Volume 27 Issue 4 - February 2022
Gould's Wall -- Philip Akin's "breadcrumb trail; orchestras buying into hope; silver linings to the music theatre lockdown blues; Charlotte Siegel's watershed moments; Deep Wireless at 20; and guess who is Back in Focus. All this and more, now online for your reading pleasure.
Gould's Wall -- Philip Akin's "breadcrumb trail; orchestras buying into hope; silver linings to the music theatre lockdown blues; Charlotte Siegel's watershed moments; Deep Wireless at 20; and guess who is Back in Focus. All this and more, now online for your reading pleasure.
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BOOKSHELF<br />
Two Takes on a<br />
Tumultuous Time<br />
Mark Miller<br />
Oneliness The Life and Music of<br />
Brian Barley<br />
Éric Normand<br />
L’Atelier de musique expérimentale<br />
(tour de bras)<br />
STUART BROOMER<br />
The late 1960s/early 1970s were a tumultuous time for various<br />
musical genres with new forms arising, often aligned with social<br />
and political foment. These recent works focus intensely on<br />
that period in Canada through the related lenses of jazz and improvised<br />
music. Mark Miller’s Oneliness: The Life and Music of Brian<br />
Barley is a biography of the forward-looking, Toronto-born jazz saxophonist,<br />
while L’Atelier de musique expérimentale, assembled by<br />
musician-producer Éric Normand, focuses on a performance space for<br />
Montreal’s experimental musicians. The works share a vital connection<br />
in artist/writer Raymond Gervais, Barley’s Montreal roommate<br />
and a founder of L’Atelier de musique expérimentale.<br />
Miller is the essential chronicler of Canadian jazz, the focus of eight<br />
of his 13 books, including recent biographies of Claude Ranger and<br />
Sonny Greenwich. While those musicians made extended contributions,<br />
Brian Barley, who died in 1971 at age 28, was a tragic figure<br />
of immense promise. Oneliness (the term comes from the mystic<br />
G.I. Gurdjieff, an interest of some in Barley’s circle), is alive with the<br />
detail that distinguishes Miller’s writing. It’s an evocative tracing of<br />
Barley’s Toronto, from his Etobicoke childhood to Royal Conservatory<br />
and University of Toronto training to long-lost jazz venues like the<br />
First Floor Club, and his time spent in Vancouver and Montreal before<br />
his death in a Spadina Avenue rooming house. Barley, a gifted classical<br />
clarinet student, singled out for early praise, was increasingly<br />
preoccupied with the expressive possibilities of jazz. From membership<br />
in the National Youth Orchestra of Canada, Barley advanced to<br />
work with the Cleveland and Vancouver orchestras.<br />
As he built jazz skills in Vancouver, a defining event occurred in his<br />
life. Driving to Seattle in May 1966 to hear the Bill Evans Trio, Barley<br />
crashed, suffering brain injuries. He spent weeks in hospital and was<br />
left with epilepsy and a dependency on medications that caused<br />
intense headaches and other symptoms, which he self-medicated with<br />
cannabis as he followed his jazz muse east to Montreal. There he met his<br />
most compatible musical partner, drummer Claude Ranger, with whom<br />
he recorded his enduring testament, The Brian Barley Trio, 1970.<br />
Miller’s scrupulous account of Barley’s life is constructed out of the<br />
traces left by periodical reviews and the memories of fellow musicians.<br />
Miller first chronicled Barley in 1982, in a segment of Fourteen<br />
Lives: Jazz in Canada, and his research includes 40-year-old interviews,<br />
creating a portrait that would otherwise be impossible to<br />
assemble today. Oneliness has a tragic dimension: and Miller’s scrupulously<br />
gathered details develop a looming resonance issuing from<br />
the chasm that separates Barley’s promise from the accomplishment<br />
ultimately betrayed by that head injury.<br />
By contrast, the French<br />
language L’Atelier de<br />
musique expérimentale,<br />
which documents a shortlived<br />
collective performance<br />
space (AME), is<br />
virtually a playground,<br />
whether considered as<br />
a book accompanied by<br />
a CD or vice versa. It’s a<br />
sequence of distinct writings<br />
that range from reproduced<br />
typescripts to<br />
grey-scale copies of newspaper<br />
articles. Historian Eric Fillion and musician/producer Éric<br />
Normand have previously been responsible for chronicling Quebec’s<br />
radically politicized free jazz in both book and CD form, Fillion in<br />
his Jazz Libre et la révolution québécoise: Musique-action, 1967-<br />
1975 (M Éditeur: 2019), Normand in the four-disc Musique-Politique:<br />
Anthologie 1971-1974 by Le Quatuor de Jazz Libre du Québec (tourdebras.com).<br />
L’Atelier… has a scholarly account of the collective by<br />
Fillion, followed by illuminating typescripts by Raymond Gervais,<br />
including an omnibus account of the scene.<br />
Barley sometimes seems limited by the scenes in which he works,<br />
while the Atelier is at the cutting edge of its era. The CD of previously<br />
unreleased improvisations by Le Trio Expansible (clarinetist Robert M.<br />
Lepage, guitarist Bernard Gagnon and bassist Yves Bouliane) presents<br />
unstructured interactions that are still slightly startling, often percussive<br />
and usually exploring unusual timbre, whether minimalist, pointillist<br />
or conversational. The close listening is such that similarities arise<br />
among the instrument’s sounds.<br />
Oneliness concludes with Gervais’ 1986 audio-visual tribute to<br />
Barley, called “Oneliness”, with a soundtrack provided by a Gurdjieff<br />
piano piece; Atelier… includes a photo of Gervais, circa 1977, setting up<br />
an installation with four turntables.<br />
Oneliness can be ordered at: https://volumesdirect.com/collections/<br />
music/products/oneliness-the-life-and-music-of-brian-barley.<br />
L’Atelier de musique expérimentale can be ordered at<br />
www.tourdebras.com.<br />
Stuart Broomer writes frequently on music (mostly improvised)<br />
and is the author of Time and Anthony Braxton. His column<br />
“Ezz-thetics” appears regularly at pointofdeparture.org.<br />
thewholenote.com <strong>February</strong> <strong>2022</strong> | 59