Tag: vancouver

Buy a Record, Make a Difference is a new series we have created to help local musicians generate income during COVID-19. It is based on the principle that we should support and reward the hard work local artists have already put into recordings, as it is an immensely difficult undertaking to be creating new material under current circumstances. There is currently a lot of emphasis on livestreaming and innovation in our industry, and while those things absolutely have their place, we think it’s also important to boost projects that have already been completed.

In each post, we’ll ask a local artist a series of the same questions, give them the opportunity to talk about recordings they’re proud of, and ask them to talk about other local musicians whose work they admire. It’s our hope that you’ll take the time to listen to & purchase the work of local artists, or at the very least share their work with others.

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ANITA ECCLESTON

1. Who are you? 

I am a jazz vocalist, trumpeter, bandleader, songwriter and educator. After my jazz studies at McGill, I returned to BC to my hometown of Kamloops, where I further honed my craft and began cultivating repertoire before moving to Vancouver in 2011.

In addition to my solo jazz project, I’ve been fortunate enough over the years to play in a wide array of ensembles. From classical orchestras, to rock bands, my trumpet has helped me find a home in so many diverse musical scenarios. Most recently I’ve been playing with an all-female Mariachi band (Las Estrellas de Vancouver). 

My hobbies are hanging out with my bearded dragon, gardening, listening to music, podcasts, and reading. 

2. Describe your music as best you can.

I love performing jazz in traditional ways, although I tend to write more eclectic music. The music I consume is wide ranging so my performances and recordings reflect this diversity, while retaining the pulse of jazz throughout. My voice, whether singing or playing is imbued with the influences I’ve drawn from, most especially Amy Winehouse, Miles Davis, Chet Baker and Billie Holiday. 

When hearing me play live you can expect a carefully crafted show mixing original material with choice covers from the jazz canon, and many genres like soul, funk, blues and pop. 

I am currently writing music for both my solo project as well as for Girl A Girl B, formed last summer with my twin sister, oboist Elizabeth Eccleston and cellist Doug Gorkoff. This collaboration has led us to create unique arrangements of 80’s, 90’s and 2000’s pop songs, wrapped up in twin vocal harmonies and electric ukulele.   

3. What’s your latest recording (or a recording you’d like to promote)? Where can people get it?

I made an album of jazz standards called More Trumpet. I wanted to create a sweet straight ahead record that people could enjoy over dinner or drinks, in the garden or in the car. My trio brings together Graham Clark on upright bass, guitarist and vocalist Andrew R. Smith (Sweetpea Swing Band), and guesting on several tracks, Doug Gorkoff (Black Dog String Quartet) on cello. 

The title was kind of a joke at first. I am often cheering “MORE TRUMPET!” at concerts, believing everybody needs a little more trumpet in their lives. It still seemed apt after we finished recording, especially since this album features more trumpet than my previous offerings, so we kept it. 

My first full length release is an original album called So It Goes. It is a collection of songs written over the course of 10 years and released in 2014. The album features 21 musicians over 11 tracks — a patchwork quilt produced while cutting my teeth at songwriting and collaborating. 

More Trumpet and So It Goes are available for digital download or on CD on my website as well as on all online platforms (Spotify, Amazon, Apple Music).

4. Is there another local musician whose work you’d like to give a shout out to? 

Here’s a whole hearted shoutout to my friend Sam Davidson, an incredible composer, clarinetist and EWI (Electronic Wind Instrument) player. He plays an integral role with the band Brasstronaut, and his solo project is called Skim Milk, where he produces original instrumental music using sound samples, keyboards and even his bass clarinet. I’d call it “ambient lounge contemplative”. His music can be found here on bandcamp.

Buy a Record, Make a Difference is a new series we have created to help local musicians generate income during COVID-19. It is based on the principle that we should support and reward the hard work local artists have already put into recordings, as it is an immensely difficult undertaking to be creating new material under current circumstances. There is currently a lot of emphasis on livestreaming and innovation in our industry, and while those things absolutely have their place, we think it’s also important to boost projects that have already been completed.

In each post, we’ll ask a local artist a series of the same questions, give them the opportunity to talk about recordings they’re proud of, and ask them to talk about other local musicians whose work they admire. It’s our hope that you’ll take the time to listen to & purchase the work of local artists, or at the very least share their work with others.

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ANDRE LACHANCE

1. Who are you? 

My name is André Lachance. I’m originally from Québec City and have been living here in Vancouver for 30 years. I play, perform and record on double-bass, electric bass and guitar. I also teach lessons and workshops, compose, watch hockey, ride my bike and enjoy supporting the small businesses in my neighbourhood. Also I like dogs.

Over the years, I have been a part of Vancouver-based ensembles the Peggy Lee Group, Brad Turner Quartet, Hard Rubber Orchestra, Chris Gestrin Trio, Kevin Elaschuk’s groups, Oddity and many more. I’ve also been blessed to perform with visiting international artists Lee Konitz, Clark Terry, Kenny Wheeler, Benny Golson, Joe Lovano, Kenny Werner, Gary Bartz, Roy McCurdy and many others. 

2. Describe your music as best you can.

As far as my own music is concerned, I’ve lead a group on guitar for the last 10 years (most often the group leads me..) that performs my original tunes, Quatuor Andre Lachance. It’s a mix of jazz, prog rock, weird sounds and pretty sounds, with a broad range of compositional influences and with vintage synth bass, like the old Stevie Wonder records. Brad Turner, Chris Gestrin, Joe Poole are in this group and we released an album in 2017 called “The Orange Challenge” and are slowly working towards another. On double bass, I often play in a horn(s)/bass/drums format and have a current project with Joe Poole, Jon Bentley and Brad Turner that was scheduled to perform in the 2020 Vancouver Jazz Fest. 

3. What’s your latest recording (or a recording you’d like to promote)? Where can people get it?

The latest one that just came out this spring is a live recording with the Brad Turner Quartet plus the fantastic Seamus Blake that was recorded at Frankie’s a little over a year ago. 

4. Is there another local musician whose work you’d like to give a shout out to? 

I’d like to nominate Jeff Younger. Aside from being an all around awesome dude and great and eclectic musician and composer, he has also done a lot over the years to help foster the scene, whether by carrying on with various music projects but also the important work of helping to run and manage small DIY music venues, to give us places to play and hang and enjoy listening to creative groups.

Buy a Record, Make a Difference is a new series we have created to help local musicians generate income during COVID-19. It is based on the principle that we should support and reward the hard work local artists have already put into recordings, as it is an immensely difficult undertaking to be creating new material under current circumstances. There is currently a lot of emphasis on livestreaming and innovation in our industry, and while those things absolutely have their place, we think it’s also important to boost projects that have already been completed.

In each post, we’ll ask a local artist a series of the same questions, give them the opportunity to talk about recordings they’re proud of, and ask them to talk about other local musicians whose work they admire. It’s our hope that you’ll take the time to listen to & purchase the work of local artists, or at the very least share their work with others.

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JULIA ULEHLA

1. Who are you? 

I am a vocalist, composer/devisor, and soon-to-be Dr. Ethnomusicologist based in Vancouver, with former lives as an opera singer and laboratory theatre actress. I’m a mother of two young girls, and I try to find ways to coherently integrate creative life, research life, and domestic life.

2. Describe your music as best you can.

As an artist, I am probably most interested in the many expressions of vitality and life force behind music and sound. I try to hone my craft so that as many of those expressions as possible might manifest through me. I would say that I am an improviser, but my practice doesn’t involve improvising over chord changes, or exploring vocal effects and extended technique. Although I worked as an opera singer for several years, the place where I really learned how to sing was a laboratory theatre hidden in a village in Tuscany—it’s called the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards—where I was a resident actress for about five years. Of all the art-making I have seen in my life, the performance work that is done there is among the most profound I have witnessed. It was more like a mystery school or a monastery than a theatre. My colleagues and I sang the same melodies for hours a day, 6 days a week, 48 weeks a year, year after year. The practice asked that you recognize your own banalities and habits, and realize when you are just going through the motions. Eventually, for me at least, it engendered the desire to sing with all that I had, without hiding—almost like a sacred act. It helped me to become attuned to following a song and giving it agency to do what I could never come up with on my own. The practice could be described as a kind of deep receptivity—to song, collaborators, audience, room, time of day, year, what else? What does a song need, at any given moment, to be alive? As the band members of Dálava know (Dálava is one of my main projects), while we always make a set list, it usually goes out the window after the first or second song, as the life of the thing takes the reins. Even though we may play the same songs, they are never the same way twice—what can manifest as tender and delicate one night, might manifest as raw and trashy the next. Maybe for me performance is a little bit more akin to ritual, or catharsis, or as a vehicle for communitas, than as a spectacle, or entertainment, or display of virtuosity. And, lest I get carried away, singing and song are also just an extremely basic element of existence, like breathing. Some of my earliest memories are of my mother singing, and as I raise my girls, song is bouncing off walls and corners everywhere in our house—silly, somber, wild, elegant. 

3. What’s your latest recording (or a recording you’d like to promote)? Where can people get it?

The last Dálava record, The Book of Transfigurations, came out in 2017. You can get it here. We were supposed to record another album this June, and I had planned to debut two new works at the Monheim Triennale in Germany this summer, but then corona came around! My husband Aram Bajakian and I recently did a collaboration with Martin Shaw, the wonderful British mythologist/author/storyteller, in which we scored one of his original stories about a shape-shifting goddess who tries to reignite her love with Manannán mac Lir, the Irish god of the sea. Martin’s language is so rich and wild-ish, and as he describes the sound world, “it’s like being at midnight mass in some snowy Carpathian chapel filled with mermaids, Welsh poets and the Baal Shem Tov.” But wait—alongside promoting those recordings, let me suggest another form of sound that people might engage with. Quarantine offers new avenues for domestic creativity. It is a great time for songs and stories at home—no matter who you live with. I sometimes think to myself—what would these months look like if people started making music in their own homes, playing and experimenting? I have found that song heritage is a powerful creative catalyst (much of my work involves reanimating a song tradition that quasi-died when my dad emigrated to North America from Czechoslovakia). For me there has been so much to discover in the old songs of my heritage, and they are remarkably relevant to the times we are in. So yes, please buy music. But also, try making your own music! Sing a song your grandma sang! Go check out an online folk song archive and figure out what people sang in the part of the world that your people come from—if you don’t already know.

4. Is there another local musician whose work you’d like to give a shout out to? 

I love Vancouver’s creative music scene, and as these blogs attest, creators are busy creating! Many of my favorites in the creative music scene have been mentioned by other artists, so I am going to give a shout out to I Putu Gede Sukaryana (also known as Balot). Balot is a gamelan musician here in Vancouver for a few years as he gets a degree at UBC and leads the gamelan. Although he is steeped in Balinese gamelan, he is a masterful percussionist, innovative composer, and vibrant performer who has been getting sucked into the orbit of the creative and improvised music scene here more and more, in part because of his wide open mind. I admire his huge, joyful spirit and generous musicality. He and I have been working on a duo that we were going to do at Jazz Fest, in which we made a spatialized sound structure that is “efficacious” for both of us—coming from two very different musical cultures. Check out his labor-of-love Insitu Recordings (with Jonathan Adams); it is well worth diving into!