t understand why so few people are not worried about nuclear weapons. True there is no more cold war, but most of them are still there. The thousands of Russian nukes are probably in the hands of their crazy military police mafia, and I hate to think about the ones in Pakistan.

If we are going to be destroyed by something (but maybe we won’t!), my guess is it will be a nuclear weapons accident.

But nobody talks about this issue. Young people don’t even know about it.

Photo: ezioman, Creative Commons

Tags: Japan nuclear, nuclear power, nuclear weapons

I just realized that the version of Bon Iver’s Flume that Corazon is doing now (with great solo work by Robin Birkett) is Peter Gabriel’s arrangement from his cover of the song.

Corazon is a 62-voice Nelson singing group, all members between 14 and 22, directed by Allison Girvan. I recently became their manager (a small part-time job) after having been a parent of one or more singers in it for eight years straight.

Last year Corazon did a version of another Bon Iver song, Woods. It had Gillian Lippert, Robin Birkett, Gabriel Macdonald and Reece Williamson doing a lead quartet part in front of the choir. Stunning. This year’s Flume will rival it.

Bon Iver’s two CDs might be my favourite music of any kind to come out in the past ten years.

Here is the Peter Gabriel version of Flume.

Tags: Allison Girvan, Bon Iver, Corazon, Flume, Gabriel Macdonald, Gillian Lippert, Peter Gabriel, Reece Williamson, Robin Birkett

Several of my friends (all 60-ish) have said, when faced with learning about Facebook or Photoshop or iTunes or any other computer thing beyond regular email, “But I can’t stand the thought of spending even more of my time on the computer.” That statement in itself illustrates the generational digital divide. Most younger people, particularly the under 30 crowd, would never say something like that because to them a computer is not something separate.  It is not something that alienates them from life, it’s just part of life and has equal status with everything else.

This photo is not really related to what I have just written.

From the public suggestion board at the Shelter exhibit at Touchstones, October 2010. The middle message says, "Let's share everything."-- Robert Munsch

Tags: digital divide, Touchstones Nelson

Living in this hurricane of information (the internet with its documentaries, movies, funny clips, news, gossip, blogs, pornography, music, opinions, photographs, conspiracies, and so on) involves a sort of responsibility. You have to choose, constantly. What choice is best at any given time for your day, your career, your relationship, your energy level and also for the world, for the health of the planet? The future of the world and the future of your morning are linked in this way.  We are pretty close to the situation where we have access to all recorded knowledge and non-knowledge that has ever been. What a crazy responsibility.

Tags: choice, hurricane, internet, the future of the planet

This blog has gone sort of dormant because I am now posting everything on Arts in the Kootenays.

I am the editor of that site, and there I am aggregating arts stories from various media in the Kootenays. I  am also writing my own stuff about Nelson arts– the kind of stuff that has appeared on this blog until now.

I have decided to just use this blog for more personal reflections. But will I find the time?

Anne Degrace signed 130 books in just over an hour on Friday night at Touchstones Nelson, along with co-author Steve Thornton and photographer David Gluns. The crowded event was the launch of Nelson, British Columbia, an update of  their 1996 best-seller Nelson, British Columbia in Photographs. Unlike the earlier book, the photos in this one are all by David Gluns. Another major upgrade is the alluring graphic design by Chris Rowat and Daiva Villa.

Yesterday I sat down with Anne Degrace and recorded her comments on eight of the 114 photos in the book:

Camille Hamilton

“I was sitting and talking with Jocelyn Carver at the Co-op, and Camille rode up on her bike which always looks like that, it’s always full of flowers, it’s really cool. She was dressed in something retro and interesting and I just said, wow, who’s that? And Jocelyn said that’s Camille, she works here.

Copyright David Gluns

I thought about having Camille somehow in a Co-op photo, but when she came for a photo shoot with Dave at my request she turned up dressed like this, in the bright red dress, and so he took her there behind the Capitol. It was inspired, I thought, to have her ride down the alley with the Cabaret sign. The photograph says that we are different in Nelson and we know how to have fun, that we think outside the box and don’t necessarily go with the status quo. Certainly Camille doesn’t.”

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Tags: Anne Degrace, Aspen Switzer, Camille Hamilton, Chris Rowat, Daiva Villa, David Gluns, Edmond Segbaeya, Justine Susteel Fry, Michael Graham, Mirek Hladik, Nelson BC, Nelson BC history, Nelson BC photographs, Reverend William Dawson, Steve Thornton, Touchstones Nelson

Peter Schramm’s new film in progress, Argenta: A Community, is about the home of his childhood and youth–the Quaker community in Argenta, north of Nelson. 

Last weekend I went to the Express Summer Shorts Film Festival at Lakeside park- my first time at an event that has been happening for five years. The films shown were all by local  filmmakers. There must have been close to 200 people there, and we watched films well past dark, outdoors in the park. The quality of the films varied wildly. The one that really drew me in, making me eager to see the rest of it, was this trailer for Argenta: A Community.

In 1970, when Peter Schramm was five years old, his parents moved to Argenta to join the group of Quakers who had moved there from the U.S. in 1952 to live a simple, rural life untouched by militarism and materialism.

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Tags: Argenta BC, Argenta Friends School, Express Summer Shorts Film Festival, Peter Schramm, Quakers, The Society of Friends