Que fait-on lorsque l’on fait du jazz?
Le vendredi 4 octobre, l’Alliance Française de Toronto a réuni deux grands jazzmen de Toronto pour un concert exceptionnel.
D’entrée de jeu, Ron Davis l’a annoncé : « Ce soir, toutes les notes seront jouées dans les deux langues officielles ». Le ton était donné. Et quel ton! Ron Davis n’est pas n’importe qui. Ron Davis est un pianiste et compositeur torontois dont la carrière connaît un rayonnement international, notamment en Europe et au Japon. Ses principales influences pianistiques comprennent Art Tatum et Oscar Peterson, mais sa musique est pétrie d’influences diverses, allant du classique au rock en passant par le klezmer. Son plus récent projet, Symphronica, lui offre l’occasion d’interpréter ses compositions à la tête d’orchestres symphoniques.
Et pour l’accompagner ce soir, rien de moins que le contrebassiste, compositeur et pédagogue Mike Downes. L’un des jazzmen les plus en demande au pays, comme en témoigne la liste impressionnante de ses collaborateurs qui comprend, entre auters, Oliver Jones, Diana Krall et PJ Perry.
[...] L’improvisation joue une place centrale dans le jazz. Mais l’improvisation, c’est énormément de travail. Un travail en amont, pour être capable de s’exprimer comme on le veut avec un instrument.
Et c’est ce que ces deux musiciens ont fait en envoyant du rêve et du son au public. La définition du jazz en somme.
He is a wonderful pianist, delightful, funny.
"Ron Davis' "Symphronica" performance with the Windsor Symphony Orchestra was a real smash. He is a wonderful pianist, delightful, funny and an entertaining host. He breezed between French and English and kept the audience in rapt attention throughout. Ron had the right blend of standards and originals legal to buy ambien online (which are all excellent)... The arrangements are superb and the orchestra really enjoyed playing the show. Ron and his band were easy (and fun!) to work with; definitely one of the most popular Pops acts we have had since I have been here!"
Authentic heir of the greatest pianists of Toronto...breathtaking!
From the prestigious Russian journal Trud:
“…astonishing buy phentermine 37.5 technique, authentic heir of the greatest pianists of Toronto - "classic" Glenn Gould and jazz musician Oscar Peterson... breathtaking!”
Pianist Ron Davis (by the way, the husband of Daniela Nardi) - winner of an astonishing technique, authentic heir of the greatest pianists of Toronto - "classic" Glenn Gould and jazz musician Oscar Peterson. The way he played at the same time the left hand and right black piano on white elektropianino - breathtaking sight!
The laws of jazz
Jazz pianist Ron Davis (J.D. ʼ82) never quit the day job but for 18 years he did shelve his dream of being a professional musician.
Davis is the youngest son of a Jewish father and mother who had survived the horrors of the Holocaust as inmates of the Bergen Belsen concentration camp and the Skarzysko-Kamienna labour camp, respectively. His parents, who settled in Toronto in 1947, worried that a career in music would never pay the bills.
“The traumatic aftereffects were present in the household forever. My parents were amazing people who, despite being impoverished and denied a full education and a childhood, managed to create a somewhat normal, lower middleclass family life in Toronto, explains Davis in a telephone interview. My parents, having known what it was like to be destitute, didn’t want that for their son. They didn’t see the material comforts in a music career. They were worried about that. They urged me to become a lawyer.”
His father had bought him a piano when he was eight years old, after years of Ron pestering him. He recalls playing Maple Leaf Rag while he was at school, with the girls he liked gathering around him. Throughout his youth, he devoured classical music and jazz, practising up to 12 hours a day. He studied at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto and with Darwyn Aitken, a student of Oscar Peterson’s.
However, in 1979, he set it all aside to come to the University of Ottawa to study common law in French. Davis says he had an affinity for the French language thanks to his parents, who had embraced Canada’s bilingualism, enrolling him in French school in Toronto.
While at uOttawa, Davis spent more time in the music practice rooms than he did studying, although he went to classes and ended up tied for 14th place in grades in his class.
In the mid-1980s, after working full-time as a civil litigation lawyer for a few years in Toronto, he decided to practise law part time and take an “academic detour” to study French linguistics.
In 1993, he got his PhD at the University of Toronto and was awarded a Department of French award for his thesis, Chrono-semantics: A Theory of Time and Memory. For the next five years, he was an assistant professor at the U of T.
However, when a jazz musician friend, saxophonist Doug Banwell, insisted that he start jamming with him in 1997, Davis re-connected with his true calling. One jam led to another and pretty soon, Davis was playing in cafès, and then, larger venues.
Black and white image of Ron Davis checking music notes sitting at a grand piano.
At a performance of Espresso Manifesto, live at Koerner Hall in Toronto. Photo: Arthur Mola.
Today, he is recording his 10th full-length album, Pocket Symphronica, and he has taken his critically-acclaimed, eclectic jazz blends on tour, playing in Russia, Japan, the United States, Hong Kong and Poland, not to mention countless gigs across southern Ontario and Quebec. Davis is a resident jazzman at Toronto’s legendary Lula Lounge.
Last March, he played the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall in Moscow with his wife, singer Daniela Nardi, in a show entitled Espresso Manifesto, which the couple had also performed at the Montreal Jazz Festival in 2013.
His latest album, due for release later this year on eOne Records, includes string quartet arrangements of his original songs, as well as a version of Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face.” The project is a follow-up to his last album, Symphronica, a jazz-symphony fusion album recorded with the Windsor Symphony Orchestra and renowned conductor John Morris Russell.
Even though he is now focused on music, Davis continues to work occasionally at the law firm of Fogler Rubonoff LLP, mainly providing legal support services. In the early 1990s, he worked on two major personal injury cases. He says there is a common thread that runs through the law, linguistics and jazz.
“The connection between trial law and jazz is in the process. The music I play is a strange balance between preparation and improvisation, says Davis. It is also a type of music that requires a great where to buy phentermine online deal of background work and study in order to free you to improvise. And litigation was the same. When you go into a courtroom you are not sure what is going to come up. You have to improvise but you need a lot of background training and preparation. It is fair to say that jazz is a vocabulary. It is a grammar; it has its own syntax. All of the elements that go into the makeup of a language are present in jazz.”
Davis is known for experimentation and innovation, mixing up genres which at first glance seem like oil and water. His eighth album, Blue Modules, blended rock and pop with postmodern jazz, and included Elvis Presley’s “Viva Las Vegas” and Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Child.”
Davis says using jazz to find common ground across different styles of music is one way to keep the genre alive and relevant.
“Jazz is now over 100 years old. If you are born after 1985, jazz is probably going to be seen as your parents’ music, a bit like classical music. But jazz in its day was pop music ó parents didn’t want their kids to listen to it. Songs that are now jazz standards were pop songs in their day. I am really interested in capturing that spirit, in honouring the jazz tradition, but at the same time reaching people born after 1985 and saying here is that song you recognize and here is our jazz treatment of it, and this is the energy of jazz,” says Davis.
He also performs with Toronto-based Japanese taiko drumming group Nagata Shachu. He says he fell in love with their sound when he first saw them.
“I just knew I had to do something with them. It wasn’t an obvious pairing. We found a way to blend the sounds, says Davis. We rehearse in an industrial park in Scarborough. The only neighbours are machine shops, which are probably the only thing that makes more noise than a Japanese drumming ensemble.”
Davis also spent some time in Japan. In 2006, he was awarded the Japan Foundation’s Uchida Fellowship for the Performing Arts and was a visiting scholar at Hosei University in Tokyo.
For seven years, Davis was co-producer of Jazz for Herbie, a benefit concert series for the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. He is also a past secretary of the Glenn Gould Foundation.
Ron Davis sits at the piano with bright lights and a fellow musician in the background.
Ron Davis playing in the limelight at the Lula Lounge in Toronto in May 2014. Photo: Saul Lederman.
Now back in the studio, with sound engineer Dennis Patterson and his long-standing quartet of Kevin Barrett (guitar), Mike Downes (bass) and Roger Travassos (drums) all co-producing, how does Davis get ready to preserve his songs for posterity?
“It is a bit like asking a chef when they go into the kitchen, ‘Is the dish all planned out or is it all improvised?’ I have a pre-production spreadsheet of songs. Every project is different. With Pocket Symphronica, because there are so many moving parts, I can’t leave too much unplanned, but I also have to leave a fair bit of room for inspiration.”
Eighteen years after he returned to his true passion, Davis concedes that his parents were sort of right ñ even with 30 to 50 gigs each year, mainly in the very competitive jazz market of Toronto, and with nine albums recorded, it’s tough to make a living and it’s getting tougher. However, Davis has improvised his own unique career path.
“In the 18 years that I have been back in music the industry has changed radically. CD sales have plummeted ó online sales are much more important. It has come to the point where very few people ó maybe the Taylor Swifts ó generate income and profit from their recordings. Do I make ends meet? I am fortunate that I have my law degree. Pretty much everyone in the music business does something else.”
He adds, “When I first saw the ‘Defy the Conventional’ tagline, I thought, ‘That describes my life.’”
POCKET SYMPHRONICA CD RELEASE
Thursday, February 4th, 2016
TORONTO – The highly acclaimed pianist/bandleader/composer and Torontonian RON DAVIS is set to launch his new collection of one-of-a-kind original music with POCKET SYMPHRONICA. The innovative, eclectic album is being released on the brand new label, Really Records, and the concert – which includes exceptional musicians Aline Homzy, Kevin Barrett, Mike Downes and Roger Travassos – takes place on Thursday, February 4th at 7:30 pm at Toronto’s Lula Lounge, 1585 Dundas Street West.
Ron Davis literally does it all when it comes to musical genres. Like his beloved multicultural home Toronto, his music is beautifully diverse, and covers an extensive musical range – from Lady Gaga to Glenn Gould – and a rich range of collaborating artists, from rock guitarist Jason Nett and Japanese drum group Nagata Shachu to Argentinian dance sensation The Lombard Twins.
Following on the heels of Davis’ great success with his brainchild, the jazz-symphony fusion album Symphronica – a movement that combines jazz, world, classical, and pretty much anything stimulating and fascinating – fans can now enjoy the pocket-sized, chamber version with POCKET SYMPHRONICA. Recorded in 2015 at Imagine Sound Studios in Toronto, Pocket Symphronica has already been honoured, with the City of Toronto choosing “Jeanamora” for its Music311 program celebrating Toronto music and musicians. It features Ron Davis on piano, as well as a driving bass solo by the incomparable Mike Downes and a stellar drum solo from Roger Travassos.
The more compact Symphronica has all of the same passion and innovation as the full orchestral format, but consists of Ron’s electric/acoustic jazz/pop quartet, plus an energetic string quartet, playing his own tunes. Davis incorporates an amazing mélange of sounds and rhythms in his works, while still managing to create a thoroughly cohesive album.
His massive skill in the use of strings is outstanding, especially in songs like D’Hora – almost a samba groove with melodic Middle Eastern lines. As Ron says, “I didn't conceive of it as a hora dance, but unconsciously I stuck the word in the title. So it must be a hora. Except it isn't a hora.” Or the song Presto, based on one of Beethoven’s string quartets, and appropriately titled, as the energetic, sprinting violins match Davis’ piano at breakneck speed. Or the intense violin-and-cello standoff on Fugue & Variations on Gaga and Poker Face, where Lady Gaga is baked right into the mix when the middle-section strings play only the notes G - A - G - A!
Davis is in fact very methodical with his creations and likes to “play” with the notes as in the Gaga tune. He does the same in Blues 54 (his token blues piece), which gets its name from the fact that the melody scales the keyboard playing every fifth note, and then similarly, playing every fourth note. His playfulness also turns up in Pentuptism, a nod to gospel music reddit best place to buy ambien overseas including Davis’ essential Hammond B3, it has five beats to a bar ("Pent"), plus it has that inherent optimism present in most music of that genre.
Davis can amp up the cool factor with the heavy groove and spine-tingling violins of Gruvmuv – which he premiered with DJ LRS, who scratched to it, in a co-presentation at the Glenn Gould Variations concert. Or the pop ballad Love Song, written by Jason Nett, and featuring a sexy electric guitar solo by Kevin Barrett. Davis also manages to smash it when it comes to the sweet, elegantly slow waltz Danza Daniela, inspired by his beautiful wife and musical collaborator Daniela Nardi. He really captures a kind of melancholic nature in that song and others, like the haunting lament Chassal Siddur Pesach – a breathtaking, achingly beautiful and rarely heard traditional Passover song that his father, who survived the Holocaust, brought over with him from his birth village in Romania. This tune also recalls a waltz tempo in parts, but the mournful cello and bass are heavy, almost as if the weight is too much to endure. Then it switches to a deep, syncopated drum line underpinning dulcet violin and poignant piano. It should be mentioned that the cello, by George Meanwell and Andrew Downing, remains remarkable throughout the entire album, as do the drums and percussion from Roger Travassos.
Quirky is a word often used to describe Davis’ work, and he certainly demonstrates it in the Jaggy Dancepiece. He says, “I was obsessed by this barnyard-like theme that my mind's ear concocted,” but this is no Charlotte’s Web. It’s more like Oklahama gone awry, complete with rhythmic handclaps, a simplistic, child-like, dissonant chunky piano under meandering, tinkling, jazzy piano and sprightly strings. The tune evokes all kinds of barnyard imagery. Then there’s the unexpected, flouncy guitar solo from Kevin Barrett, where he whimsically quotes the child’s taunt, “nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah.”
The eleven-track album was produced by Dennis Patterson, Ron Davis, Mike Downes, Roger Travassos and Kevin Barrett and utilizes brilliant talent of string musicians Jessica Deutsch (violin), Ben Plotnick (violin, viola), Aline Homzy (violin), Aleksander Gajic (violin) and Anna Atkinson (viola).
WHO: Ron Davis w/ Aline Homzy, Kevin Barrett, Mike Downes, Roger Travassos
WHAT: CD launch concert for Pocket Symphronica
WHERE: Lula Lounge, 1585 Dundas St. West
WHEN: Thursday, February 4th, 2016
TICKETS: $20 Adv. / $25 Door https://www.bemusednetwork.com/events/detail/131
WEBSITE: www.rondavismusic.com / www.lula.ca
Twitter: @rondavismusic
This project is funded in part by FACTOR, the Government of Canada and Canada’s private radio broadcasters. Ce projet est financé en partie par FACTOR, le gouvernement du Canada et les radiodiffuseurs privés du Canada.
For more information, photos, mp3s, advance CD copies, interviews, please contact:
MEDIA CONTACT:
Beverly Kreller SPEAK Music
bev@speak-music.com | o: 416.922.3620 c: 416-258-5683
Twitter: @SPEAKMusicPR Facebook: www.facebook.com/beverly.kreller
Pocket Symphronica
With the release of his tenth recording, eclectic and skilled pianist/composer/producer Ron Davis has reaffirmed his position as one of the most tenacious and engaging musical artists in Canada. Pocket Symphronica embraces the wide range of Davis’ skills and taste (which includes explorations into the milieus of jazz, world, pop/dance and classical musics). Comprised of 11 original compositions (and with Davis performing brilliantly on piano, Fender Rhodes and Hammond B3), this new project is a fresh distillation of his previous, innovative CD, Symphronica – a clever symphonic jazz recording which in turn led to the current chamber-sized, more portable version of the larger ensemble.
Davis has surrounded himself here with a stalwart group of collaborators, including arrangers Mike Downes, Jason Nett and Tania Gill and co-producers Dennis Patterson, Mike Downes, Roger Travassos and Kevin Barrett. A breathtaking string quartet (including genius Andrew Downing on cello) and a first-call core band comprised of guitarist Barrett, bassist Downes and drummer/percussionist Travassos fully manifest Davis’ creative and stylistically diverse visions.
Included in the recording are Davis’ impressions of such far-flung motifs and artists as Lady Gaga (the ambitious Fugue and Variations on Gaga and Poker Face), funk (Gruvmuv – featuring a few face-melters from Barrett), Middle Eastern/Sephardic elements (the exciting and rhythmic D’hora) and a beautifully string-laden and evocative take on the traditional Jewish Passover song, Chassal Siddur Pesach (featuring sumptuous cello work from George Meanwell).
Additional memorable tracks include the uptempo string/piano feature, Presto and the gentle, bossa-infused beauty of Jeanamora. This is a deeply satisfying CD, as well as a portrait of an artist at the peak of his creativity and technical facility.