{"id":28782,"date":"2016-02-06T10:15:01","date_gmt":"2016-02-06T18:15:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jasonhall.ca\/?p=28782"},"modified":"2018-09-10T22:15:00","modified_gmt":"2018-09-11T06:15:00","slug":"you-had-me-at-gravitas-two-concerts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/jasonhall.ca\/music\/you-had-me-at-gravitas-two-concerts\/","title":{"rendered":"You had me at gravitas \u2014 two concerts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-28783\" src=\"http:\/\/jasonhall.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/St.-Andrews-Wesley-Church.jpg\" alt=\"St.-Andrews-Wesley-Church\" width=\"800\" height=\"536\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Every Wednesday, three musicians hold a little performance of improvised music inside the cavernous St. Andrew\u2019s Wesley United on Burrard. I went because I\u2019m curious to hear Classically trained musicians who are willing to improvise. The constriction of their\u00a0music training is such that, when improvising, many highly skilled Classical musicians can do little more than eke out a few trills.<\/p>\n<p>These three musician could clearly do more than eke out trills \u2014 despite their Classical training \u2014 particularly the pianist Craig Addy who had the capacity to create vast landscapes of sound enough to fill the church and parts of Burrard street as well. Unfortunately for the three, they\u2019re trapped in a new constriction even more asphyxiating to improvisation than Classical music \u2014 New Age music.<\/p>\n<p>I listened patiently waiting for something to happen. My mistake. The entire point of New Age music is that nothing should ever happen, and to that degree it was a success. Here\u2019s the core problem. New Age music is already \u201cthere\u201d. There\u2019s no getting \u201cthere\u201d because it\u2019s already \u201cthere\u201d. So it has nowhere to go. New Age Music merely sits in its self-satisfied beauty doing nothing. Occasionally, it\u2019ll glance about and change from a state of serene beauty to beautiful serenity, but that\u2019s about all it can do. It\u2019s a downright infuriating experience if your life contains other hues, which is the case for most people still claiming a pulse. Or in Dorothy Parker&#8217;s words, \u201ca striking performance that ran the gamut of emotions, from A to B\u201d.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-28784\" src=\"http:\/\/jasonhall.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/PuSh2016_Limmediat2_credit-Cyrille-Cauvet-675x449.jpg\" alt=\"PuSh2016_Limmediat2_credit-Cyrille-Cauvet-675x449\" width=\"675\" height=\"449\" \/><\/p>\n<p>The other performance, L\u2019Imm\u00e9diat (part of the PUSH Festival), was something of a circus. There are really no words to compare the two performances, except that I have a few extras so I\u2019m going to try anyway.<\/p>\n<p>L\u2019Imm\u00e9diat plays in the diametrically opposite court to Craig Addy\u2019s group. Instead of well-worn clich\u00e9s of peace and serenity, L\u2019Imm\u00e9diat plays with chaos and to a certain extent tragedy \u2014 although not in a way you\u2019d recognize it as such because it\u2019s so absurdly funny.<\/p>\n<p>Mostly, L&#8217;imm\u00e9diat\u00a0is about\u00a0gravity. Not the concept of gravity, but the reality of gravity. Spoiler alert: Everything falls down. The sets fall down. The actors fall down, climb up again, then ultimately fall. It&#8217;s pure inspired (brilliantly choreographed) chaos.<\/p>\n<p>And the gravity of the thing is that here I could recognize myself. Witnessing the wrenching\u00a0futility of life pushing against gravity relaxed me in a way that was\u00a0paradoxically the most uplifting experience I could imagine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Every Wednesday, three musicians hold a little performance of improvised music inside the cavernous St. Andrew\u2019s Wesley United on Burrard. I went because I\u2019m curious to hear Classically trained musicians who are willing to improvise. The constriction of their\u00a0music training is such that, when improvising, many highly skilled Classical musicians can do little more than [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[43,44,9],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jasonhall.ca\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28782"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jasonhall.ca\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jasonhall.ca\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jasonhall.ca\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jasonhall.ca\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28782"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/jasonhall.ca\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28782\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29452,"href":"http:\/\/jasonhall.ca\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28782\/revisions\/29452"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jasonhall.ca\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jasonhall.ca\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jasonhall.ca\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}