Recent Articles/ Reviews
Quirkiness Pays Off for Eclectic Composer:
Multimedia Show, CD Debut, TV Kitsch-Fest put John Korsrud at Peak
Vancouver Sun
Saturday, February 26, 2005
By Greg Buium
If it feels a little easier to pin a label on John Korsrud, he'd probably understand. Just go ahead and try.
The Vancouver composer, trumpeter and bandleader has spent more than a dozen years zapping musical stereotypes, clearing away a spot on the city's arts scene that hadn't really been there before.
He's best known, perhaps, for his Hard Rubber Orchestra, a 17-piece group that's become a kind of calling card nationwide. Yet the question remains: Is it a contemporary music ensemble, or a jazz big band? The Canada Council calls it new music, although the Hard Rubber Orchestra's two CDs are on a Quebec label (Victo) specializing in musique actuelle, a French-Canadian strand of the avant-garde. But then how do you characterize their projects with local singer-songwriter Veda Hille or punk legend Joey Keithley?
On his own, Korsrud's commissions are equally eclectic. He's written for documentaries, dance companies, and groups as diverse as Loos, a Dutch ensemble specializing in 20th-century classical music and rock, and the CBC Radio Orchestra. Yet on Tuesdays, you can still hear him at the Cellar playing trumpet with the local Afro-Latin band Shango Ashe.
Pegging Korsrud is one thing; finding him is another. Next week, you see, might just be the busiest, highest-profile moment in this 41-year-old's career; three events in four days will bring a larger audience to his work than before.
As this year's winner of the Alcan Performing Arts Award, he's created Enter/Exit, a sprawling, four-day multimedia show beginning Wednesday at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre. And on opening night he'll also celebrate the release of Odd Jobs, Assorted Climaxes (Spool), the first CD devoted entirely to his original new music compositions.
Then on Thursday, CBC-TV premieres Cantata for the King, a television version of a show first produced at St. Andrews Wesley Church in 1994. If it isn't one of the most adventurous programs the CBC has aired, it might be one of the weirdest.
Korsrud calls it a kitsch-fest, the kind of grab-bag performance he's made his own. With the Hard Rubber Orchestra as the house band, producer Leigh Badgley, a longtime fan, and director Gordon McLennan have created an odd postmodern revival led by a preacher (played by Vancouver actor Kevin McNulty), capturing the life and music of Elvis Presley.
It's silly, sweet, provocative and entertaining. And it also embodies his own unique brand of humour and musical taste. First conceived as The Elvis Cantata with violinist Cameron Wilson (of the Joe Trio), they curated a concert with singers and arrangers flipping famous Presley tunes on their head. It became a local prototype, a model in many ways for the Little Chamber Music Series That Could's 1998 Beatles tribute (The White Album) or even Ron Samworth's upcoming An Evening Without Leonard Cohen. In 2000, Korsrud again mounted something extravagant -- The Ice Age, a bit of musical theatre at Kerrisdale Arena featuring figure skaters, hockey players, curlers and Zamboni choreography.
He's undoubtedly filled with a fascinating pool of impulses. On the one hand, he's compelled to create events that are widely accessible, while on the other he's drawn to serious, absolutely current musical forms. His titles are purposely playful, to create a bit of buzz. He's shrewd and entrepreneurial and his contacts stretch into nearly every corner of the city's arts communities. Korsrud isn't a flake; he gets things done.
But he is quirky, a word so often used to describe his work. On Odd Jobs you'll find "Zippy Pinhead," a Xenakis-inspired homage to Vancouver's '70s punk scene, but you'll also find "Glurp," something composed for Holland's Combustion Chamber, a 14-piece new music ensemble.
Indeed, Amsterdam remains a useful reference point for understanding his work. He lived there for three years in the mid-'90s and he's been going back regularly. That city's easy intermingling of contemporary music scenes with their oddball ways and rigorous methods is a touchstone for him still. His mature composition style was born there -- the sweeping, painterly gestures, the driving repetitive figures and a commitment to write as quickly and as dramatically as he can.
Where else, really, but Vancouver or Amsterdam could he have mounted Enter/Exit, described, in advance notices, as a "psychedelic, rave-inspired, non-linear theatrical experience," where a series of groove-oriented pieces set off a wild brew of musical and visual events.
Certainly the $60,000 prize gives him a great deal of freedom. Half the pieces are his, the other half were written by Brad Turner and Giorgio Magnanensi. He's hired a crack new ensemble, four dancers (choreographed by Martha Carter) and a number of visual artists, too.
It's ambitious and forward-thinking and it's one of the reasons why Korsrud's increasingly in demand as a mentor to young composers. Two prestigious appointments this spring, at the Banff Centre and the new Vancouver Creative Music Institute, will give him a bit of space to plot more large-scale operations. And he's moving. After years above a storefront on Commercial Drive, he's shifting east a few blocks. It's quieter. But more to the point: his new place will have an office.
Greg Buium is a Vancouver music writer.
Multimedia Show, CD Debut, TV Kitsch-Fest put John Korsrud at Peak
Vancouver Sun
Saturday, February 26, 2005
By Greg Buium
If it feels a little easier to pin a label on John Korsrud, he'd probably understand. Just go ahead and try.
The Vancouver composer, trumpeter and bandleader has spent more than a dozen years zapping musical stereotypes, clearing away a spot on the city's arts scene that hadn't really been there before.
He's best known, perhaps, for his Hard Rubber Orchestra, a 17-piece group that's become a kind of calling card nationwide. Yet the question remains: Is it a contemporary music ensemble, or a jazz big band? The Canada Council calls it new music, although the Hard Rubber Orchestra's two CDs are on a Quebec label (Victo) specializing in musique actuelle, a French-Canadian strand of the avant-garde. But then how do you characterize their projects with local singer-songwriter Veda Hille or punk legend Joey Keithley?
On his own, Korsrud's commissions are equally eclectic. He's written for documentaries, dance companies, and groups as diverse as Loos, a Dutch ensemble specializing in 20th-century classical music and rock, and the CBC Radio Orchestra. Yet on Tuesdays, you can still hear him at the Cellar playing trumpet with the local Afro-Latin band Shango Ashe.
Pegging Korsrud is one thing; finding him is another. Next week, you see, might just be the busiest, highest-profile moment in this 41-year-old's career; three events in four days will bring a larger audience to his work than before.
As this year's winner of the Alcan Performing Arts Award, he's created Enter/Exit, a sprawling, four-day multimedia show beginning Wednesday at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre. And on opening night he'll also celebrate the release of Odd Jobs, Assorted Climaxes (Spool), the first CD devoted entirely to his original new music compositions.
Then on Thursday, CBC-TV premieres Cantata for the King, a television version of a show first produced at St. Andrews Wesley Church in 1994. If it isn't one of the most adventurous programs the CBC has aired, it might be one of the weirdest.
Korsrud calls it a kitsch-fest, the kind of grab-bag performance he's made his own. With the Hard Rubber Orchestra as the house band, producer Leigh Badgley, a longtime fan, and director Gordon McLennan have created an odd postmodern revival led by a preacher (played by Vancouver actor Kevin McNulty), capturing the life and music of Elvis Presley.
It's silly, sweet, provocative and entertaining. And it also embodies his own unique brand of humour and musical taste. First conceived as The Elvis Cantata with violinist Cameron Wilson (of the Joe Trio), they curated a concert with singers and arrangers flipping famous Presley tunes on their head. It became a local prototype, a model in many ways for the Little Chamber Music Series That Could's 1998 Beatles tribute (The White Album) or even Ron Samworth's upcoming An Evening Without Leonard Cohen. In 2000, Korsrud again mounted something extravagant -- The Ice Age, a bit of musical theatre at Kerrisdale Arena featuring figure skaters, hockey players, curlers and Zamboni choreography.
He's undoubtedly filled with a fascinating pool of impulses. On the one hand, he's compelled to create events that are widely accessible, while on the other he's drawn to serious, absolutely current musical forms. His titles are purposely playful, to create a bit of buzz. He's shrewd and entrepreneurial and his contacts stretch into nearly every corner of the city's arts communities. Korsrud isn't a flake; he gets things done.
But he is quirky, a word so often used to describe his work. On Odd Jobs you'll find "Zippy Pinhead," a Xenakis-inspired homage to Vancouver's '70s punk scene, but you'll also find "Glurp," something composed for Holland's Combustion Chamber, a 14-piece new music ensemble.
Indeed, Amsterdam remains a useful reference point for understanding his work. He lived there for three years in the mid-'90s and he's been going back regularly. That city's easy intermingling of contemporary music scenes with their oddball ways and rigorous methods is a touchstone for him still. His mature composition style was born there -- the sweeping, painterly gestures, the driving repetitive figures and a commitment to write as quickly and as dramatically as he can.
Where else, really, but Vancouver or Amsterdam could he have mounted Enter/Exit, described, in advance notices, as a "psychedelic, rave-inspired, non-linear theatrical experience," where a series of groove-oriented pieces set off a wild brew of musical and visual events.
Certainly the $60,000 prize gives him a great deal of freedom. Half the pieces are his, the other half were written by Brad Turner and Giorgio Magnanensi. He's hired a crack new ensemble, four dancers (choreographed by Martha Carter) and a number of visual artists, too.
It's ambitious and forward-thinking and it's one of the reasons why Korsrud's increasingly in demand as a mentor to young composers. Two prestigious appointments this spring, at the Banff Centre and the new Vancouver Creative Music Institute, will give him a bit of space to plot more large-scale operations. And he's moving. After years above a storefront on Commercial Drive, he's shifting east a few blocks. It's quieter. But more to the point: his new place will have an office.
Greg Buium is a Vancouver music writer.
John Korsrud
Odd Jobs,
Assorted Climaxes:
an eclectic collection of
newmusic compositions
Spool Point 3
Every scene has its overlooked figure whose importance is not fully grasped by the media. Given his sheer talent and the scope of his music, however, it is nothing short of amazing that composer-trumpeter John Korsrud remains pretty much in the background in discussions about the Vancouver creative music scene, or the Canadian national scene for that matter. A cross-section of pieces penned between 1995 and 2001 for ensembles as large as chamber orchestra and as small as a programmer, the frequently astounding Odd Jobs,Assorted Climaxes should change that.
Even listeners with no prior exposure to Korsrud will quickly catch on that he is truly being beyond category. As a trumpeter, he combines “legit” technical polish with strong improvising instincts. Compositionally, he is all over the lot: he can write tension-filled chamber orchestra pieces, hard-hitting off-center charts for big band, and engaging electro-acoustic pieces. Perhaps the real strength of the album is that each facet of Korsrud’s aesthetic has sufficient space. “Glurp,” performed by the Amsterdam-based Combustion Chamber, has the clean formal bearing one would expect from studies with Louis Andriessen. The trenchant humor of “You Look Like An Angel” could easily and mistakenly be attributed to Dutch sources, as well (imagine John Zorn and The Crazy World of Arthur Brown deconstructing Elvis, and you’re in the ballpark). Conversely, his use of samples and overdubbing can be oddly soothing.
Korsrud’s repeatedly makes smart personnel choices. He enlists great readers like clarinetist Francois Houle and cellist Peggy Lee for “VAP DIST,” a bristling orchestra score. He brings on the twin guitar juggernaut of Ron Samworth and Tony Wilson for a teeth-rattling excerpt from “Swing Theory.” And, Hard Rubber Orchestra brings the album to a crashing halt with “You Look Like An Angel.”
Odd Jobs, Assorted Climaxes
**** (4 stars out of 4)
Mark Miller
Globe & Mail
John Korsrud is a composer in the truest sense. He may play jazz trumpet, and he may lead a big band (Vancouver's redoubtable Hard Rubber Orchestra), but like any real composer, he'll not be limited by instrument or instrumentation. Accordingly, Odd Jobs, Assorted Climaxes brings together 10 pieces dated 1995 through 2001 for eight settings, from a single, multi-tracked guitar (Vancouver's Ron Samworth) and to large ensemble (Amsterdam's Combustion Chamber). The common thread here is Korsrud's freedom from idiomatic constraints and his curiosity about the way elements of pop, jazz and New Music and improvisation can fit -- and flow -- together. Flow is key, onward and usually upward. The music's quite stirring that way, all motion and colour. It's abstract, yes, but compellingly so.
Enter/Exit
Wednesday 2 March
Vancouver East Cultural Centre
By Penelope Mulligan
Discorder Magazine
The Hard Rubber people are a fairly whacked out lot, so they'd have probably given us a sonic shakedown even if they hadn't won this year's Alcan Performing Arts Award for Music/Opera. What the hefty cash prize allowed them to do, however, was throw a party, deck the whole house, hire dancing girls and give a performance that bled way beyond both ends of the time we spent in the concert hall. Even the pathway to the venue's door was illuminated by ghostly images from hanging video screens. Inside, the decor theme continued (courtesy of DJ HoneyBee), casting its light on the crowds of mildly giddy patrons. The complimentary wine may have been a contributing factor, but something else was goosing the atmosphere as well because from the moment I entered, it seemed like I was walking on a slant. I ran into my dentist, my date ran into his piano teacher, and we both ended up singing "Happy Birthday" to a woman we'd never met before.
Once inside the packed theatre, we felt cozy and pleasantly trapped as the 11 piece band came at us from down on the floor. A pretty, melodic overture abruptly gave way to driving, horn-shot jazz which was run over in turn by crazy, rattling percussion. From that moment on, a pressure began building and it never let up, despite the sonic shifts provided by the varied compositions of Giorgio Manganensi, Brad Turner, and Artistic Director John Korsrud. Even James Proudfoot's lighting design kept things taut, with blackouts in which darkness descended from the rafters like a sheet. I stopped expecting any kind of arc to the piece as a whole and just enjoyed the tension.
Korsrud dragged in some vibrant visual artists whose contributions were projected above the playing area. Jamie Griffiths EEG-like patterns responded to every note of Peggy Lee's gorgeous cello improv; Reno del Pieve Gobbi's silvery projections of cut fruit were like a score played by the musicians; and Brian Johnson's video footage turned dancers into amoebas.
The live dancers-Amber Funk Barton, Lina Fitzner, Katy Harris-McLeod and Jennifer McLeish-Lewis - would slink onstage every few numbers like flappers coming out to play. Martha Carter's choreography featured her signature ripples and Egyyptian-frieze voguing, but also included some passages of Charleston-gone-made twitching that were the embodiment of jazz.
After the show, the audience hung around in the lobby for what felt like hours-being silly, getting a bit sozzled and generally behaving like party guests. In the end, maybe that's what Enter/Exit meant: no event is over until everyone has left the building.
Enter/Exit
Saturday, March 5
Vancouver East Cultural Centre
By Alex Varty
Geogia Straight Magazine
Money changes everything, although sometimes its effect can be more subtle than not. John Korsrud, for instance, has a decade-long history of organizing large-scale multimedia works based on his strong, sinewy compositions, and being the 2004 winner of the $60,000 Alcan Performing Arts Award hasn't altered the way he operates. But what the Alcan prize did buy Korsrud was time: time to think about how his latest interdisciplinary tour de force, Enter/Exit, should look, and time to rehearse it properly. The result is a triumph.
Full credit has to go to the Hard Rubber Orchestra bandleader for conceptualizing the show, for assembling an impeccable band, and for writing the bulk of the music, including an extraordinary "Prelude/Overture" that set the pace for the rest of the evening with the graceful way it moved in and out of tonality while morphing between tightly organized structures and looser, more atmospheric passages. But Enter/Exit was also a true collaboration between a large cast of technicians and creators, and they must be recognized, too.
Guest composers Giorgio Magnanensi and Brad Turner were particularly welcome additions to the team, and both contributed intriguing music. Magnanensi's "Insidie Cromatiche" was the show's sonic highlight, a truly hallucinogenic soundscape that defied the ear to tell where acoustic virtuosity left off and computer-driven synthesis began. Turner's "50TB" and "Happy Fun Ball" were less adventurous, at least on a technical level, but staked out some new terrain of their own in the way that they combined modern club grooves, '70s-style hyperspeed fusion riffs, and Afro-Cuban percussion.
With such exceptional material to work with, the Hard Rubber musicians were so uniformly inspired that there's not room to list all the standouts, but Peggy Lee contributed an improvised cello solo that was unusually well-crafted, even by her high standards, and percussionist Sal Ferreras amazed with his is-it-live-or-is-it-Memorex triangle-playing on Korsrud's house-inspired "Groove I".
And then there was the visual component, which included Andreas Kahre's creepy-warehouse set design and Riel Roussopoulos's whimsical film loops in the lobby and entranceway. In addition, Jamie Griffiths, Brian Johnson, and Rena del Pieve Gobbi contributed interactive video elements, in some cases guiding the actions of the musicians, elsewhere being altered by their musical input. For example, the dreamy, solarized images that Griffiths provided for "Improv Quartet" waxed and waned according to the musicians' actions, whereas del Pieve Gobbi's blue-and-green abstract landscapes were the source material Turner, guitarist Ron Samworth, bassist Andre Lachance, and drummer Bernie Arai worked to during "Improv Quartet III". Aesthetically, both delighted, with the latter offering an especially worthwhile variation on the graphic-notation concept.
Only dancers Amber Funk Barton, Lina Fitzner, Katy Harris-McLeod, and Jennifer McLeish-Lewis seemed underutilized; choreographer Martha Carter's repertoire of shrugging gestures, frugging motions, and sideways glances didn't seem all that far removed from go-go�dancer cliche. Still, when the four dragged Korsrud and saxophonist Bill Runge on to the floor it was clear that none of this was intended to be taken too seriously. My only regret is that the audience didn't get a chance to dance too.
Multimedia Show is a Frenzied Ride Through the City: Enter/Exit Sweeps You Up in its Energy and Leaves You Craving More
Vancouver Sun
Friday, March 4, 2005
Byline: Greg Buium
Enter/Exit
Created by John Korsrud
Vancouver East Cultural Centre, 1895 Venables, through March 5
In its opening minutes, Enter/Exit, the 2005 Alcan Award-winning multimedia show at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre, seems a rudderless mishmash of modern art. Musical ideas jerk from one to the next, visual images idly roll by. When the dancers arrive on stage, you're just hoping the point of it all might actually become clear.
But these impressions don't last for long; pretty soon you feel rather shallow for ever letting them cross your mind.
Indeed, the Vancouver composer and trumpeter John Korsrud has created a sometimes spectacular, sometimes sprawling abstraction that gradually sweeps you up in its energy and ideas and leaves you just enough room to breathe. Enter/Exit is a stunning 85-minute gift to the senses. If it were a motion picture you'd probably want to stay for the second show.
Emboldened by Alcan's largess, Korsrud -- longtime leader of the Hard Rubber Orchestra -- has practically created a theatre company out of thin air. He's hired a new, 11-piece group (with musicians from the city's jazz and classical music communities), four dancers, three visual artists, a lighting designer and a choreographer, Martha Carter.
He calls the project a "highly theatricized concert." But it's much more than that. Billed as a "psychedelic, rave-inspired, non-linear theatre experience," Enter/Exit is a kind of wild performance piece fuelled by a series of recurring musical moods and patterns. Thirteen loosely tied-together compositions are the framework; a storyline doesn't exist, although many of the songs have their own unconventional beginnings, middles and ends.
The cumulative effect is a kind of fragmented, edgy landscape of urban life. Carter's choreography and the visual creations -- film projections, computer designs -- seem to hold up a mirror to the city, and to our own, crowded inner life. Somehow it's easy to see something familiar in the dancers' abstract tales. In one scene they're standing on boxes -- four sizable Lego-like blocks, the stage's only prop -- looking about. Are they waiting for the subway, or are they models walking down a runway? Are they depressed? Confused? Exhilarated? High above them images shoot up, sometimes cinematic, sometimes pure geometry.
Throughout, the music drives everything forward: there's often a compulsive drone, hypnotic bass and churning percussion. But it's really an incredible mix, sometimes reminding you of late-Miles Davis or Philip Glass or even Deee-Lite.
Korsrud's compositions are woven into a series of improvisations and scores by local composers Giorgio Magnanensi and Brad Turner. Magnanensi's "insidie cromatiche", in particular, is a concentrated instance of the thematic pairs alluded to in the show's title, a kind of new music collage, where fragmented events pile one on top of the other, in swells and a thick electronic haze, eventually fading out like a long-playing record stuck in a groove.
Greg Buium is a Vancouver music writer.