[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

GG: sort of an unexpected sighting



Hi, f-minors

For a possible series of totally unexpected sightings of GG
(or, after all, not so...)

I've just bought a jazz recording, of the trumpetist and composer Kenny
Wheeler
(All the More, Soul Note 121236) and look what I've found in the liner
notes 
(by the very interesting British saxophonist Evan Parker):

"Is it too neat to start locating Kenny Wheeler among a select group of
musicians all losely of the same generation who seem to represent a
specifically Canadian sensibility? Paul Bley, Glenn Gould, Joni
Mitchell, Kenny Wheeler. Each of these great artists has for me an
absolutely recognizable personal style but they also have in common an
intensely felt, hard-won lyricism expressed through what seems like an
entirely innate musicianship, speaking to the listener of an inner-life
lived entirely in the realm of music. It is also immediately apparent
though, that each has worked long and hard at the craft of their art. To
quote Gould, actually talking of Newfoundlanders but in a way that is
perhaps more generally aplicable and may be a key to a specifically
Canadian sensibility, 'perhaps the fact of life aginst the elements...
disciplines their stanzasa, gives an underpinning of reality to their
ever ready impulse to fantasize'"

I happen to be a fan of both GG and Wheeler (and for anyone interested,
I deeply recommend the cds
Music for Large and Small Ensembles, ECM 1415/16 843 152; or The Widow
in the Window, ECM 1417 843 198), but I was quite surprised to see them
associated in a specifically Canadian sensibility (Joni Mitchell I
hardly ever heard; but Paul Bley... well, perhaps it makes some sense,
after all); a certain bittersweet melancholy pervading their most lyric
moments, maybe...?

Or whatever; so I decided to submit this to F-minor, just to see what
comments it may (or not at all) produce.

Greetings,
Marcos Maffei.  




Visit my homepage at:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Ithaca/5467/