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Three October 2007 concerts

Be an extra in a bebop film, at the Guelph ebar, Oct. 21

Two 1940s bebop veterans will be performing at the ebar this coming Sunday, as part of a documentary film project produced by local violinist and CBC host Jef ten Kortennar with Guelph’s Ed Video. Mike Lewis (piano and vocals) and Gord Carly (drums) with Stan Russell (bass) will perform on Sunday at 3:30 pm at the ebar, upstairs at 41 Quebec Street.

Gord and Mike are two octogenarian bebop musicians that cut their teeth as jazz musicians in the late 1940s, as bebop was coming of age. Kortennar says, “We already have some interview footage with Gord, who talks about his introduction, in 1946, to bebop and the music of Charlie Parker. He also talks at length about the New York jazz scene in the fifties and early sixties and the cast of characters working in New York at the time, such as Thelonious Monk, Art Blakey, Julian ‘Cannonball’ Adderly, Stan Getz and Gord’s roommate Al Haig.

“Both Gord and Mike still play with an excitement and enthusiasm that is at odds with their advanced years, and they paint pictures, through the stories, of their New York days that has a vividness and freshness that is quite contagious.”

The performance at the e-bar is going to be used for live performance footage for the film. The money raised through the $8.00 cover charge will go towards the musicians.

British free improviser plays with Guelph musicians, Oct. 25 & 26 in Toronto

British free improvising drummer Eddie Prévost is in Toronto next week for a series of concerts with the Association of Improvising Musicians Toronto. He’ll be joined on Thursday, October 25 by Guelph’s Ellen Waterman (flutes), along with Andrew Downing (cello) and Scott Peterson (bass). The following night he’ll playing with the Guelph’s Ajay Heble (piano) and Rob Clutton (bass).

Waterman is a professor of music at the University of Guelph, serves on the GJF Board of Directors, and performed recently at the (Not Just) Talking Heads concert during the 2007 Festival. Ajay Heble is the Festival’s Artistic Director, who also performed with the (Not Just) Talking Heads ensemble.

Here’s Wikipedia’s take on British drummer Eddie Prévost:

“In 1965, along with tenor saxophonist Lou Gare, bassist Lawrence Sheaff and guitarist Keith Rowe, Prévost made a radical break with jazz, a music that had inspired these English musicians but couldn’t accommodate their rapidly expanding aesthetic concerns. Their dedicated inquiry into the terms of spontaneous creativity led them to reinvent music as a dialogue with the world beyond the limits of conventional musical discourse.

“Prévost bowed cymbals, used drums as resonant amplifying ‘sound boxes’, incorporated ‘found objects’ into a growing battery of percussive elements that now includes gongs and a huge stringed contra-bass drum. He examined the very grain of the material at hand. At the same time Prévost has remained at home with the jazz drum kit and those conventional techniques associated with it.”

The Oct. 25 Prévost/Waterman concert (8 pm) is at Somewhere There, 340 Dufferin Street (entrance from Melbourne Avenue).

The Oct. 26 Prévost/Heble concert (9 pm) is at The Arraymusic Studio, 60 Atlantic Avenue, Suite 218. Both concerts are $15. For more information: http://www.aimtoronto.org/interface/october2007.php