Pianist Cory Smythe’s music “dissolves the lines between composition and improvisation with rigor” (Chicago Reader). In Guelph, he will animate the jazz standard “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” or perhaps a ghostly apparition of it: Its swirling and spiralling vocality, its portrayal of deceit and disappearance, its fluidic memorial to acrid, heartbreaking loss. To do so, Smythe will augment the piano’s sound resources with a range of nuanced, mysterious electronic extensions, transforming this most canonical of instruments into something –– like the love affair the Kern/Harbach standard laments –– that isn’t quite what it seems.
Saturday 16 September, 11am • Studio Theatre, River Run Centre • $25/$20 [buy tickets]
Listen to Cory Smythe here
photo credit: Moritz Bichler