May 21, 2023
First off, wow! We had such a blast playing at the Gordon Best Theatre in Peterborough, a beautiful gem of a venue located above The Only Café downtown.
May 4, 2023 (the day of our show) actually marked 50 years since Paul first saw the Mahavishnu Orchestra play live – an event that would go on to forever shape his career. You can read more in our feature in KawarthaNow.
We started loading in around 3pm and luckily enlisted the help of a couple local friends, Peter Griffin and Victoria Wallace, to haul Paul’s drums (and gong) up the stairs. Quick soundcheck and dinner break before we met with our lovely group of VIPs for a pre-show meet and greet and photo op, then showtime!
The show itself of course was magnificent. A lot of people ask me how difficult it is to play this material. These days, I find so long as I keep up my general practice routine (patterns, rhythm pyramids, atonal improv, lots of metronome woodshedding etc), I’m fairly comfortable. But this type of improv especially is like a second language to me. I can build up my fluency with hard work, time and consistency – but if I let it go for any real period of time, the facility starts to whittle away and it becomes harder for me to play freely.
Paul first asked me to sub in with his band about six years ago, which was the first time I had ever listened to music by the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, Jeff Beck, Allan Holdsworth etc. It was very foreign to me. I played a couple tunes in 7 or in 5 before; toyed with some tunes that had the odd bar out here and there, but nothing like this. So, I was a little relieved when the other violin player became available and took the gig after all.
But I knew the call and the opportunity would come again eventually, so I practiced those tunes every day. I would listen to the entire set and read along with the charts (mental practice is powerful stuff), then woodshed at least one tune a day. Sometimes I’d stay on the same tune for the full week to try to understand and internalize it. That summer, I also studied at Christian Howes’ Creative Strings Workshop in Asheville, NC and got into the real nitty gritty of each tune.
That’s when everything started coming together, because there’s no guessing in this stuff, and no room for sloppiness playing with Paul. Improv, fusion, contemporary music… all of it is actually quite mathematical and precise, so you need to really know what’s happening in order to lock it in.
It’s a constant work in progress for me. I took another round of lessons with Chris last year when we started playing live again as a band so I could brush up, clean up and improve.
The day that I stop learning, or that I feel like I have nothing else to learn, will simply never come!
All images courtesy Trevor Hesselink, Groundswell Photography