gig 004 - w/Alan Gerber

Saturday March 5, 2006
@ Café Pazzazz on rue de l'église in Val-David, Quebec
9:40 – 12:40

Alan Gerber – vocals, keys, fiddle, slide guitar, powerstomp (www.alangerber.org)
John Sobol – tenor sax (www.johnsobol.com)

Ist set bandmembers
Eli Gerber (13) – electric and acoustic guitars
Hannah Gerber (10) – vocals and tambourine

40 spectators
Set 1: 65 minutes
Set 2: 75 minutes
All Alan's own tunes except for a few old faves like You Are My Sunshine & Summertime & I'll be Glad When You're Dead You Rascal You
Alan's tunes are fabulous
masterpieces like Bad, But Not So Bad, Quick Service & Embarassed
some that I just heard for the first time tonight
(this being only our second gig together)
are irrestible
his is a stunning repertoire of original songs
and his interpretations are out of this world

no press no pizza no dressing room
$18 dollar cover charge
about 3/4 full and very charged up
mostly by Alan
who is an animal
relentless yet sublime
and totally out of his mind
in the music

but still very skilled at being in the here and now
exceptionally so
his approach to his audience is really like a busker's
show no mercy
resistance is futile
the way a good busker can part a sea of people with a wave
alan does it with a song
and googlyeyes

and in particular i think what he does that is the same as a busker is he constantly addresses his audience directly as himself – tells them exactly what he's doing at any time, narrates the moment, tells people what he's going to do next, and then does it
and then tells them the next thing
and they love it

so that the interstitial moments eventually merge with the performances
become one narrative moment
all equally fun and in-your-face
and all equally Alan and nobody else
and he's funny and fast as hell

and the letting go
combined with the killer barrelhouse piano
and the fun
and the great songs
would be badass enough

were it not for the chicago firecracker up his ass
the whistling kid from the windy city
singing blue alleys in black vinyl grooves
preaching each song with a powerful conviction
singing the blues
like it was an electric rebirth

and
praise be to funk
in the warm embrace of the appreciative crowd
it is

I blew hard
played the first set's songs better than in rehearsal
and in the second just jammed on all kinds of alan's songs

overall I played pretty well
but blew out my reed early in the second set
made my horn playable but aggravating

alan liked when we were rocking
him wailling slide electric stomp blues like a fiend
me wailing right next to him
catching his melody line and us really ripping it up like a buzzsaw
yeah there were several moments where it was really very happening!

for anyone who has read my blog this far and who doesn't know Alan Gerber here are two amazing facts about him:

1) he's played with Muddy Waters, Lou Reed, Jimi Hendrix, John Lee Hooker, Jerry Garcia and lots of other amazing musicians and he is definitely worth checking out and 2) he's my neighbour

Amazing eh?

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Risk Factor: 8
Riff Factor: 8
Success Factor: Humbling Exhaustion
Wild Card: Eli and Hannah
Cash Factor: 8
Parking Lot: covered in snow
Joy: 9.5
Obliteration: 9

gig 003 - w/House Band #9

gig 003

Saturday February 25, 2006
@ Café Pazzazz on rue de l’Eglise in Val-David, Quebec
10:20 pm-12:30am

HOUSE BAND #9
John Sobol – sax
Laurent Belec – guitare electrique
Jean-François Barbeau – drums/batterie
Félix Leroux – congas
François Myrand – basse
Richard St-Aubin – acoustic guitar

50 spectators
Set 1: 40 minutes
Set 2: 40 minutes
Improvised instrumental jams on simple and not-so-simple song forms
Serious grooves and blowing
8 track minidisc audio recording made
& no press
& no cover charge
alcohol sold and consumed
audience noise
but only the good kind

this is a band that has played together before
we’ve worked maybe a dozen dates at Pazzazz Café
some members are old friends some are new
for me they are all new friends
Richard, the acoustic guitar player, is a part owner there
It’s a very good band
we rock the house
It's a damn good jam band
I call it
Le Bon Jambon Band

We play richard’s original tunes
And we play a blistering Scofield tune
And we play Herbie Hancock's most funky Chameleon
And I can’t wait for us to do Joe Farrell’s Canned Funk
the rhythm section grooves relentlessly
and Laurent is a fantastic guitar player
he can really lay it down any way you need it done

we have a lot of fun together

conjuring tunes on the fly
like tonight this is how we composed one tune:

richard starts one of his ‘tunes’
which are basically 2-chord vamps
but they’re cool and he plays them like a groove machine
and I turn to Laurent as the rhythm section kicks in
and say:
"we’re in a plane
on the tarmac of a runway
and we’re preparing to take off
soon
we're going to take off and fly
and then
we’re going to jump from the plane with parachutes on
and fall"

and that’s what we do as a song
making every last bit of it up on the fly
in dialogue
along a narrative spline
live in front of people

here’s a link to the (completely unmixed and totally live) recording of it:

www.johnsobol.com/aviation.mp3

We’ve made a lot of songs that way
Usually Laurent and I just figuring out a quick plan as the groove starts
Sometimes he makes suggestions
Now that he knows how
But it is me that leads us in this compositional direction
Always has been

See the first couple times we played together
A quintet
There were no charts
Which is fine
But more than that there were no defined song structures
The tunes were guitar patterns that Richard likes to play
But we had no idea how to play them as a quintet
Especially Laurent and I as the lead players were getting in each other’s way
And it was frustrating
And not that great musically
and of course we only gigged and never rehearsed

So at a certain point I said to Laurent
Whom I’d not known before
“listen, here’s what we’re going to do: before each tune we’ll make up a song structure and we’ll follow it on the fly, in the tune, OK?”
And Laurent was skeptical
Because it’s not how people normally compose or jam
But he agreed to try it and so I said: “I’ll play an intro
You play a melody and then I’ll take a solo
Then you take a solo
Then we’ll both play the melody
Then we’ll end”
Or something like that
And we tried it and it totally worked
And made the music work for the first time as a group
Because we understood our roles and responsibilities and opportunities
And could not only make our statements strong but could support each other’s
So that was the beginning

The next stage was to design shapes to go along with the roles
I’d say:
“Ok, we both come in with long tones for an intro
slow and deep
and then we both play a melody exploding with punches"
And it would be a groove in A minor and we’d go off

So from there it wasn’t a big leap to saying:
"The backseat of a car at night driving towards the city in the rain
we get to the highway and then we get to the city.”
And we’d be off.

And then it was just like:

“We're on a boat, going down a river, and you’re looking out one side and I’m looking out the other. We describe what we see.”

Or:

“This one’s for the people in new orleans”

And if we were lucky, that’s all we’d need.

Did I mention that at this show (gig 003) people went insane all night being totally blown away? Yeah it was all pretty fierce, fun and funky.

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Risk Factor: 2
Riff Factor: 9
Success Factor: !!!!!
Wild Card: Exhaustion
Cash Factor: 7
Parking Lot: covered in snow
Interactivism: 2
Joy: 9
Obliteration: 8

gig 002 - w/Toutes Choses de Paille

gig 002

Saturday February 25, 2006
@ Théatre du Marais, Val-David, Quebec
8pm-10:20pm

John Sobol – sax and vox
Michelle Bastien – voix et mouvement
Marguerite Morin – voix et gestes
Michel… – flute et synthésiseur
Nathalie Levasseur – sculpture performance
Line Dicaire – chant et piano
Gilles Matte – voix et conception
Sylvain Fontaine – technicien

23 spectators
Set 1: 60 minutes
Set 2: 40 minutes
Entirely scripted and choreographed (except for brief improvisational interludes by me)
Video recording made
A couple small previews in local papers
$14 tickets
booze not sold
but beer available in the fridge if you left a toonie in the cup

the show was Toutes Choses de Paille
all things of straw
a multidisciplinary thematic poetry show
video projections, recitations, songs, scatterings
conceived by a group of poets and artists who live in the laurentians north of montreal
of which I was this time a willing participant
the entire show in French
combining original poems with excerpts of poems by famous French poets
exploring the metaphors of wind and sand and straw
with lovely songs interwoven by line dicaire
her own and old favourites everybody in the room but me knew
like Pauvre Rutebeuf by Léo Ferré, the celebrated Québecois chansonnier of years past

Gilles was the director
Leading us as a cast of collaborators
Into an assembly of poems staged and blocked and seamed
Michelle flung upon the floor of the theatre
Nathalie hanging rattan sculptures made from old chair guts
Marguerite sifting sand in her hands

I got to call the winds
At the start of the show
With my horn

If you blow through a sax
Very hard
But keep from making the reed vibrate
It makes a deep whooosshhing sound
So I called the wind with that sound
In and around the mic
Until Michel arrived with the big synth winds through the p.a.
swirling around the room
It was a nice effect
With the huge fans coming on too and all
Blowing the sheets covered with blue block letter poems hanging from the rafters

Very nice
And unlike the night before (gig 001)
Here nobody else was talking

People loved it
They were really thrilled
It moved them quite a bit
Figuratively not literally
Because literally they did not move at all
The show being in a theatre
theatre = immobility

This is not the first show this group has done together
There have been others in the past year
I saw one
Which is why I was interested in working with them at least once
Because Gille’s concept is really quite original
Not completely
But certainly nobody else is putting on poetry shows of this nature
The antithesis of slam
Very French in its aestheticism and oratory
More introspective than hiphop
More romantic than anything else
I mean this is quebec
Sophisticated, sensual and tough enough
Though always a bit insular
Inevitably
As this is a country and its people

So a solid show
Satisfying
Much better than I had expected it to be based on the 2 rehearsals I had been to
(they had had more)
and again
people really liked it

also
I riffed in French again
And actually got off
In that dark quiet solemn space
An improvised poem that succeeded in weaving together strands of the night’s language and moods
which I had failed to do the night before (gig 001) in my first try at public french riffing
So that was satisfying

I learned a new way to create collaborative poetic performances
I learned I can riff in French if the setting is right
And that maybe that’s not so different from English riffing

And I learned about Saint-John Perse
Gilles asked me to read a few lines that he selected from Saint-John Perse’s Gallimard book-length poem, Les Vents
I had never read the man before
But on Saturday night I got to speak these words to an audience already entranced by poetry:

Et le Poète aussi est avec nous, sur la chaussée
Des hommes de son temps.
Allant le train de son temps, allant le train
De ce grand vent.
Son occupation parmi nous: mise en clair des
messages. Et la réponse en lui donnée par illumi-
nation du Coeur.
Non point l’écrit, mais la chose meme. Prise
En vif et dans son tout…

Et le Poète encore est avec nous, parmi
Les hommes de son temps, habité de son mal…

Mais attentive à sa lucidité, jaloux de son auto-
rité, et tenant clair au vent le plein midi de sa
vision

(from Les Vents, Saint-John Perse, 1946)

Here’s my translation:

And the poet too is here with us
In the streets of the men of his age
Taking the train of his times
Riding the great trade winds
His occupation amongst us: revealer
of messages. Response in him given in the ill-
uminated Heart.
Not in writing. But in whole
Live sound…

And the poet is with us still
With the men and women of his times
Inhabited by his pain…

But attentive to his lucidity
Jealous of his authority
Cutting the clear wind toward
the high noon of his vision

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Risk Factor: 5.6
Riff Factor: 6.6
Success Factor: Strong Success
Wild Card: Saint-John Perse
Cash Factor: 0.0
Parking Lot: 13 cars by a frozen river
Interactivism: 5 (my accented French improvisations an inter-eruption of the already thinned literate skin by the spoken word
although significantly the rest of the spoken poems were read and/or recited by memory from texts, somewhat like proto-awol activities before the letting go of the page, of the tune, of the text altogether) / additionally, collective cut up performances and sharing of texts as babbling tapestries onstage/words hung from banners and projected on screens/songs and music/bodies in movement/everybody mic'ed/overall a very unusual semantic stitching, blending of idioms and vocabularies, balancing of imperatives, literate and oral and even slightly post-oral (digitized synchronicity and enabling of meaning-mixing w/electronic sound and image) with intention too, from an interactivist design perspective not groundbreaking but effective in a blunt way i kind of like, because it puts the poetry first and I always believe that the best poetry will always grab people, an event rather Interdisciplinary than Interactivist in concept and approach)
Joy: 7
Obliteration: 2

gig 001 - w/Tom Walsh

gig 001

Friday February 24, 2006
@ Café Pazzazz on rue de l’Eglise in Val-David, Quebec
9pm-12:30am

John Sobol – sax and vox
Tom Walsh – trombone and samples (www.tomwalsh.ca)

26 spectators
3 sets of 30 minutes
entirely improvised
no recording & no pictures
& no press
& no cover charge
alcohol sold and consumed
audience noise
wanted and unwanted

a surprised audience in a rural quebec bar on a Friday night
finding tom and I
playing happily way out there as a duo

tom’s crashup mashup sample mayhem maybe made a few folks uneasy
and maybe my weird poetry did the same

but few
if any
were able to resist his ‘bone playing
which is of the finest hew
and I had my own horn too

with far more souls remaining than leaving
to fully sample the night’s varied offerings

I worked entirely in French
For the first time ever
Improvising poems publicly in Quebec in the Quebecois language
For an entire evening
And found it difficult indeed
Despite my fluency

What I lacked was words, a rich enough vocabulary

Mayakovsky said: “Poets! You must fill your pockets, fill your storehouses with words. Words must spill from you!”

Working in French I lacked the ability to spill
Because my wordstore was weak

The best riffs were those I took slow
Paced out
Placed out
Plenty of silence
And space
Dropping phrench phrases over tom’s superior sampled soundscape

tom's approach is hands-on midi-triggering and knob twirling
database management
real-time polyphonic orchestrations
serial serendipity of waveforms
using clips
short and long
remixed and matched
he's a real-time composer working with changing palettes of choice samples
and it's very very cool

When I relaxed
And let my voice out
On the waves of the words I did have
Things began to move

The experience was filled with lessons:

• my riffing in English is enabled by my ability to surf the flow of words without thinking too much about what they mean…and definitely without searching for them but rather letting them come…because one always comes, swimming up from the miasma of meanings into utterance

• my riffing in french is disabled by my inability to surf thusly on an incomplete wordscape…lacking the depth, my French ocean of words tumbles me incessantly into vortexes from which I cannot escape…when I just can’t find a word to say and none comes…it’s the most brutal and banal failure…and I did have a few of those…tho with skill one can always hold on to enough of the moment to at least try to redeem oneself…and usually succeed…but still…the collapse has been witnessed and felt by all…

• surfing is an apt metaphor in light of the walls I encountered while riffing in French…in English I feel that those mental pitfalls are still there but I can ride above them, as in a speaking meditation, but in French my avocabularism drove/dove me into dead ends repeatedly…

• I found poetic respite and succour in story…telling the longest riff of the night as a tale…of a great snow serpent slithering down from the north beneath the blanket of snow lying thick over the country…

• that story ended somewhat weakly, but at least it ended, which is always a strength and a relief…the worst part of the dead end walls that I encountered riffing in French was that my excursions flamed out, which not only denied me the ending power but scuppered the merits of the creative tension that I had built…no ending is much much worse than a bad ending…

• tho still there were some successes with the riff. I just have no idea what they were. I only remember the failures

• a challenging collaboration with the sampler – Tom’s instructions were to pay close attention to the repeating patterns and sample families that would appear and sometimes return… this was sometimes tougher than it sounded...It was like learning how to play an instrument not just jamming with a musician…but I think we still made messy sense of it all

By the way, Tom Walsh is a blast. Literally, figuratively and furiously. Check him out. www.tomwalsh.ca

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Risk Factor: 9.9
Riff Factor: 9.9
Success Factor: Survival
Wild Card: Duke Ellington
Cash Factor: 6.5
Parking Lot: Covered in Snow
Interactivism: 6
Joy: 7
Obliteration: 7