THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 37 JUNE 8-15, 1990

Lunar Adventures Goes Fission

T

he time of the fusion
bands has passed. Is
it now time for musical fission?
The members of the local
quartet Lunar Adventures
seem to think so. Like the fusioners, they're working with

Off Beat
ALEX VARTY
electricity, song forms, and
jazz. but while fusion, so
promising initially. now
seems stuck in the rut of its
own formalized conventions,
the music that Lunar makes
develops in a series of leaps
and divisions. Their songs
can be shattered and rebuilt,
and their electricity doesn't
come entirely from a wall outlet.
This is most obviously apparent in a live setting, where
the group can take some
spontaneous, strange, and often strangely attractive twists
in its pursuit of invention.
If you're listening to Lunar,
listen first and listen close to
Gregg Simpson's drumming.
You'll hear, in the wash and
pulse of his cymbals and
snare, that there's a song, a
chant evocative of times and
places other than our own.
Sometimes futuristic, sometimes tribal, Simpson's
rhythms are one heartbeat of
Lunar Adventures, and they
beat not with stiff metrical
precision but with all the fluidity of breath.
Over Simpson's magnificent
roil, three other heartbeats
pulse.
Bassist Clyde Reed offers
the band another centre, with
his muscular tug and twang.
He doesn't walk so much as
coil note upon note in tumbling acrobatics: his work is a
flow of surprises.
Ron Samworth and Coat
Cooke are Lunar Adventures'
speaking voices: the nature of
their instruments makes
their contributions slightly
less physically immediate
than those of their bandmates, yet they are no less
compelling.
Samworth's electric guitar
has an unusually versatile
voice. Sometimes it shouts
with bluesy passion; elsewhere it can take on a hyperarticulate
sheen
of
intellectual vigour. It's hard

Not fusion but fission, Lunar Adventures' music draws on jazz and a variety of ethnic forms
to produce a splintered kaleidoscope of instrumental and compositional colours.

not to compare Samworth to
John Scofield, but the parallels are becoming less valid
with time, as this young player matures. And they don't
exist when Samworth is
speaking in another one of
his voices, a heavily processed low-frequency moan
that seems to address all of
the things that can't be said
in more conventional musical
terms.
Cooke has a more singular
voice, although it, too, can
range from a muffled, breathy
roar to an edgy squawk: his
tenor saxophone playing is
steeped in the traditions of
Ben Webster, Archie Shepp,
and John Coltrane, yet imitates none of those greats.
Cooke uses the classic saxophone vocabulary to enlarge
his own probing instincts.
All of these individual qualities are represented on Lunar Adventures' first CD
release, Alive In Seattle. The
disc works well, perhaps in
part because it is a live
recording, and the group can
be heard flexing its lmprovi-

sational sinews on nearly 60
minutes' worth of extended
compositions. There's a regional quality to some of the
compositions (Gregg Simpson's writing in particular, is
tied in to his unique sense of
place and cross-cultural interactions, as a person of
Scottish descent living on the
edge of the Dollarton Native
reserve and in the rain forest,
and as an internationally respected painter with strong
ties to the surrealist tradition), but the quality of the
playing is anything but "local".
Like any artist, Cooke isn't
quite satisfied with his finished product. "It's a good
document of the band as it
was when we recorded it," he
says , and has nothing but
praise for 9 Winds, the Los
Angeles-based, artist-run
record label that released it
(and a compilation CD of
Vancouver-based New Orchestra Workshop groups, including Lunar), but he knows
that his band has already
outgrown that particular set

of performances.
He cites a new solidity that
has developed between himself and his 16-year playing
partner Simpson (the two
have been playing as an informal duet between Lunar
rehearsals ), saying that it has
resulted in more moments of
intimacy-solos,
duets,
trios-within the basic quartet format, and that it has
also upped the amount of
musical telepathy ("it's not
there all the time, but it's
there") that the band ,can
muster.
"We've been coming back to
Lunar with all of this energy
that we've developed, and it's
making me hungry to play
more with all four of us," says
Cooke.
With two du Maurier Jazz
Festival appearances in the
works (at Isadora's on June
23 and as part of the free
Jazz at the Plaza concerts on
June 30), Lunar will get to do
just that in the very near future, and the band will surely
provide Adventures for us
all. ■

THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 38 JUNE 8- IS, 1990

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