Space Elevator has got something for everyone

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      All of Mike WT Allen’s musical dreams are coming true—and this, he admits, worries him deeply. In his band Space Elevator, he has successfully assembled 20 of Vancouver’s most adept young musicians to play his complex charts, which combine crunching metal guitars with a billowing horn section and prog-rock keys. The band’s first show sold out, as has every subsequent outing. And this week, Space Elevator will release its self-titled debut album on the prestigious Redshift label, known for its selection of adventurous art music from some of Canada’s finest composers.

      Sometimes it all seems too much.

      “I keep waiting for us to have a bad concert so I can break up the band and don’t have to keep organizing everything,” Allen tells the Straight in a telephone interview from his East Van home. “It’s just so much work, and it’s an expensive undertaking.”

      And then, of course, he laughs. Self-mockery is a big part of the dreadlocked saxophonist, clarinetist, conductor, and composer’s makeup; he jokingly ascribes Space Elevator’s genesis to his being an “artistic type” who needs to express himself through “odd time signatures and atonal harmonies”. But the group also pays tribute to Allen’s focus as a leader, to his knack for writing compositions that are as accessible as they are ambitious, and to an interesting moment in Vancouver’s musical history. One reason why Space Elevator can exist, he contends, is that we have a surplus of excellent musicians and a shortage of work; people can’t live comfortably within a single genre, so they’re open to music that blurs stylistic boundaries—and to working hard for minimal pay.

      “I’m extremely happy to have the people that I have in this band, because the music that I’ve written for them is crazy difficult,” he says. “The musicians are all so talented and so incredible and should be paid, like, three times what I pay them for the amount of work I make them do. But I’ll message them and say, ‘Hey, guys, I’ve got this gig,’ and they don’t care that I can only pay them so much. They just say, ‘Yes, that’s fine. We’ll be there.’ I’m eternally grateful for my musicians and the amount of enthusiasm that they bring to it, because if it wasn’t for them it would just be me standing on an empty stage waving my arms around.”

      As for those sold-out shows, there’s always the fact that when you’ve got 20 people in the band, they’re going to bring a lot of partners, parents, and friends along with them. But Space Elevator’s music also has something for almost everyone, as Allen points out.

      “If someone’s coming into the concert expecting big-band jazz, then they’re going to latch on to those really pretty, jazz-leaning things,” he says. “Maybe they’re going to shy away from the heavy-metal riffs, but you can more easily put up with a bunch of heavy-metal riffs if some kind of beautiful trombone chorale is happening right afterwards—and vice versa, you know. If someone is coming in looking for a big, loud rock concert, they might go, ‘Wait a second, what are all these saxophones doing on-stage?’ And then they’ll make their way through the saxophone solos and they’ll get a nice big heavy-metal riff. So I think that may be part of the appeal of the band: there’s always enough of everything in there that people can take different things away from it.”

      Space Elevator plays the Rickshaw Theatre on Saturday (April 6).

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