Ornette Coleman, legendary jazz saxophonist and free jazz innovator, died this year at 85-years-old. His angular, noisy, and unpredictable approach to the language of jazz inspired and alienated both contemporaries and followers throughout his career and after, and his impact is unmistakable and important. If Coltrane was the patron saint of jazz, then Coleman was its apostate.
Perhaps it was not strictly dedicated to the memory and contributions of Coleman, but nowhere is Coleman’s legacy more felt than a festival like the Guelph Jazz Festival, which prides itself on its challenging, experimental programming. The festival’s 2015 installation featured artists such as Colin Stetson, Marc Ribot, and Douglas R. Ewart, who is also the 2015 improviser-in-residence for the university’s IICSI (International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation). I got to see Colin Stetson and Sarah Neufeld, Marc Ribot’s Ceramic Dog, and Suuns/Jerusalem In My Heart over the weekend for The Ontarion, and, well, I was blown away.
Colin Stetson and Sarah Neufeld
If the uneducated listener were to stumble into Friday night’s Colin Stetson and Sara Neufeld concert, one might think they’ve walked in on some strange hipster fertility cult ritual. The crushing, droning sounds of Stetson’s low-register saxophone(s), coupled with Neufeld’s driving, almost locomotive violin playing and her chilling, piercing on-stage gaze and persona, it’d be easy to confuse a concert like this for some kind of incantation to a higher power, whatever it may be.
The whole set featured material from their new album, Never were the way she was, along with a solo performance from both Stetson and Neufeld. The material from the new record is surprisingly minimal—recalling 20th century minimalist composers like Philip Glass, Arvo Part, and Steve Reich — a direction that is, admittedly, a bit surprising from such virtuosos of their respective instruments. At any rate, Stetson was literally glitching his signature bass saxophone with each extended technique and circular breath (at once taking on a herd of elephants and a dubstep bass drop), Neufeld’s violin playing was haunting and hypnotic in its repetition and soundscape, and both performers offered a concert of proportions more epic—and I use that term in the truest sense—than two musicians can usually offer.
Suuns/Jerusalem In My Heart
What do you get when you mix electric-drone-chamber-music with a Lebanese street performer? I don’t really know, but it might sound a bit like the set Suuns and Jerusalem In My Heart played at the Guelph Little Theatre, right after Colin Stetson and Sarah Neufeld on the Friday night of the festival. The double-band, made up of experimentalists Suuns and Jerusalem In My Heart and led by Radwan Ghazi Moumneh, played an hour-long set, free of song breaks, that traversed their latest self-titled album – an album made up of droney, art-psych soundscapes with a distinctively Middle Eastern sound.
It’s gestures like these in rock music (looking at you, Graceland) that are easy to shout “appropriation!” at, even if Moumneh himself is Lebanese, but a project like this is a wryly acute, multi-faceted look at cultural exchange, freedom of creativity, and the two hemispheres, so to speak, of Western and Eastern music engaging in open dialogue with each other. With moments featuring Moumneh playing the oud and singing Arabic verses into a vocal synthesizer, the band performed a sort of deconstruction and delineation of this musical binary throughout their hour-long set, allowing for the remarkable intelligence and musicianship of the group to reveal itself to its small and sleepy audience.
Marc Ribot’s Ceramic Dog
Kicking up the “punk” factor of what jazz can be (or what it is already), Saturday night at the Guelph Little Theatre featured Marc Ribot’s Ceramic Dog, performing a set of noisy, pounding tunes, and a few covers blurred to the point of unrecognizable, such as Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” and Hank Williams’ “Cold Cold Heart.” The genre-defying trio, featuring Shahid Ismaily on bass/synth/guitar and Ches Smith on drums, delivered a high-energy set of punk-tinged improvisational songs, fluctuating in tone from crushing and intimidating to tender and inviting (often within the same tune). Ismaily and Smith also performed in the opening set, alongside Norwegian drummer Øyvind Skarbø and Icelandic guitarist Hilmar Jensson, under the name Bly de Blyant.
For a guitarist who’s performed with the likes of Tom Waits, John Zorn, Elvis Costello, and many, many others, it’s no surprise that the evening’s music took one unexpected turn after another, and resisted easy classification. As a guitarist, Ribot plays by his own rules—as a bandleader, Ribot is capable of merging not only entire genres, but entire traditions, into a menagerie of which you’re not really sure where one style ends and the other begins. Such is the thrill of jazz is that in it exists all musical possibility. And supported by the world-class musicianship of Ismaily and Smith, as well as the blazing opener Bly de Blyant, this open-endedness comes through even more so.