confluence: where the elbow meets the bow

AN INTERVIEW WITH robin tufts

So we made this record, Richard mixed it, and Rupa came and sang. Then she took it over to India, the record company over there pressed 2,000 copies, and that was sort of the end of it. She asked us to come over and do some touring, but there were no contracts or anything ready to go. I said I can’t do that, so I stayed in Calgary, but Don and our bass player John Johnston went. They did a few shows with Rupa and then everything fell apart, so they just travelled around India and had fun. That was sort of the last we heard of it.

Then about five years ago I got a Facebook message from a guy in Berlin who was at a disco and heard this music. He talked to the DJ, saw the cover, and loved it, so this guy contacted me to see if I was the drummer on the record. He asked me if I had a copy, which I did, and if I would sell it to him for €650. I said “what?” But I didn’t sell it. After that I started getting all of these messages from people as interest started building. 

I never really thought too much about it until the record company that did the reissue got in touch with me. They asked me if I had access to the masters or the publishing, and who owns the rights, because it was big in Europe and they wanted to re-release it. I put them in touch with Ashish and Parish, and Richard Harrow, who had the masters. About a year and a half ago it came out again, which is 40 years after the original recording. Nothing had been heard of in all that time, so that was bizarre to me.

How does the music sound to you now?

It still sounds fresh and alive! My son was visiting at Christmas, so we were listening to it, and he thought it was pretty amazing. He’s a drummer too. He plays in the band Braids. The record company is trying to get synch licences, so who knows what kind of life this music can have now that it’s been reissued. For me, it’s just a crazy story. It was a wacky one-week thing that happened, and now I’m getting royalty cheques for this one song that I have partial authorship of. That’s pretty cool! [laughs]

From there, how did your trajectory as a musician progress through the ’80s, ’90s, and into today?

I worked in local bands for years, and did a lot of society gigs. Then I had kids and decided I wanted to stay in town most of the time and not be as busy. I started accompanying dance classes at Alberta Ballet and the University of Calgary around 1994, and that sort of became my day job. It gave me about half of an income, so I didn’t have to gig so much and could focus on what kinds of jobs I wanted to take. I got involved with a Celtic group called Seanachie and played with them for 15 years. We toured all over the place, played folk festivals, and recorded CDs. That got me involved in the concept of playing original music and doing the things I really wanted to do with friends, as opposed to just gigging. 

Seanachie also gave me another solid source of income, which meant that I could start to explore my other love, jazz. I started to get more involved in the local scene, and that’s mostly what I do now: original jazz projects with local players and writers. I work with Aimee-Jo Benoit and Lorna MacLachlan in her quintet, who I’ve played with since high school. There are just so many great musicians in Calgary.

My other passion that I started exploring with my group in high school is free improvisation. That’s my true passion. There’s no market for it as far as gigs go, so I decided to start a concert series at my house called Music for Soup. I’ve done 12 of them so far. The way it works is that I invite a guest artist that has never worked with me before in a free improv setting. We meet face to face and play without any preparation. Total spontaneous composition in my living room, with guests around. 

To come to the show, you have to bring a donation for the kitty so I can pay my guest, and a donation for the soup pot. We make a big pot of veggie stock and a big pot of chicken stock. People come in with their sausages and potatoes or whatever, and my wife helps them make the soup. They improvise that in the kitchen while we improvise music in the living room. It’s been really enriching, and the events have been extraordinarily well received. We usually have 25 or 30 people in our little house. It’s very intimate and spontaneous, which is great.

Is there any crossover between Music for Soup and Bug Incision?

No, but I’ve done some stuff with Bug Incision. Chris Dadge and I have done a couple of shows together, and he’s invited me to ad hoc events where people are thrown together to improvise. Through that I met Jiajia Li, who’s a phenomenal player, and we’ve connected very strongly. She’s on my list for the next people I’d like to invite to Music for Soup.

Can you tell me a bit about the work you do as an accompanist for dance? Is that music typically improvised or composed?

It’s all improvised, but I have to create structures because I play for contemporary classes. Every teacher develops different exercises that need accompaniment, so they can’t really use pre-recorded music. Quite often the exercises will be in odd time signatures, odd phrase lengths, or whatever. I have a hand drum rig that I use for classes, so I just sit in the corner watching them demonstrate the exercise, and spontaneously create something in my mind that I then play. That evolves as it informs the dance and informs what I do. It’s kind of like improvising in a structure for 2-4 hours a day and getting paid for it.

That’s great!

Yeah! I basically have the dancers to read as a score. The idea of moving visual structure as a source of input for improvisation has been really great. It created an idea of a relationship between form in improvisation and visual forms. That’s a very strong connection for me and it informs everything else I do. I always have visualisation happening when I’m playing now. Some people see colour in sound, but I see shape and movement.

What can people expect from your upcoming Soundwalk?

I’ve been reading about what other people are doing, and reading about Soundwalks in general, going all the way back to R. Murray Schafer. A big theme seems to be finding quiet. Acoustic ecologists and musicians tend to value silence as a way of finding calm. People look for natural spaces in the city so they can reconnect with what they’ve lost. I think that’s really valuable, but for me it’s about finding peace, tranquillity, and music in whatever soundscape you’re in. My current bugaboo is looking for sonic beauty wherever you are.

As an example, to walk to Inglewood from my house in Ramsay, I have to walk down 12th under the railroad tracks. It’s very noisy, but if you focus your listening in a different way, it’s one of the richest acoustic environments in the city. Trains aren’t always happening, and the underpass tunnel has a wonderful reverberant quality with low frequencies. You hear the sound of Inglewood traffic, commerce, and people talking all channelled through that transitional space as you leave one neighbourhood and enter another. Then at any time, you can start hearing trains heading towards you. If you’re standing right underneath the trestle when the engine goes by, there are a lot of percussive sounds. When you focus your attention in a musical sense, it’s as powerful as any bombastic symphonic expression.

I want the symbolism of the confluence of the Bow and Elbow Rivers to be the focus of the walk. It’s going to be fairly short so we can spend a lot of time in each location sitting, listening, and contemplating. We’re starting at the zoo bridge on 12th, which has recently been replaced. I was walking across it one day when it was howling wind, and the bridge sings! The railings produce a polyphonic humming like an Aeolian harp. It changes as the sound blows at different frequencies, which is pretty cool. If you put your ear on the bridge you can hear it all the time. Light tapping on the different railings produces long, sustained, beautiful tones. That’s one of the sonic experiences I’m going to incorporate.

Robin Tufts’ Further Reading Recommendations

The Tuning of the World by R. Murray Schafer

This book is a totally valuable resource because it’s so academic and codified. It’s such a great way of thinking about how we can make laws and build cities better if we value sonics.

Zero Decibels by George Michelsen Foy

One of the things that got me started in my quest for silence is that I live across the city from the Lilydale Chicken Factory. It closed two weeks ago through the work of me and a bunch of people with our alderman connecting the Green Line pathway through that space, eliminating the last industrial noise in our neighbourhood. When I first moved in, it was in full production, and it grew over the years to become very noisy and difficult. 

I started reading about noise and sound and found this book. It’s about a guy in New York City who had a sonic existential crisis on the subway platform when five trains arrived simultaneously on three different levels. He started searching for sonic spaces with absolute silence, and that got me measuring locations around me on a decibel level. I started thinking about how the quality of sound is more important than the level of it. You can adjust the quality of a sonic environment by changing how you build things and how you plant gardens. You can also adjust the quality of how we think about sonic environments, and that’s what got me thinking about the Soundwalk idea.

One Square Inch of Silence by Gordon Hempton

The documentary film Big Giant Wave is a little bit uneven, but it has some mention of a fellow named Gordon Hempton. He calls himself an acoustic ecologist, and is very concerned with the disappearing quiet in the world. The activities of humans and industry are pervasive, and it’s impossible to get away from now. Hempton is trying to use legislation to protect areas that he’s found that are particularly quiet, without airplanes passing over them or anything else. He’s very famous for recording natural sounds, which are used a lot in film soundtracks and research studies. 

The book he wrote is about a park in Washington on the West Coast, which he considers the quietest place in the United States. He leaves there and goes across the country looking for similar spaces. Those are the things I’ve read that informed my Soundwalk, but the difference is that I’m looking for the quiet within us by focusing our listening in a different way. John Cage found that Times Square can be an amazing musical experience if you focus your attention on the “silence” for four minutes and 33 seconds.