Pianist David Braid likes to hear himself think

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      Looking online for examples of David Braid’s music, listeners might be drawn toward a YouTube clip of the keyboardist’s sextet, live at Toronto’s Rex Hotel in 2011. It’s thorny and powerful stuff, with Braid so deeply into the music that he nearly levitates off the piano bench as he slams into the chords—but it’s nothing like what he’s doing now.

      These days, it’s rare to hear Braid in a club, and even rarer to hear him banging away with such kinetic abandon. He’s made a radical departure from ensemble jazz, turning instead to a hybrid style that retains aspects of improvisation, but places his piano inside a string quartet or small chamber orchestra. This is due, in part, to his increasing interest in compositional form—but it’s also a way for him to hear himself think.

      “From the jazz point of view, I’m really attracted to bringing that aesthetic into the classical realm,” Braid explains, on the line from his Toronto home. “Sonically, I have much, much more space to be musically colourful, because of the much wider range of dynamics. When I’m working inside the jazz world, I feel like my instrument doesn’t compete with amplified instruments very well, and when my instrument is amplified it doesn’t sound like my instrument anymore. I still love playing acoustic jazz, but I’m attracted to this idea of having more sonic resources available to me.”

      Braid adds that he also enjoys working with conservatory-trained musicians because it affords him more control. Working with his sextet, he never considered giving the horn players specific instruction on timbre or phrasing—those were for each musician to discover on their own. In a chamber setting, however, the discussions are more detailed, and the process works both ways. Through listening to musicians like the Borealis String Quartet, who’ll join him in Vancouver this week, he’s learned a lot about what string players can do, and is incorporating that into his new compositions. It’s a kind of “democratic authorship”, he says, although as composer he retains the last word.

      “If you look at one of my scores, there are parts where everything is written out, like it would be in classical music,” the 40-year-old musician explains. “And then there’s parts where there’s a bar of nothing, and it’s an indeterminate length of time. In those sections, I might have some written instruction, or I might just say, ‘I’ll talk to you about this.’ And then there are sections where it’s somewhere between those two things, where there might be a melody and someone needs to improvise a texture underneath it, or there might be a textural concept which just makes more sense for me to explain verbally.”

      In one of the strongest of his new pieces, the 20-minute-long Chauvet, Braid’s gone even further afield, taking as his inspiration the Werner Herzog film Cave of Forgotten Dreams.

      “I’ve never seen a film twice in my life, like in a theatre, but I went back nine times to watch this piece,” Braid says of Herzog’s documentary. “The premise of the film is the discovery, in France, of these cave paintings, which are between 20,000 and 35,000 years old. And these paintings are not like stick people; they show sophisticated thinking. These were artists, and the first feeling, for me, was to start thinking about questions like ‘Why did they do this?’ And then I started thinking about what I’m doing, tens of thousands of years later.

      “I’m not making music because I think music is some sort of object to be worshipped,” he continues, noting that he’s now striving for the immediacy and eloquence found in the best cave art. “I’m making music because it’s a form of expression and communication between actual living human beings.”

      David Braid and the Borealis String Quartet play Pyatt Hall on Saturday (April 25).

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