On It Becomes Us, drummer Kenton Loewen and trumpeter JP Carter find beauty in often challenging free improvisation
The pair, one of two duos appearing at the BlueShore, mine rich melodies and textures from their instruments
Kenton Loewen
JP Carter
Ted Poor and Cuong Vu join Kenton Loewen and JP Carter at the BlueShore Financial Centre for the Performing Arts at Capilano University on Tuesday (February 22).
BACK IN THE doo-wop era, legend has it, the best way to get your music noticed was to set up on a street corner and wait for a record producer to come strolling by. Well, Pender and Carrall isn’t exactly Hollywood and Vine, and if there are any links between free jazz and quartet harmony they’re obscure—but otherwise, some things haven’t changed.
When local jazz superfan, podcaster, and concert producer Tim Reinert was thinking of setting up his own record label, The Infidels, he wasn’t entirely sure where to start. He knew, for instance, that he wanted to feature Vancouver musicians, believing that this city is blessed with a superabundance of gifted players but short of outlets for their recorded works. And he had already decided that he wanted drummer Kenton Loewen involved, not only for his superb percussion skills but also for his get-things-done attitude towards life. But it wasn’t until he saw Loewen and trumpet virtuoso JP Carter playing on the street that he knew what his label’s first project would be.
COVID-19 was the trigger, unlikely as that seems. With indoor venues closed, the musicians involved with the 8EAST cooperative at 8 East Pender Street had started concertizing outdoors for socially distanced audiences. “JP and I played duo out on the plaza in front of 8EAST,” Loewen recalls in a telephone interview. “Tim was there and just said ‘Can we do this, please?’ And that was that.
“Really, it’s the easiest thing,” the drummer continues. “It’s the fewest amount of people, it has such a deep history, and the communication between the two of us is really natural. The playing is just right there.”
As documented on Infidels’ first release, It Becomes Us, all those things are evident. Whether playing spur-of-the-moment improvisations or choosing from a select catalogue of tunes written by jazz icons such as Ornette Coleman, Sonny Sharrock, and Wayne Shorter, Loewen and Carter display an easy camaraderie that the drummer attributes to their having worked together for two decades, on projects ranging from Gordon Grdina’s Middle Eastern big band Haram to singer-songwriter Dan Mangan’s delightfully imaginative backing ensemble.
“After 20 years, you just have so many incarnations,” Loewen notes. “Plus we’re both part of the collective at 8EAST, so just by virtue of that we’ve ended up playing even more—but at the end of the day, this is just a distillation of the two of us.”
Perhaps the most impressive thing about It Becomes Us—and what might make it the perfect introduction to free improvisation for listeners previously scared off by the genre’s reputation for harsh noise—is how much like a band these two players sound. That might seem counterintuitive: drums are not a melodic instrument and the trumpet is generally capable of producing only one note at a time. One might think that the players would be mining a fairly thin seam of melody and texture, but Loewen and Carter have invented a number of ways to work around such limitations. The drummer, for instance, has been influenced by African and Middle Eastern polyrhythms, but when the music demands it he’s also capable of producing as solid a four-four slam as any rock musician. And not only does Carter have a lovely, lilting melodic voice on his horn, he’s also developed an intuitive sense of how electronics can augment his single-note lines, adding looped rhythms, lush harmonies, and even bass frequencies to his tool kit. Both players are also restlessly imaginative, and unafraid of finding beautiful ways of using “ugly” sounds.
“I think that’s part of the curiosity of improvising,” Loewen says. “You’re trying to find what you haven’t done, I mean, I feel that’s what I’m always doing. You can hear when people are really leaning on what they’ve practised, and that’s a different experience than what I want to have. I feel that with rock music you practise this part and do this thing, and that’s what that does. And with improvising, you practise alone, and then you play what you haven’t practised. You just go for it. There’s a different vulnerability in that that I find makes for very powerful music.
“We’re trying to fill as much space as possible with just the two of us,” he adds. “I mean, JP playing acoustic is just ridiculous, but he’s running stuff through all sorts of crazy effects as well, which is great. And when you’re just two people playing, you can really mess around with a different level of connection and sound.”
Listeners who share Loewen’s curiosity will definitely want to check out the upcoming release party for It Becomes Us. Not only will Loewen and Carter play a set, but they’ll be joined by the Seattle duo of Ted Poor and Cuong Vu, similarly accomplished musicians with their own take on the drums-and-trumpet format.
“I have heard a little bit of what they’re doing,” Loewen says, “but I’m intentionally not listening to too much because I just want to take in their set as an experience. From what I have heard, I think we’re doing interestingly different things. I would say that they are probably taking a bit more of a traditional approach in playing ‘free jazz’, and it’s awesome. It’s really, really good. And I think that probably JP and I, while having free jazz in the bag, are playing from a place that is less formal.
“Actually, maybe I don’t want to say ‘traditional’, because that lends itself to a certain aesthetic,” he continues. “I think that their playing is really open and free—and I’m excited to check out what they’re doing.”
Ted Poor and Cuong Vu
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