Stet Lab celebrates its third birthday with trumpeter Ian Smith

Monday, 15 November 2010

9:00 pm (doors: 8:45 pm)

Upstairs @ The Roundy [map…]
Castle Street
Cork, Ireland

€10 (€5)

Stet Lab will be welcoming London-based, Irish virtuoso trumpeter Ian Smith in celebration of the third anniversary of Cork’s monthly improvised music club. The event takes place on Monday, 15 November 2010, upstairs at The Roundy, Castle Street, Cork, Ireland, at 9:00 pm (doors open at 8:45 pm).

Mainstay of the London improvised music scene, Ian Smith is best known as cofounder of the London Improvisers’ Orchestra, and The Gathering. He has performed with improvisers such as Evan Parker, John Stevens, Maggie Nicols, Steve Beresford, Eddie Prévost, Reeves Gabrels and Harris Eisenstadt. His second CD as a leader, Daybreak, featured Derek Bailey, Veryan Weston, Gail Brand and Oren Marshall, and his most recent release is with the spontaneous mashup ensemble Mathilde 253 with Charles Hayward and Han-earl Park plus Lol Coxhill.

Smith’s playing has been described as a “revelation…. There is a clear jazz edge to his tone, which sounds almost radical these days when many trumpet players in the improv world seem inclined to turn their back on that vocabulary. But he can also dip down to breathy flutters and muted coloristic playing” (Michael Rosenstein, Signal to Noise). His style has been compared to Wadada Leo Smith and Joe McPhee: “gestures seem to derive from earlier forms of jazz, and there are moments of harmonic directness that you could put chord symbols under. But it has all been thoughtfully moulded into a highly convincing and distinctive language” (Philip Clark, JazzReview).

Joining Smith on stage for the Stet Lab event will be Cork-based guitarist, and fellow member of Mathilde 253, Han-earl Park.

Opening the event will be a trio of Stet Lab regulars, Andrea Bonino (guitar and electronics), Helena Reilly (voice) and Athoulis Tsiopani (keyboard).

For three years Stet Lab has both introduced new blood into Cork’s musical life as well as fostering local talent. Cork’s monthly improvised music event, Stet Lab is a space in which improvisers can meet, play and learn from one another. Since its launch in November 2007, it has successfully brought together improvising musicians with varied experiences and from far afield; hosted twenty-two events with twenty-seven guest artists, including eighteen international visitors.

The event will begin at 9:00 pm (doors open at 8:45 pm) and entry is €10 (€5).

Next month’s Stet Lab will take place on Monday, 6 December 2010, featuring the exciting Derby-based vibraphonist Corey Mwamba.

the performers

Ian Smith has been playing since he was fifteen. He has studied with Joe Csibi (principal trumpet in the Irish National Symphony Orchestra) and Bobby Shew (Buddy Rich, Horace Silver bands) as well as learning harmony from Trevor England (ex-Berklee). As a bass he was a Vocal Scholar of the College of Music and a Choral Scholar of Christchurch Cathedral, Dublin. There is a strong tradition of trumpet playing in Smith’s family, his grandfather Chick Smith played in many British dance bands from the 1930s onwards and his cousin Jimmie Deuchar was at the forefront of British bop as well as playing in the Clarke/Boland Big Band. During the mid-80s while in Trinity College, Dublin, he arranged music for and played on many recording sessions, including jingles for the Bank of Ireland, a TV documentary score and singles for local rock bands. He has also composed and performed for theatrical productions including a version of Joyce’s Nighttown scene from Ulysses at the Project theatre, Dublin.

He has guested on albums by highly established Irish songwriters like Luka Bloom and Mick Hanley. He joined post-punk band the Real Wild West in the late 80s and gigged frequently with them for three years, including playing the Eurorock Festival ’87 in Frankfurt, the Mean Fiddler in London and supporting Echo and the Bunnymen and the Pogues in Ireland. The Real Wild West single was produced by Pogues Shane MacGowan and Philip Chevron; the album was produced by John Langford of The Mekons. Ian Smith appeared at the Cork International Jazz Festival in 1988 and 1989, playing a set with saxophonist Richie Cole in ’89. He has been involved in duo and trio gigs with guitarist Louis Stewart. He moved over to London in 1990 and in May ’91 co-founded the group Forest which quickly became established on the London freeform scene. He was a sometime member of the Screech Owls, a rock band which featured former Virgin Prune Dik Evans, which performed at the Mean Fiddler.

Since 1992 he has been playing improvised music and has performed with Evan Parker, John Stevens, Maggie Nicols, Lol Coxhill, Steve Beresford and Eddie Prévost among others. His own trio, Trian, has played at the 1993 London Experimental Music Festival and the 1992 Soho Jazz Festival. He also participated in a reformation of Cornelius Cardew’s Scratch Orchestra in the ICA in 1994. He has collaborated with composer Roger Doyle, winner of the Bourges International Elecro-Acoustic Music Competition 1997, and he has been featured on two instrumental tracks by the hip hop band Marxman. He toured the UK with Butch Morris’ London Skyscraper conduction project in November 1997.

He helped to institute the London Improvisers Orchestra in 1998 with Steve Beresford and Evan Parker, which continues to play monthly in London and has recently performed at the BimHuis in Amsterdam. He also founded The Gathering with Maggie Nichols.

In 2000 he recorded his second CD as a leader, Daybreak, with Derek Bailey, Veryan Weston, Gail Brand and Oren Marshall. Into the twenty-first century, as well as regularly playing with London improvisers, he has also performed with Greg Tate’s Burnt Sugar Arkestra, guitarists Han-earl Park, Reeves Gabrels, the Poet and Detriot legend John Sinclair, and New York-based drummer Harris Eisenstadt.

Smith’s style has the free-form panache of a Wadada Leo Smith or Joe McPhee, but his experience of other musics is never too far from the surface. Some of his gestures seem to derive from earlier forms of jazz, and there are moments of harmonic directness that you could put chord symbols under. But it has all been thoughtfully moulded into a highly convincing and distinctive language.

(Philip Clark, JazzReview)

Smith’s trumpet playing is a particular revelation. His brassy blats and smears play off of the hyperactive spatters of Eisenstadt’s drums. There is a clear jazz edge to his tone, which sounds almost radical these days when many trumpet players in the improv world seem inclined to turn their back on that vocabulary. But he can also dip down to breathy flutters and muted coloristic playing.

(Michael Rosenstein, Signal to Noise)

Improviser, guitarist and constructor Han-earl Park works from/within/around traditions of fuzzily idiomatic, on occasion experimental, mostly open improvised musics, sometimes engineering theater, sometimes inventing ritual. He feels the gravitational pull of collaborative, multi-authored contexts, and has performed in clubs, theaters, art galleries, concert halls, and (ad-hoc) alternative spaces in Denmark, England, Ireland, The Netherlands, Scotland and the USA.

He is involved in ongoing collaborations with Bruce Coates, and with Franziska Schroeder, fifteen year long associations with Alex Fiennes and Murray Campbell. Recent performances include ensemble Mathilde 253 (Park, Charles Hayward and Ian Smith) with Lol Coxhill, a duo concert with Paul Dunmall, a trio with Kato Hideki and Katie O’Looney, an improvisative meeting with Thomas Buckner and Jesse Ronneau, and the performance of Pauline Oliveros’ ‘Droniphonia’ alongside the composer. He has appeared at festivals including Sonic Acts (Amsterdam), the Center for Experiments in Art, Information and Technology Festival (California), dialogues festival (Edinburgh), Sonorities (Belfast) and VAIN Live Art (Oxford).

Park founded and curates Stet Lab, a monthly improvised music space in Cork, Ireland, and teaches improvisation at the UCC School of Music.

During the 1990s Andrea Bonino performed regularly with Eugenio Sanna and Nanni Canale, who had been students of Donal Rafael Garrett during his years in Pisa, Italy. A friend of John Coltrane, Garret encouraged musicians to learn to be creative on many instruments instead of focusing on mastering one. Andrea followed this advice and still likes to keep an experimental attitude in his work, improvising on guitars and other stringed devices, electronics, objects and toys. Among others he has played with Mike Cooper, Roger Turner, Steve Noble, Roberto Bellatalla, and with the late Mississippi blues legend R. L. Burnside.

Here’s a little back-story: in my first semi-public attempts as an improvising guitarist, I had my guitar, amp and volume pedal… plus a compressor, a distortion box, a delay pedal and a chorus unit. Eventually, this chain would be joined by a wah. (I did, incidentally, my first recordings (a piece by Pedro Rebelo) with more or less this complex of equipment.)

Why am I going through this guitar-geek fetish confession? I started as an improvising guitarist of the ‘if-only-I-had-a-gizmo-I-would-rock’ school of wishful, self-delusion. Somewhere in my head, I had this naive idea that what separated me from the Frisells and Friths of the world was the hardware. (Oh, I almost got myself, don’t laugh, an SG thinking that this would get me closer to Frisell and Zappa.)

Yet Bailey never got better than with a guitar, terrible sounding fuzz box, a volume pedal and amp. Heck, Braxton, age 24, got two LPs from a single alto.

Who was I kidding here?

I only got through my personal-political-musical-technical hiccups and hang-ups by jettisoning, first the wah, then the compressor and delay, and eventually the distortion and the chorus boxes.

Fast-forward to the present…

I feel I’ve melowed from my fundamentalist, luddite stance from years ago, but, as I sat watching Katie O’Looney setup her behemoth kit, as I helped her carry her atomized percussion setup out of her van, up the stairs, into the performance space, I couln’t quite figure out what I was feeling.

My mentors include those who enroll gargantuan complex of musical resources and those who do not. How do I figure in this equation? There are, of course, pragmatic dimensions to this (I travel from one gig to another, by and large, via public transport), but nonetheless what are the political/ideological implications of subscribing to one position?

Part choice, perhaps: I did, for example, suggest to Owen Sutton that he might want to “decide whether you’re an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink drummer (a la Tony Oxley), or happier with a more spartan approach (like Joey Baron). Neither [is] the wrong choice, of course….” Sure, neither’s wrong, but neither are they neutral; they have very different implications and possibilities.

During a chat with Murray Campbell after the January Stet Lab we discovered we both had worked with Menlo Macfarlane, a Canadian artist/performer now based in Nevada County. I remember Menlo talking about writer’s block, and saying something like: “if you sit at your desk and you assume the writer’s posture, then The Writer will come through you… things to write will pop up in your mind, connect to each other and so on….”

While this might explain why this could become a looooong post (you can blame The Writer), it actually says a lot about the way I think about my approach to musical improvisation… in my experience I have encountered improvisation first as an outcome of African heritage, and always felt some sort of connection with possession rituals and the practice of collective improvisation.

In the best moments when music really works, I still have the impression that music is coming through the musicians, and the musicians receive it and transmit it more or less like a radio set… think about that weird and beautiful sound that came out of your instrument almost by accident, and that you are trying to recreate with no success and you get the picture.

In musical practice this translates as not trusting my intellect to take too much hold on my performance, not trusting it to make decisions or devising strategies on its own.

Nerve endings that report external temperature and humidity percentage, and my sense of smell have probably as much input in what I’m playing as information that my ears report to my brain.

Finally getting to February 2009 Stet Lab, I must say that there was a great energy all night and the music felt powerful and engaging from the very first minute and throughout all performances. I was honored to have to chance to sit-in with Paul Dunmall, Mark Sanders, Neil O’Loghlen and Katie O’Looney for the first piece, and also Han-earl Park, Jamie Smith and Paul Dowling for the final jam… I loved it, and got the feeling the audience enjoyed it too.

I brought my lapsteel, which is becoming less of a tool for sliding than a source of interesting sounds, and went straight into scratchy mode, looking to explore the highest possible pitches I can get from it and the in-between-pickups zone… I find that not knowing what I’m going to do generally helps… that’s probably why I like to engage in different instruments, and get the freshness/sense of wonder at the sounds that only a beginner can get from an instrument… I generally get bored and not happy with myself when I realize my performance relies too much on tricks and material that I know well… I guess my strategy could be summed up as: Risks First.

I thank everyone that worked towards organizing this Stet Lab and run it as smooth as possible, and thank especially Jamie and Katie for pushing the limits and bringing in some rock’n’roll.