Toronto

Bringing my music to Canada

Hello and welcome to all my new subscribers!

The post below is a journal of my trip to Toronto to play music last week, and it has a few audio and video clips embedded. Please take some time to listen to the music with care. Thank you!

I was away last week performing in and around Toronto, Canada. Guitarist Michael Occhipinti and cellist Roman Borys from the Gryphon Trio invited me to return to this vibrant town to collaborate with them. I have played several times in Toronto in the last 20 years. During my time as a biology student at MacDonald College of McGill University in the 1970s I played in Mélange, a band that played original music for a while in Québec and Ontario.

This past Saturday we played a concert at Hugh’s Room in Toronto. Joining our program was The Gryphon Trio, Canada’s premier chamber ensemble,plus several other musicians. I have collaborated with the Gryphons several times over the years, but it had been a while since my last visit to Toronto.

During the recent pandemic I had composed a new suite for piano trio (piano, cello, violin) for the Eroica Trio plus flutist Viviana Guzmán, commissioned by our dear friend Ted Viviani, who left us before we could celebrate the release of this music with a performance. You can listen to the entire recording of Suite Delas here, produced by Silas Brown in 2022.

This invitation to play in Toronto by Michael Occhipinti from Hugh’s Room became an opportunity to perform some of this music in front of an audience. The venue is a former church, built in 1894. The wooden nave (as the name implies, the ceiling of the church resembles an overturned boat hull) made the acoustics of the room become favorable to our instrumentation of strings, piano and flute, trumpet, melodica, drums, bass, guitar and percussion. The Gryphon Trio (Annalee Patipatanakoon, violin; Roman Borys, cello; Jamie Parker, piano) chose two movements from my Suite Delas, Choro Escondido (Hidden Choro) and Baião Sapeca (Naughty Baião). I played flute on the first and melodica on the second. Normally, I play both instruments mostly in an improvised context in my shows, but this time I had to read the notes I originally wrote for Viviana, meaning that I had to practice on the flute to be able to accomplish half of what Viviana did on the recording. In the Baião Sapeca, my flute chops were not up to the task, and I made the decision to play the part on melodica, closer to the accordion, one of the main instruments in the northeastern music of Brazil. The keys of the melodica resemble a piano, but they are a lot smaller, so in order to play written melodies I needed to close my eyes and imagine that my hands were also tiny, almost like a cartoon character (certainly not like a certain buffelon’s hands who has been on the news lately). The melodica challenges you to map your fingers differently in your brain. If any footage of the performance of these two pieces becomes public in the future, I will share it here with you.

In addition to the world premiere of these two pieces, we also played an arrangement for piano trio of the beautiful Frevo by Egberto Gismonti that I did many years ago, based on a chart I wrote for the Pró Arte Wind Orchestra in 2015. Here is that recording, prefaced by a piano introduction by the composer himself:

We also played the third movement of Vida e Volta, a suite I composed in 2003 for piano and string quartet. Here I imagined a sort of plant grafting technique applied to music. The third movement, titled Pra Casa (Going Home), has the standard rondo form of choro (three parts played as AA-B-AA-CC-A). The musical/genetic modification came when I combined the piano/string quartet version of this choro (which you can hear here on a live recording in Toronto in 2005 with me on piano, a string quartet, Roberto Occhipinti on bass and Maninho on percussion). We expanded the A section when it repeats for some improvised solos.

…And there is this other version, recorded in 2010 with my Quinteto on the album Current, with Mark Ivester on drums, Jeff Busch on bongos, Chuck Deardorf on bass and Harvey Wainapel on clarinet and bass clarinet:

The challenge was to do that quickly, as we only had a couple of days to morph these two facets of Pra Casa into one performance. The result? Well, maybe someone will post a video from last Saturday online, and if anyone sees that, let me know.

The program also had my arrangement for piano and string quartet of Pixinguinha’s delightful maxixe Ainda Me Recordo. After the intermission we returned as a jazz quintet, and we played 3 of my songs, Patuscada, Trio de Quatro and Pontapé with Roberto Occhipinti on bass, his brother Michael Occhipinti on guitar, Mark Kelso on drums and Alan Hetherington on percussion.

It’s not often that we can play such a diverse array of musical colors in one performance, but the whole program ran under two hours, including an intermission. We ended the concert by playing some arrangements written for the entire cast. Are You Going With Me? is a Pat Metheny/Lyle Mays composition from the 1980s. The melody has a great ascending shape. Roberto Occhipinti, a bassist, composer and arranger (and a dear friend of mine for decades) arranged it for our extended ensemble, with me on melodica. Here’s a live video from Saturday:

We did my arrangement of Tom Jobim/Vinícius de Moraes iconic song A Felicidade and closed the show with Roberto’s version of Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays’ Minuano.

Next morning Roberto, Mark Kelso and I drove out to Kitchener, west of Toronto, where we played 2 sets of my originals on a Sunday afternoon at the Jazz Room, a wonderful listening room . What a contrast to bounce around in a trio after the large ensemble concerts the night before! In addition to the pleasure of rehearsing and performing all these notes, the joy of meeting old friends and making new ones is what remains with me today. During the flights from and to Seattle I caught up with reading The Master and His Emissary by IainMcGilchrist, which I recommend to anyone interested in how music travels in our different brains. This book has a biological, psychological and music approach, and I am enjoying reading it very slowly, never more than 10 pages at a time. It is to be savored like any piece of art. Slow reading is a zen activity.

I appreciate all of you, especially those who have upgraded their subscriptions to a paid level. I have many more stories to tell you, and this platform is an ideal place to connect with you. Thanks for your support, which enables me to continue doing it.

Until soon, obrigado!

Jovino