Al Neil

Jazz pianist, novelist, sculptor, painter, Al Neil can be an artist right down to the bone tissue. Exalted, enthusiastic, whimsical, actually cynical sometimes, he regularly adjustments skins and continuously remained within the underground since he fallen from the bebop picture in the first ’60s. Located in or about Vancouver for some of his existence, he remains among the least known and recognized Canadian performers. A pioneering pianist in free of charge jazz and experimental music, he offers recorded very hardly ever. Often in comparison to Cecil Taylor, he in fact has more in keeping with Michael Snow, another multi-faceted Canadian designer. Al Neil was created in 1924 in Vancouver. Classically qualified from age nine, he started to provide recitals in his teenagers and was considering a concert profession when World Battle II pressured him to combination the Atlantic. Back in 1945, he resumed his piano research with Glenn Nelson and Jean Couthard. Wilf Wylie trained him his initial rudiments of jazz and off Neil visited play clubs, departing the traditional repertoire behind. In 1956 he helped open up The Cellar where he performed as a residence musician, associated for another few years an extraordinary number of Western world Coastline players while suffering from first-hand the music of such visionaries as Ornette Coleman, who performed his first worldwide gig there in 1958. Through this Western world Coast marketing Neil, got an invitation to construct an organization to back again poet Kenneth Patchen for the tour that yielded the LP Kenneth Patchen Reads with Jazz in Canada using the Alan Neil Quartet, released by Folkways in 1959. Sick and tired of modal jazz as well as the sector (Neil frequently performed for the nationwide radio and tv), the pianist had taken a couple of years away in the first ’60s, immersing himself in school of thought and modern artwork. Ready to keep coming back in 1965, he recruited drummer Gregg Simpson and bassist Richard Anstey, two youthful music artists also with passions in mixed mass media performance. For another five years, they performed frequently in art areas and alternative night clubs, traveling the ’60s influx and pursuing a kind of music that mixed free of charge jazz, live audio collage, installation artwork, and performance artwork. The Al Neil Trio disbanded in 1970, of which period the pianist made a decision to concentrate on his composing (submitting the novel Adjustments in 1975) and rubbish sculpture. A Retrospective LP from the trio made by Anstey in 1976 remaining 200 copies from the group’s music to posterity. Neil continuing to execute sporadically and also recorded a single LP in 1980 for the Music Gallery while surviving in Toronto. Back Vancouver in the first ’80s, he considered visual arts once more, building a great career like a collagist.