ARTS

The musicof Oswald'smind
> BY ALEXANDER

W

VARTY

ant to make John
Oswald a happy man?
Search your junk
drawer or instrument
cases for unused Macaffery Futurity
saxophone reeds, which had a brief
vogue during the plastic-happy 1950s.
"I seem to have the world's supply,"
says the renegade media artist and
musician, calling from his Toronto
headquarters. "I got my first one for
free out of a candy dish at a local music store in Waterloo back in the early
'70s, and when I decided I preferred
them to cane reeds I bought out their
supply, which was several hundred.
And then somewhere in the mid- to
late-'70s, I tracked down the guy who
ran the company, who said 'Oh, yeah,
we still make those,' and he sent me a
few, but they were of an inferior plastic. They had moved their focus over
to making 8-track tapes, which was
probably the end of them."
A few of Oswald's Futurities will
get a workout when he joins the New
Orchestra Workshop at the Scotiabank
Dance Centre next Friday (November
24). "Yeah,I managed to get my foot in
the door for that," he notes with a hint lin Concertoby Tchaikovsky,with Ausof amusement. Despite his 30-year tralian improviser Jon Rose as soloist.
history as an improvising saxophonist,
In it, the soloist is not required to
he doesn't often share the stage with play anything that Peter Ilich Tchaijazz performers-even ones as open- kovsky specified in his original conminded as NOW artistic director Coat certo score, but the orchestra performs
Cooke and his accomplices.
it more or less straight. "It's about the
Instead, it's Oswald's brain as contrast between a very familiar thing
much as his instrument that will be coming from the orchestra and a very
the draw on Friday. Having essen- unfamiliar thing coming from the sotially invented the remix with his loist-which is my way of dealing with
Plunderphonics experiments in the concerti in general," says Oswald.
early 1980s-and despite suffering ''I've always found them kind of anthe wrath of Sony as the result-he's
noying; they're just putting the soloist
continuing to experiment with re- in a straitjacket."
contextualizing other people's music
The forum he's arranged for Diane
in a variety of provocative ways.
Labrosse, the soloist in his as-yetFor instance, he's just returned from untitled commission for NOW, does
Glasgow, where the BBC Scottish Or- have certain restrictions, but it's no less
chestra premiered Oswald'sFirst Vio- unconventional. Essentially, the key~

boardist and conductor's sampler will
be loaded with instrumental quotes
from the jazz canon, which she'll introduce and mutate based on input
from a casino-style roulette wheel.
"It's going to be a little bit like one
of those game shows, a Wheel of Fortune sort of thing,'' Oswald allows. "I
definitely wanted something where
it would be apparent to the audience
what's going on. It's not a bunch of
hidden operations that are producing a purely abstract piece of music. I
wanted it all out in the open."
As with all concerts of experimental music, chance is a factor
here-but there's a good possibility
Oswald's eccentric intelligence will
produce provocative and perhaps
even wildly entertaining music. ◊