An all-star avant-garde jazz ensemble of François Houle, Mark Helias, Gordon Grdina and Gerry Hemingway “find fresh new ways to express the human spirit in sound.” The music is rhythmically driven, with Grdina’s incendiary guitar playing matched by Mark Helias’ fluid bass lines and Gerry Hemingway’s propulsive drumming.
– Mark Werlin, AllAboutJazz / NativeDSD Music reviewer

In 2019 the Canadian clarinetist François Houle bean working on a new group the François Houle 4 that included Vancouver guitarist Gordon Grdina as well as two outstanding improvisers who had not previously featured in his bands. The music is rhythmically driven, with Grdina’s incendiary guitar playing matched by Mark Helias’ fluid bass lines and Gerry Hemingway’s propulsive, unconventional drumming.

Following a rigorous compositional process, Recoder was designed to highlight the musicians’ infectious virtuosity and to tackle ideas inspired by a wide range of influences, from Miroslav Vitous, Olivier Messiaen and Jimmy Giuffre to Anthony Braxton. Houle is also an accomplished and busy classical, new music and world music performer and a noted composer-performer of electroacoustic clarinet music. When he turns his focus to Avant Garde Jazz, this unusually broad range of musical experience inevitably contributes to the music’s interest.

The key for Houle lies in the “casting” and subsequent compositional process: “My goal was to create a music that would challenge the musicians, but always in full respect and understanding of their own personal affinities. In their solo contributions and improvisations on this album, I felt that the they found some truly creative and imaginative ways to interpret the material, and to support each other in weaving a coherent canvas for self-expression.”

“My writing style leans heavily on the juxtaposition of melodic threads, from which harmonies and structural elements emerge. It is in part based on my affinity for classical counterpoint, but more directly on my affection for a certain kind of jazz and improvised music – the chamber music-like interplay heard in the Jimmy Giuffre Trio’s seminal albums Fusion and Thesis, and in Steve Lacy and Gil Evans’ Paris Blues album. I am also indebted to Anthony Braxton for his teachings and writings on creative and re-structural concepts. In these recordings the harmony and rhythm are very often defined not by the archetypical roles of the instruments (bass plays a bass line, the piano plays chords, etc.) but rather by a complex layering of melodic threads from which harmonies and rhythmic aspects emerge through the interplay between the protagonists. That’s what I’m after in my own writing. The music is conceived very methodically, with pitch cells, tonal key areas that are constantly shifting, and rhythmic figures that I stretch and compress following a pre-established yet flexible compositional matrix. But rather than dictating what the mood or spirit of the music should be, I let the compositional ideas lead the way and take me down some path where a range of emotions emerge. The intellect eventually takes a backseat to what the music expresses, and I navigate that fine line between territories.”

“The duets are all free improvised, short, single takes. Mark and I spent about two hours just playing, having fun talking to each other in clarinet language! I was looking to balance the highly structured pieces with something more spontaneous and free.”

François Houle 4
François Houle, Clarinet
Gordon Grdina, Guitar
Mark Helias, Double Bass & Clarinet
Gerry Hemingway, Drums

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What’s unique about this duo is partly the timbral qualities and partly the players’ different but compatible approaches to composing and improvising. Houle brings his arsenal of extended techniques, including slap tonguing (“Woodhoopoe”), flutter-tonguing, playing without a mouthpiece (“Ged’s Shadow”), and, in “Fallen Angel”, creating a melody softly shadowed a 12th below (this ‘duo tone’ is actually the fundamental with the 5th partial emphasized). But he uses these effects rather sparingly. Wiik’s often dynamic free/modal approach brings out Houle’s melodic gifts to the full. Charged rhythmic interplay and subtle textural shadings further display their mutual understanding. As Houle puts it, “I felt, as I listened back to the session’s music, that there was this undercurrent of things unsaid, that we as musicians feed off of. A lot of fleeting shadows of ideas flying by, with the two of us trying to catch on to, play with, and release.” (“Ged’s Shadow” references Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy and specifically his detached shadow that eerily stalks the young mage Ged/Sparrowhawk.)

As for the clarinet-piano combination, there are only a few precedents in jazz, though many in classical music – what makes it so satisfying? François: “Having had a serious training as a classical musician [M.M from Yale] my relationship to the piano is deep, having had to learn most of the traditional repertoire, as well as playing tons of chamber music. Timbre is key here. Both instruments are basically metal tagged to a wooden resonating chamber, so they blend well together. There are very few instances for sure: Kuhn Brothers, Jimmy Giuffre with Paul Bley. Most influential recordings I know have bass or drums in addition. But the duo format that really caught my ears was the long-term relationship of Steve Lacy with two very different pianists, Mal Waldron and Gil Evans. Both really shed light on different aspects of Lacy’s playing. What I like about playing with piano is how it re-contextualizes what you do melodically into a harmonic framework. It forces you to listen more closely to how you connect notes.” Håvard adds: “I’ve always felt that the instruments blend very well sonically, the clarinet takes up less sonic space than the saxophone which gives some more space for the piano. Not many pure clarinet-piano duos in the jazz-canon but some strong combinations, including Tony Scott and Bill Evans.”

François Houle, Clarinet
Håvard Wiik, Piano

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A milestone in the musical journey of clarinetist-composer François Houle. Solos by cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum and trombonist Samuel Blaser weave through the unique voicings of pianist Benoît Delbecq in a set of dazzlingly inventive chamber jazz compositions.
– Mark Werlin, HRAudio & NativeDSD Reviewer

One of Canada’s premier contemporary classical clarinetists, François Houle is equally a virtuosic and original avant-jazz improviser and notable composer.

François Houle 5 + 1 (now known as the Genera Sextet) consists of outstanding international leaders in jazz/creative music, including New York based Canadians Michael Bates and Harris Eisenstadt, Swiss trombonist Samuel Blaser, and Braxton associate Taylor Ho Bynum.

“The lineup was very crucial, as I wanted to explore colors and varied instrumental combinations while retaining a classic jazz sound. I also desired to have strong idiosyncratic voices in each chair of the band so that the compositions would be designed for the players’ personalities, coming to life in a kind of Ellingtonian way.” The group coalesces in an intense and moving collaboration that balances spontaneous exploration and disciplined ensemble, dense textures and spare, off-kilter lyricism.

From one angle this is as much of a jazz record as Houle’s beautiful 1998 John Carter tribute In the Vernacular; from another it brings together his classical music interests with free improv. The common factor is a keen awareness of 20th century music in its various manifestations and a fascination with the structure and organization of sound in both composition and improvisation. “I’ve been very influenced by the music of John Carter and Steve Lacy, primarily because of their mastery of orchestration in small groupings. Jimmy Giuffre would be another important influential figure in terms of orchestration. I’ve always been seduced by a kind of composition that makes full use of instrumental colors: Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Elliott Carter, Ligeti, Xenakis. In the jazz arena I would be attracted to the more colorful approaches of Gil Evans, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Bob Brookmeyer. I wanted my new band to have that kind of versatility, but with the writing focusing on instrumental combinations at the micro level.” An example of these ideas is how Benoît Delbecq’s piano sounds combine progressively with the other instruments in “Piano Loop (for BD).”

“My ideas always come from a musical standpoint, putting tones, pitches or rhythms together. How I process these ideas, however, borrows from many sources, including art, literature, architecture, mathematics, science. For example, I am very much into neuroplasticity, new understandings of how our cognitive functions adapt to our environment, and also how we perceive time. This knowledge inspires a different way of looking at our relationships to sound and rhythm. A good example is found in “Concombre I,” where all the lines are derived from the main melody in the clarinet, except that for each of the other parts I stretch the rhythm values incrementally. The end result is a strange diatonic counterpoint producing a very potent mood.

“Most of the compositions on this record started from a sound, a small of group of sounds, or a rhythmic cell. So the intent, feeling, mood of the compositions are already present at the start. It was really important for me to realize and construct ideas from an evocative primary state. I called the album Genera to express this idea of a genetic code that is present from the very beginning of the creative process….Ultimately, you want your playing to be in line with an inner purpose, be it raw or sweet. Your job as a musician is to tap into these potentials via sounds. You become a vehicle for something that is intrinsically a human experience. At least that is what I sense when I hear great music making. It always seems to come from a very deep place. If I can walk the fine line between virtuosity and expressivity, then I shouldn’t be too far off my ideal of what music means to me personally.”

François Houle 5 + 1
François Houle, clarinets, compositions
Taylor Ho Bynum, cornet, flugelhorn
Samuel Blaser, trombone
Michael Bates, bass
Harris Eisenstadt, drums
Special Guest: Benoît Delbecq, piano, electronics

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