Bassist James Meger's new How to Do Nothing band sails into unpredictable elements at IronFest
The versatile acoustic and electric musician draws, in part, from pandemic downtime spent at sea
James Meger has played with everything from Peggy Lee’s Echo Painting band to the Now Orchestra. Video still by Jo Hirabayashi
Coastal Jazz and Blues presents How to Do Nothing at the Ironworks on November 20 at 9:30 pm, as part of IronFest. IronFest runs from November 18 to 20.
JAMES MEGER’S NEW band is called How to Do Nothing, but that doesn’t mean he’s following his own prescription. Yes, there’s that pandemic thing, which kept the versatile acoustic and electric bassist off the concert stage for the best part of the past two years, but he’s been busy.
To start with, he’s spent a lot of his enforced downtime at sea. From being one of the top freelance bassists in Vancouver, he’s gone to being a deckhand on a prawn boat operating out of the Sunshine Coast—and, most of the time, he’s loved it.
In fact, he says during the first in-person interview I’ve done since COVID hit, “It’s been really amazing to not have to be a musician.”
Meger laughs, knowing how absurd that must sound coming from someone who’s done little else for most of his adult life. “On one hand, it’s an incredible privilege to be a musician and to get to make art, and for people to ask me to do it with them and to be involved with so many great projects,” he explains. “On the other hand, if you’re going to do this thing there’s no backing down, and there’s really not a lot of breaks from it. You kind of say yes to everything, and it’s pretty all-consuming. Forget about having, like, weekends where you go to family dinners; if you get called to play some gigs, you have to jump. But also just being part of an artistic community and staying active and staying present for people… There’s a lot of that. And you fall in love with it and you become committed to certain projects, too; you want to be available, especially for those things. And I’ve been lucky to do a lot of things that I really love and really believe in.”
Among those projects have been playing bass in Peggy Lee’s Echo Painting band, the Now Orchestra, Sick Boss, and the Bruno Hubert Trio, alongside co-curating the interdisciplinary performance series Sawdust Collector with his partner Barbara Adler and Pugs & Crows/Sick Boss guitarist Cole Schmidt. Surprisingly, the improvisational and interpersonal skills he’s learned from those projects have come in handy while afloat on the Salish Sea. Especially, he adds, “the trust thing”.
“The person I was fishing with is also a musician and someone I’ve played with, so we’d developed a relationship on that level first, and there were already certain understandings about the trust thing and the working environment,” he says of shipping out with songwriter, poet, and novelist Joe Denham. “But also it can be very dangerous when you’re in intense situations, all of which were new to me. So there was something at play there that reminds me of musical relationships, and maybe of having a band, too. Something about attention to detail, and pulling things up from the bottom of the ocean—kind of seeing what’s there, and physically touching it with your hands, and being part of a food-supply chain, all these things. It’s endlessly fascinating, and I’m sure it had an influence, in some way, on this new music. But it’s hard for me to put words to.”
It’s certainly hard for anyone else to describe: so far, How To Do Nothing has had only a handful of rehearsals and one low-key but well-received gig. The quintet’s upcoming Coastal Jazz and Blues booking, as part of the IronFest fall concert series, will be the first chance for a larger audience to imbibe Meger’s new sound. This, he says, builds on his musical past but also adds a number of new and arguably unpredictable elements, including a willingness to get stormy that draws directly from his recent immersion in the marine environment. While keyboardist Lisa Cay Miller has been a frequent collaborator over the past several years and Meger has known guitarist Sam King since high school, Andromeda Monk on saxophone and electronics is definitely a major X factor. (Drummer Dan Gaucher, also of Sick Boss, rounds out the lineup, although for the IronFest show he’ll be replaced by Jesus Caballero).
Not only is Monk a relatively new face on the local improvising scene, she plays an instrument, the no-input mixer, more associated with left-field electronica and experimental noise than with jazz. It’s essentially a regular multi-channel mixing board, but rather than use it to control a PA system, the performer loops its output back into its input to generate eerie, grainy, or simply otherworldly electronic sounds. (Don’t try this at home; used carelessly, it can blow up your speakers.) Yes, it’s musical. No, it’s not like anything else you’ve ever heard.
“I did write a little bit for the mixer specifically,” Meger says. “Like, there’s a thing in one piece where there’s a set of melodic pitches that Andromeda can play. But anything you write that’s pitch-based needs to be prepared in advance and assigned to a fader. She has 24 channels to work with, but the more you do that the more limited she is improvising, so you don’t want to completely take that away.”
Other than this radical addition, Meger says that he’ll treat a How to Do Nothing concert as an opportunity to create evolving, partially improvised suites.
“I’m trying to build more of a bigger program,” he notes. “Maybe with moments where people don’t play for a long period of time and then they come to the forefront, or maybe there are moments of extreme density and saturation leading into moments of very delicate acoustic playing.”
His thinking, he adds, has been shaped by the way classic rock bands—Pink Floyd, say, or Led Zeppelin—might structure an album as a journey rather than a collection of discrete songs. And it’s also been influenced by another of his pandemic activities: mastering the controls of skipper Denham’s Roberts Creek recording studio. Among the projects Meger is overseeing as an engineer, producer, and/or performer are a solo guitar album from local multi-instrumentalist John Paton, three full albums from Sick Boss, and a trio project with drummer Omar Amlani and saxophonist Ted Crosby.
How to Do Nothing? The name might be drawn from artist and author Jenny Odell’s 2020 guide to surviving the information apocalypse, but How to Stay Busy would be just as apt.
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