A20 - North Shore News - Friday, June 27, 2008

HOMAGE COLLAGE: IMPROV FOR AL NEIL

Improvisers pay tribute to unique artist
Between the Lines
Caroline Skelton
■ Homage Collage: Improv
for Al Neil, June 29, The
Roundhouse (Performance ~
Centre - Innovation Series),
2 p.m. Music and multimedia
show featuring Gregg
Simpson, Paul Plimley, Clyde
Reed, Viviane Houle, Stefan
Smulovitz and Krista Lomax.
Admission free. Info: www.
coastaljazz.ca.

IT was the summer of
1968 in Vancouver, and
the man at the cutting
edge of the underground
art scene was tiding a
big, red bouncy ball.
The location was the
Vancouver Art Gallery; the
event, 39 Wonderful Years
in Showbiz - a 20-minute
collage in which the artist
bounced up and down a series
of neon steps, each specially
designed to bleat out a different
tone, whilst wearing a football
helmet with a lightbulb in the
ear that flashed on and off.
It was a time when collage
art - a merging, in this case,
of dramatic performance and
musical experimentation - and
free jazz were in full swing all
along the West Coast. Media
were being melded, boundaries
were being ripped down and
tossed out.
The man on the ball was
Al Neil - writer, jazz pianist,
multimedia artist, would-be
priest, liberator of Paris and

he started playing jazz piano,
frequenting the Cellar in the
'50s and early '60s.
But when Simpson met him
in 1965, Neil had stepped awar
from the Cellar scene, sick of '
horn players instructing him to
play the straight changes. So
in the years that followed, he
rewrote the score.
Calling on Simpson and
bassist Richard Anstey, he
assembled the Al Neil Trio in
1965. As Simpson, who was
just 18 at the time, records
in his writings about.the era,
their first practice together was
prescient of the years to come:
the 'score' for the evening was a
collage of chopped-up musical
paper and magazines.
The trio rented a piano,
and a studio at Fourth Avenue
and Bayswater in Kitsilano.
The small storefront is now
occupied by a sushi restaurant,
but in those days, it was the
Sound Gallery, a practice space
and all-purpose hangout.
A few months later, they
tacked up a qirdboard sign
advertising Al Neil and his
Royal Canadians, and launched
a series of evening c.onc.erts.
"For donations only," notes
Simpson. ''We found out that
was the way to get around the
- fire regulations."
Even in the early days, the
performances in the shoebox
of a spac.e featured not just the
trio, playing an oft-improvised
photo Michael de Courcy
and frequently apocalyptic
THE Al Neil Trio (Gregg Simpson on drums, Neil at the piano and bassist Richard Anstey) rehearse in their third jazz and noise music, but also
dancers and multimedia artists.
floor studio space at lntermedia on Beatty Street in 1968.
"This was the beginningof the kind of Carnaby Street
post office employee. An
On June 29 at the
much of his long career
priest; who adored the bebop
artist informally crowned
Roundhouse, as part of the
orchestrating diverse media into piano of Bud Powell, Elmo
invasion ofVancouver," says
Simpson. "There wasn't
king ofVancouver's artistic
TD Canada Trust Vancouver
unsteady synchronicity. Books
Hope and Sonny Clark.
meet music. Music meets
anything kind of raw about
underground.
International Jazz Festival,
"So freedom," says
Or maybe not king, exactly.
Simpson and friends will
theatre. Musical neon steps
Simpson. ''Yeah, he was part of it yet, but it did get that way
later."
·
"I wouldn't say king
perform a fitting tribute to
meet football helmets.
it: artistic freedom."
because he never lorded it over
Neil, now 84 - Homage
"He's a real purist and
Both politically and
The Sound Gallery soon
musically. As a young man, Neµ upgraded to a larger space
anybody," says Gregg Simpson, Collage: Improv for Al Neil,
uncompromising," says
Neil's longtime friend, a North
will feature piano, bass,
Simpson. The philosophy
fought in the Second World
at 1236 Seymour, dubbed
Vancouver visual artist and
drums and vocals alongside
behind his work, if you need to
War, playing boogie-woogie
Motion Studio - there was a
drummer in the seminal Al Neil video, images and electronic
name it, is something like Dada piano in the bars of Paris
spot for aspiring poets, and a
meets mysticism - a man who
Trio.
experimentation.
during the liberation. When
Seer, maybe.
Neil, after all, has spent
at one time wanted to be a
he returned to Vancouver,
See Trio page 21

photo submitted

AL Neil (piano), Bob Frogge (vibraphone), Freddy Schreiber (bass), Bill Boyle
(drums) and John Dawe (trumpet) made up one of the Cellar "house" bands during
the late '50s. For a history of the Vancouver jazz club see John Dawe's article, The
Cellar April 1956-Jan. 1963, at www.greggsimpson.com/Cellar_Story.html. '