Christian Wood...
I started working with Christian
in 1999 and we are now collaborating regularly on each other's material:
songs, instrumentals, film scores, etc.
Christian’s abilities are numerous:
singer, songwriter, composer, guitarist, keyboard player, virtuoso MIDI
programmer, remixer and sound fx specialist, recording technician, these
are some of the hats that Christian wears with panache. His remarkable
sense of detail and accuracy, as well as his keen musical abilities make
him a precious collaborator/partner in my composing and arranging.
Christian is a superb songwriter and instrumental composer and arranger
with an uncommon ability to concentrate critically on the task at hand
in the studio. He is also a dance/hip-hop/trance track remixer.
One of the things he does is use studio created sounds for loops and samples.
That makes it much cheaper for the artists than having to pay royalties
for licensing samples from copyright protected material. He will
not let clients use stolen copyrighted tracks on dance/hip-hop projects
he is producing, protecting the client and himself by doing so.
Working with him is always full
of surprises, challenging, and extremely rewarding.
Watch for is first CD of songs
to be released in 2004 and our duos instrumental CD,to be released late
fall of 2003.
Jean-Pierre
Bouchard...
Guitarist and composer, Jean-Pierre
has been a friend for over 25 years. Jean-Pierre was one of the founding
members of the fabulous seventies group Conventum.
He also played in Les Quatre Guitaristes de L'Apocalypso Bar, alongside
former Conventum guitarists René
Lussier and
André Duchesne and remarkable british drummer Chris
Cutler, of Henry Cow and Père Ubu fame.
A very accomplished composer
in his own right, Jean-Pierre has written for string quartet, chamber orchestra
and many ensembles of musique actuelle. He is very active in the
fields of theatre and film music.
Jean-Pierre runs Les Productions
du CEM in Chicoutimi, in the Saguenay region of Québec. CEM
stands for Centre d'Expérimentation Musicale and produces several
New Music and Musique Actuelle concerts and projects every year.
In November 2001, he produced the tour Village Musical, with musicians
Daniel
Heïkalo,
Claude
Fradette and Etienne Ratthé. Village was born of a project
of musical collaboration over the internet conceived by Jean-Pierre to
work with Claude and Daniel. In the end, after exchanging countless
files, arrangements, MP3s and scores over the course of a year, they met
for a week in Jonquière and rehearsed, finalizing the arrangements.
They ended this phase of the project with three concerts in Jonquière,
Québec and Montréal.
Jean-Pierre also plays with
composer,guitarist and saxophonist Carol Dallaire in the free improvisation
group Les Radicaux Libres.
Arthur
Bull...
Guitarist and improvisor, Arthur
Bull, of Sandy Cove, Digby County, Nova Scotia, has played extensively
with Toronto avant-garde musicians such as Michael
Snow, John
Oswald, Bill
Smith, David Prentice,
John Heward, Paul Cram and Paul
Dutton. Arthur has also played in concert with guitarist Derek
Bailey, reedman Roscoe Mitchell, and many other important figures of the
improvised music scene. Arthur was part of the quartet Perfectly
Normal with Daniel Heïkalo, Paul Cram and Jeff Reilly.
Arthur has released a solo CD
called simply Solo Guitar, in May 2001. The CD was produced and recorded
by Daniel Heïkalo at Heïkalo Sound Productions. He has
recorded a duo CD with John
Heward in July 2003 that was also engineered and mastered by Daniel
Heïkalo. This latest production will be released sometime next
year.
Lately, Daniel and Arthur have
been doing larger improvisation sessions that include Ruth Bull on tenor
sax, voice and noises, Linda Fuller on voice, percussion and noises, and
Tamara Heïkalo on percusion and noises. All these people are
not necessarily present at every session, but they somehow all find themselves
playing together virtually in Daniel's musique concrète montages,
with or without electro-acoustic transformations.
Arthur is a poet with three
books published. His latest is called Key
to the Highway and is available through Roseway
Publishing. As poet and singer Paul Dutton said in a review of
Arthur's poems:
"The rhythmic and sonic
dimensions of Arthur Bull's poems press for a reading aloud. Silent
or sounded, they are weighed with keen senses of the seasons, and with
perspectives on nature that are by turns anthropomorphic and dispassionate."
Bull is also a translator,
from chinese to english.
His email is: arthbull@tartannet.ns.ca
Pogo (Hugh) & Betsy Blackmer...
I have known Pogo and Betsy
since 1983, when Pogo and I started to play music together. When
they moved away from Nova Scotia, I moved into their house. Every
year they return to visit for at least a week, and a lot of music happens.
Pogo's main field is anthropology;
he is also a science librarian at Washington and Lee University; this is
only the tip of the iceberg of this phenomenally brilliant and interesting
guy. Check out their website
for more!
Pogo shares his immense knowledge
with amazing generosity, and a total lack of pomposity, which has made
him a popular and very admired professor with his students. He made
me discover music I had no idea existed. He is my main musical influence.
Pogo expresses his musical personality
through his beautiful collection of instruments: mandolins, mandola, mandocellos,
oud, sazes, banjo, guitars, lauto, bouzouki, citterns, electric bass, and
Turkish çumbus. His musical collection of thousands of records
and CDs from all over the world provide him with inspiration for his own
free-form folk improvisational playing, a style which is particularly marked
by Blues, Bluegrass, Appalachian, Celtic, Turkish, Greek, Arabic and Klezmer,
all mixed into his own stew.
When we play together, what
comes out is a result of years of listening to obscure and some not-so
obscure recordings, and absorbing the material and letting the subconscious
take over as our fingers do the work; it is unlike anything else either
of us have heard.
During a fabulous marathon week
of jamming, nine hours of music was recorded in April 1999, a lot
of which will soon find its way into a couple of CDs to be released in
2002, augmented by a couple of amazing improvisations from the summer of
2000.
In 1991, he gave me a cittern
he had built; I was in a performance at the Lunenburg Folk Festival in
Nova Scotia, playing on that instrument which he had loaned to me, and
on which I had composed a few pieces; after the performance, Pogo took
the instrument, then gave it back to me, saying: "This is now yours; it
has to be yours." The CD, "Eagle's Paradise - The Cittern Project",
is dedicated to him.
Betsy, also a brilliant and
multi-talented scholar, works in the fields of language, psychology, and
internet design. She is the author of an interactive accent-reduction
course to help non-english speaking people improve their english, to better
assist them in their careers.
Betsy is an enthusiastic and
much-appreciated supporter of Pogo's musical endeavours, and our jamming.
They both are wicked cooks. And of course, their two kids, John and
Kate, are also very gifted and interesting individuals.
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