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Brady's bunch >>Tim Brady's concert series The Body Electric unites players of serious music for the unserious guitar by CHRIS YURKIW
"No, I didn't see it in the history books," says Brady. "No, I didn't see any scores at the store. No, I didn't see any records. But that didn't tell me I couldn't do it. It just meant it hadn't been done much before." Hadn't been done much, no, but it was being done--by a clutch of scattered pioneers who were having the same idea as Brady: to make "serious" music with the most "unserious" electric guitar. Glenn Branca and his guit-orchestras in New York, Fred Frith after leaving the "dada blues" band Henry Cow in the U.K., and René Lussier amid the burgeoning musique actuelle scene of Montreal--all were playing the individualist composer amid the wash of uniformed rock rebels. But even today, some 20 years after the initial outcrops of such a notion, Brady feels there's still a need to bring these musicians together. Thus was born the 23-concert, seven-city tour The Body Electric: The Future of the Electric Guitar, under the auspices of Innovations en concert, the new music production company that Brady co-runs. The realm of musique actuelle, where you could comfortably fit most of the musicians participating in The Body Electric, is nothing if not a genre that lies at the intersection of other genres. So in the Montreal shows you'll see the anarcho-classicism of the Fred Frith Guitar Quartet (Oct. 5, Club Soda), which includes Mr. Lussier. And the jazzy peregrinations of western Canadians Ron Samworth and Greg Lowe (Oct. 4, la Chapelle historique du Bon-Pasteur). And NYC downtowner Elliott Sharp filling in for the scheduled Terje Rypal, playing with the Toronto ensemble Hemispheres (Oct. 4, Club Soda). And Brady himself (who has just released his seventh album on the Justin Time label, entitled Strange Attractors) along with a solo performance by David Torn (Oct. 2, Club Soda). And more. "This is the first event that I know of," says Brady, "where the whole point is to say, 'This is the electric guitar, we're composers and here's music for the guitar written by composers'--not by virtuoso guitar players who happen to play really well, not by people writing songs which are accompanied by guitars. This is composers writing for the guitar." Info 252-0287, tickets 790-1245
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Montreal-based musician and composer Tim Brady came to the electric guitar much like the guy in Bryan Adams's tune: he liked the ultimate pop group the Beatles, and was inspired by folkie Gordon Lightfoot. Later, Brady's interest in technique and composition turned him into a jazz guitarist with a fledgling interest in contemporary classical music. But it was there that he hit an ideological wall: Brady wanted to write serious neo-classical works for the electric guitar, but all around him were just rock bands wailin' and jazzy fingers flailin'.