Peggy Lee & Cole Schmidt - Forever Stories Of: Moving Parties

I'm searching for adjectives to describe what I'll uncreatively refer to here as The Vancouver Sound. Pretty is one inadequate yet unavoidable term that needs to be expressed before other descriptors can show themselves. Skronky, underlined in red on my word processing software, is apparently not a word at all but is nevertheless an accurate descriptor for much of this music. Longing and yearning are not adjectives but to force them into such a grammatical format would yield longy and yearny, both of which are too cute to carry the loaded weight of their intended connotations so they'll have to suffice in noun form.

Under the umbrella of The Vancouver Sound, I might position bands that we would catch at long defunct venues like 1067, the Sugar Refinery, and the Vinegar Factory, as well as not-yet-defunct spaces like the Ironworks and China Cloud. I'm thinking of influential bands like Inhabitants, Fond Of Tigers, DarkBlueWorld, guitarist Tony Wilson's bands, and harpist Elisa Thorn's various projects, to name just a few. Perhaps not coincidentally most of these artists have recorded for the BC-based label Drip Audio, which has done a good job of documenting a large slice of the cool local music coming out of this tiny scene for the past twenty years.

So we're talking about this community of improvising musicians coming together to make music that's somewhat difficult to define. If you wanted to illicit a mild cringe from some of them you could call it jazzy, and you wouldn't technically be wrong given that the musician-who-went-to-jazz-school-for-at-least-a-couple-years phenotype makes up a generous proportion of the sample size here. Still, for music that is so assertively improvisation-forward, the musicians' focus is more often on melody and texture than on clever solos over complex chord changes, and there are usually more back beats than swing beats.

To sum up an entire musical community's varied and constantly evolving output in a few paragraphs, as I've done above, is necessarily to homogenize and generalize nearly to the point of caricature. To maintain any sort of perspective, one ought to listen to a dozen records for every record review they read. If after reading this review you only have time to listen to one record but are hoping for a tangible summation of the The Vancouver Sound, might I suggest the new release from Peggy Lee and Cole Schmidt, Forever Stories Of: Moving Parties.

The compositional and improvisational aesthetics of Lee on cello and Schmidt on guitar pair beautifully in this duo. Listen to the final track "Coda" to hear the attention to tone and thoughtfully chosen notes that I hear as characteristic of their individual and collective voices. The laid-back but confident timefeel, and the generously doled-out space between the notes and phrases, leave me wishing this weren't the only tune on the album where we get to hear Lee and Schmidt come together alone as a duo.

The remainder of the record, comparatively maximalist in approach, is a collage made up of contributions from more than a dozen musicians spread across the globe. In the hands of another dozen it could be easy to imagine things getting out of hand as layer upon layer of shredding and cool licks pour in to Vancouver from studios in Montreal, Melbourne, NYC, Amsterdam and Gothenburg, building a wall of sound behind which the distinct compositional voices of Lee and Schmidt might be lost entirely. Thankfully, the duo recruited a global army of decidedly tasteful improvisers whose contributions, whether as a lead voice or filling in the background, are gracious and always in service of the whole.

Upon first listen, I wasn't aware just how much of the record was made up of remote contributions, and checking out the liner notes gave me a surprise. Records put together in this way, especially when drummers are sending in their parts from a location separate from the rest of the rhythm section, almost always have some hint of disjunction, an incongruity to the feel of the grooves, an intangible lack of life. The drum tracks here were laid down by two veterans of the Vancouver jazz and improvised music scenes: Mili Hong, based in Montreal, and Dylan van der Schyff, based in Melbourne. To my ears, this whole disc is seamless enough that it could have been the result of a single live session in a single studio with a few choice overdubs layered on after the fact. Special credit must be given here to bassist James Meger – reportedly based somewhere in the woods near Roberts Creek on the Sunshine Coast – who played the bass and also played an outsized hand at getting the record to groove, handling the massive task of editing, mixing and mastering the whole project.

It's perhaps strange to hold up a record with contributions from so many artists around the world as exemplary of The Vancouver Sound. That this collection of music sounds so decidedly Vancouver to me is probably in large part due to the strong and highly complimentary compositional voices of the leaders – with these songs it's hard to tell where the Peggy ends and the Cole begins, and vice-versa – but maybe it also speaks to the influence that this relatively tiny, geographically isolated, and distinct scene has on creative musicians around the globe.

released Nov. 15, 2024 | Buy CD & digital (Bandcamp) | Available on streaming (under Various Artists)