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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Trumpeter inspired by fellow horn man

By: Chris Smith

8/02/2010 1:00 AM | Comments: 0

Supplied photo Dave Lisik, left, with fellow trumpeter Tim Hagans, has recorded a big band album inspired by a Michael Ondaatje book.

Former Winnipegger Dave Lisik combines jazz, history, myth and fiction in his latest project, a big band CD inspired by Michael Ondaatje's fictional look at New Orleans cornet player Buddy Bolden, Coming Through Slaughter.

Bolden, who was born in 1876 and died in 1931, was considered one of the best musicians in the Big Easy until he was committed to a mental institution in 1907, where he remained until his death. Helping to fuel his legend is the fact there are no recordings of his playing.

Ondaatje's 1976 book draws on what historical record there is, but Lisik, a jazz trumpeter and professor, had no such resource.

That turned out to be a good thing, however.

"The appeal of composing a new work inspired by this particular musician's legend is that he was the only significant figure in jazz who has no recorded music. Creating an even mildly programmatic work based on another musician, whether we're talking about Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong or even Mozart or Beethoven, without using their music as the 'soundtrack' seems counterintuitive," Lisik said by email from Memphis, where he is leaving a teaching position at LeMoyne-Owen College to become the jazz composition professor at the New Zealand School of Music in Wellington.

"The improvisational nature of jazz and the short gap between its birth and recording technology places Bolden in a unique position, where a thoroughly modern work could be written without any pressure to produce a historically accurate rendering."

The CD, Coming Through Slaughter, The Bolden Legend is a very good big band recording with great musicians such as Tim Hagans (trumpet, flugelhorn), Luis Bonilla (trombone), Donny McCaslin (tenor saxophone) Matt Wilson (drums), Lisik on trumpet, and former Winnipegger Amy Rempel (piano), an adjunct lecturer in jazz piano at Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. Rempel is also a former student of Lisik's from his music teaching days at Murdoch MacKay Collegiate.

It was on leaving Murdoch MacKay that Lisik became enamoured of Ondaatje's account of Bolden; it was part of a collection of Canadian literature he received as a parting gift from fellow teachers.

Hagans, McCaslin, Bonilla and Wilson "are among my absolute favourite living musicians," Lisik says. "When I looked at assembling the key soloists for the group, they were the first names on my wish list. As I was writing the piece, long before thinking that I would complete this type of recording, Tim Hagan's trumpet playing was the voice of my modern version of Buddy Bolden and the music was shaped in some ways by his sound being present in my conception, long before I asked him to play.

"Donny McCaslin is an absolute genius of the tenor and soprano saxophones... I had known Luis Bonilla and Matt Wilson as guest artists at different universities and had written some music for Luis. Luis is almost without peer as a trombone player and Matt is one of the most creative musicians I have ever met.

"Fortunately for me, they were all interested enough in the idea of the project to commit to it with very little idea of what they were in for," Lisik adds.

Six of the 10 movements were originally written for Lisik's doctoral dissertation in the spring of 2006. The final version was recorded last spring.

Among quintet recordings he has planned, he is also working on a collection of movements for a piece commemorating the anniversary of Darwin's Origin of Species that will be a jazz orchestra project set for a fall 2011 release.

CDs and digital copies of Coming Through Slaughter are available from www.cdbaby.com and digital only copies are available through iTunes (search: lisik) and Amazon.com.

Lisik takes up his post as jazz composition professor in Wellington on March 1, "which is my 36th birthday and will seem like a great gift!"

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What would Valentine's Day be without classic love songs from the pens of Gershwin, Kahn, Mercer and Rodgers & Hart, performed by a very good jazz orchestra with guests Toronto composer and trombonist Dave McMurdo and Winnipeg vocalist Anna-Lisa Kirby?

The Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra will be feeling the love Feb. 14 in afternoon and evening performances of favourites from the Great American Songbook.

Tickets for the 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. concerts at the Winnipeg Art Gallery are $28/adults and $15/students from www.winnipegjazzorchestra.com, 632-5299 and McNally Robinson Booksellers.

chris.smith@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition February 8, 2010 D3

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