Globe and Mail: Diana? 'She's done all right'

[Bud]

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Diana? 'She's done all right'
Don Thompson has done it all in his 45 years on the Canadian jazz scene, including teaching. In fact, Diana Krall was one of his students

By MARK MILLER

UPDATED AT 6:23 AM EST Tuesday, Nov 30, 2004

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Words tend to fail any effort to give Don Thompson his due as a jazz musician. The late American alto saxophonist Paul Desmond captured the dilemma as well as anyone when he wrote in 1975, "If Don Thompson didn't exist, nobody could invent him."

In point of fact, Thompson -- who has been active on the Canadian scene for nearly 45 years, 35 of them in Toronto -- pretty much invented himself as a bassist, pianist, vibraphonist, teacher, composer, arranger and recording engineer. And never mind that he's self-taught; to subvert another cliché, he's a master of all trades, jack of none.

Thompson at 64 seems rather unimpressed by this achievement, as if such a remarkable confluence of versatility and virtuosity is the most natural thing in the world. There are no airs about the man as he sits down, still in his winter jacket, for a coffee at a Timothy's near his home in midtown Toronto; he talks quickly and yet remains impassive, save for his dark, darting eyes.

And there are no airs in the way he has conducted his career. True, he moves among the Canadian and American elite in mainstream and modern jazz circles; over the years, he has worked with such internationally noted figures as Paul Desmond, alto saxophonist John Handy, pianists JoAnne Brackeen, Fred Hersch, Jay McShann and George Shearing, trumpeter Kenny Wheeler, trombonist Rob McConnell and guitarists John Abercrombie, Ed Bickert, Lenny Breau, Sonny Greenwich and Jim Hall. But you'll also find him in the company of much younger musicians whose best work surely lies ahead of them.

Typically, he was on the road along the U.S. west coast earlier this month with Jim Hall and out in Edmonton this past weekend with tenor saxophonist Dino Dominelli; the latter is a recent graduate from Humber College, where Thompson teaches in Toronto. Back home this week, he's playing bass and piano with John Abercrombie at the Montreal Bistro, renewing an association that dates back more than 20 years and accounts for A Beautiful Friendship and Witchcraft, two of the dozen or so LPs and CDs bearing Thompson's name as leader or co-leader since 1969.

He asks only that his bandmates -- whoever they are, and however old -- be serious about what they're doing. Attitude is everything. "I've been on gigs with guys who are big stars," he notes, leaving out the names to protect the guilty, "and they're just fooling around. It's really a drag."

He recalls one in particular, a trombone player from Los Angeles. "He started to play The Stripper and he was taking his shirt off onstage. And this guy could really play, but he was such a jerk. And there are other guys who come up [to Toronto] and they'll start to play In the Mood or something. They just don't even want to be there. So if some of my students have written some music that they really want to play, they've rehearsed it and they've got it together, I'm happy to do that."

It's uncommon to hear Thompson speak ill of his fellow musicians, even unidentified ones; more often he's singing their praises. It's precisely his supportive nature, coupled with his own can-do development as a musician, that has made him an ideal teacher. And, in fact, he's in the classroom more than he'd like to be these days; it's keeping him from writing music, among other activities. But teaching, too, has its rewards.

"It's nice to see kids come up and actually do something," he explains.

"To see [Toronto pianist] Laila Biali doing all the stuff she's doing really makes me happy." He mentions a few other musicians who have passed through his ensembles at Humber and elsewhere in recent years -- pianist David Virelles, bassist Andrew Downing and saxophonists Tara Davidson and Quinsin Nachoff, all of them now productive members of the local scene.

And that's just the current generation. Thompson has been teaching for more than 20 years, beginning at the Banff Jazz Workshop in 1982. A broader list of his pupils would include the pianists Jon Ballantyne, Jeff Johnston, Andy Milne, Dave Restivo and, for a time in Toronto back in the late 1980s, one Diana Krall.

"Yeah, Diana," he deadpans, at the mention of her name. "She's done all right."

But not for him Krall's kind of career; not for him her success. "Career is a funny thing," he comments. "The idea of having a career, or being a 'success,' is weird. It's so different for everybody. Jim [Hall] and I were talking about this. He's not the highest-paid cat around; he might be the best guitarist we've got, but he's not the highest-paid guy. I mean Pat Metheny makes infinitely more money. But Jim loves to play, it's really important for him to play and the money is not a huge priority."

Ditto, it seems, for Thompson and his wife Norma. "We get by. We're not rich, but we get by."

No, if pressed, he'll measure success in other ways. Listen to him talk about working with John Abercrombie, for example. "He's open to anything, so it's really easy. We can play really freely. Jim is the same. . . . And that's a lot of fun, if you can do that -- [if you can] know where the other person's at and feel safe that he knows where you're at. It involves a lot of trust. John and I have always been able to do that."

And then there are his compositions. "I'd like to think that I've written a couple of tunes that people will keep playing," he suggests. "It's nice when someone calls me and says, 'I'm going to record your tune.' 'Cool.' "

He has had several such calls regarding his elegantly turned Days Gone By, which has been recorded by the Boss Brass, Moe Koffman and George Shearing, the last with a string arrangement by the legendary Robert Farnon. ("Can't beat that.")

"Writing is different than playing," he continues, of the satisfaction it offers. "Playing is full of mistakes. It's just about impossible to get through anything without making a mistake. Afterward, you think, 'Oh, man, I wish I'd done that differently.' But when you write, there are no mistakes. You spend the time and you get it right. Improvising is an imperfect art. Things go wrong. It doesn't matter who it is, even [piano virtuoso] Art Tatum, things just go wrong. And sometimes a lot of things go wrong."

Trust Thompson, of course, to set the standard as high for himself as for anyone else in that respect. Possibly higher.

"To play a solo that works from beginning to end," he says, "almost never happens. You might say, 'These eight bars are cool, those eight bars are okay,' but to play 32 bars in a row where everything's great, well. . . ."

Which, as any good teacher might add, is no reason not to try.

Don Thompson and John Abercrombie perform at the Montreal Bistro from tonight through Saturday.

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[scielle]

To see [Toronto pianist] Laila Biali doing all the stuff she's doing really makes me happy." He mentions a few other musicians who have passed through his ensembles at Humber and elsewhere in recent years -- pianist David Virelles, bassist Andrew Downing and saxophonists Tara Davidson and Quinsin Nachoff, all of them now productive members of the local scene.

Laila Biali has become a staple on all the CBC jazz shows lately; yet another BC gal w/ a stallar-looking future (she's originally from Vancouver)... Saw her at this year's Mtl jazz fest, along w/ Tara Davidson and Karine Chapdelaine. What a great group of gals - they go by the name Without Words, you can get the CD here.

[Coda]

I can understand why Don Thompson is such a sought-out music educator. I love his attitude about mistakes being quite normal, and reminding us that even genius players like Art Tatum would make mistakes in improvising. However, as a writer (though not of music), I'd say that I find even in pieces that I thought were "finished," I could always keep editing them, if I wanted to, sometimes to oblivion. At some point you have to let it go, warts and all. From what little I've done of music arranging, I do think you come to a point where you feel you've got the notes down the way you want them. I guess I don't feel as certain when I'm writing with words![/quote]

[scielle]

Laila Biali finds her true jazz voice

Routinely compared to other female musicians in the same genre, the pianist is determined to explore her own melodic ways, MARK MILLER writes

By MARK MILLER
Special to The Globe and Mail
Monday, January 3, 2005 - Page R3



There are, in Laila Biali's development as a jazz pianist and composer, passing similarities to the emergence of three other Canadian women in the same field. Like Jane Bunnett, Biali saw a career as a concert artist in the classical world curtailed by physiological problems at the piano; like Bunnett, who eventually switched to flute, Biali found comfort in jazz.

Like Renee Rosnes, also a classically trained pianist, Biali came under the sway of a North Vancouver high-school music teacher, Bob Rebagliati, who nurtured her early interest in jazz by gradually revealing to her the classic recordings, beginning with Miles Davis's Kind of Blue.

And like Diana Krall, who was in fact the first jazz artist that Biali heard on record, she has lately started to sing. Her debut CD, Introducing the Laila Biali Trio, which will be released during her engagement at the Montreal Bistro in Toronto this week, includes several vocal selections, three of them old pop standards.

If that seems entirely as per La Krall, though, Biali is quick to advise that "they're totally messed with." She's talking on a cold Sunday afternoon at Toronto's fabled Pilot Tavern on Cumberland Street, where her trio, with bassist Brandi Disterheft and drummer Sly Juhas, has been the house band of late. At 24, Biali has something of Bunnett's engaging warmth and energy, and something more of Rosnes's keen intelligence; she can only hope to have something of Krall's success. Biali is, in any event, already her own woman, a musician who expresses a "desire to present music that is accessible but still pushes boundaries."

To that end, she has been a central figure in no less than four bands since her move to Toronto in the late 1990s for studies at Humber College: the all-woman Without Words, the Crossings Quartet, the Laila Biali Octet and now the trio. For good measure, she's currently exploring the possibility of forming a big band with a young Toronto musician.

"What I love about jazz is the collective experience," she explains, of this flurry of activity. "The fact that you're interacting with any number of people means that the music will be different every time; different players will bring new elements and new sounds to the music, so you can never really recreate it, and I love that. And I love that it's collaborative, because I'm a real people person."

People person or not, though, her attraction to jazz wasn't immediate.

"In all honesty, I didn't love it when I first heard it," she admits, laughing lightly. "I remember being sort of perplexed by [John] Coltrane." It was in fact yet another Canadian, the trumpeter and composer Kenny Wheeler, who really turned her head. Or rather it was his music.

"To me his writing was like a total fusion between classical music and jazz in a way I had not heard done before. And Keith Jarrett also served as a bridge for me. That combination, Keith Jarrett and Kenny Wheeler, showed me how to use the classical knowledge that I had -- that background and those influences and those sounds -- to create jazz and improvised music."

Biali's transition from the formality of classical music to the relative freedom of jazz, initially undertaken in high school, was nevertheless not easy. "There's a real disconnect between what you're hearing and how it translates through your body," she notes, "which is strange for a classical pianist, because you have all this [technical] facility on the instrument."

She splays 10 finely manicured fingers and pushes them awkwardly into one of the Pilot's shiny table tops to demonstrate the disoriented effect.

"It's especially humbling. My first inclination was, 'Oh, I'll play bass,' or 'I'll try some other instrument,' so I'd be starting from scratch and approaching it as a totally new experience. Because to me, as a pianist, this felt like a regression."

Her turnaround and transition certainly seems complete now, however, thanks in part to her studies with Don Thompson at Humber College for two years, with Fred Hersch more briefly in New York and now with Frank Falco privately, in Toronto.

Rosnes and Krall, of course, went to New York and stayed, many years ago. Biali's neither so keen nor so quick to follow suit, even if Canada's jazz industry hardly seems equipped to handle someone with her potential. "I was shocked to discover that New York didn't fit me well," she remembers, of her time there in 2003. "That may change. I'm getting the itch to go back -- in bouts, concentrated bouts. It's an intense city."

All in good time, no doubt, although the real question is perhaps not "When?" but "In what guise?" Will it be as the pianist and composer whose bright, melodic octet writing, for example, works handily with the influences of Wheeler, Maria Schneider and Duke Ellington? Or will it be as another Canadian pianist and singer who, if even she is a dark, wavy-haired brunette, will inevitably be compared to Krall?

"I do get compared to her a lot," Biali admits. "It's tough, you know, because the music that she does, the real straight-ahead standards, I actually love doing, too, and it gets a great response. People love that kind of music rendered in that classic way. And that's what I do at corporate gigs; it's not that I don't enjoy doing it, I definitely do."

Still, Biali obviously has much more to offer. "There was a lot of resistance to me singing, initially, because my fellow musicians know me as a pianist and composer, and I am definitely those things first. It was like, 'Oh, no, not another piano player and singer!' "

Oh, yes, but one clearly with a mind of her own and a good sense of herself. "The challenge for me, and it's a huge challenge," she says with convincing confidence, "is not to compromise who I am musically. . . . I'll never pretend to be someone I'm not."

The Laila Biali Trio appears at Toronto's Montreal Bistro this Thursday to Saturday. It also performs most Sunday afternoons at Toronto's Pilot Tavern.