Boo! Here comes Halloween weekend when the bars get
loaded with plenty of costume contests, lots of live music and general
all-around weirdness, which adds up to one frighteningly good time. Check
the IT Pub
Crawl listings for a favorite fright night location and have some fun on
this hoot of a holiday. Then around 8 p.m. on Sunday, Nov. 2, at Charles
and Limey’s Lounge (620 S. First at Vinegar Hill Mall area) come
scare yourself when End Times Trio hosts the Springfield Freejazz &
Creative Music Forum concert series featuring guest artist Crissie Trigger.
We’ve been through the jokes before so
I’ll refrain from asking why freejazz isn’t free and attempt to
explain this peculiar music art form sometimes termed as avant-garde or
experimental. Richard Gilman-Opalsky, drummer and founding member of End
Times Trio along with saxophonist Frank Trompeter and guitarist Mark
Schwartz, creates music that sounds cacophonic and unorganized while
actually containing complicated song structures within parameters of
improvisational performance. Often songs are completely improvised while
others begin with merely a title and suggestion. Some are more defined into
movements, but all encompass a strikingly different approach to
music-making and instrument-playing than your average popular music
composition.
In improvisational music performance and particularly
in jazz, guest musicians enhance group shows, and End Times Trio often
invites participants for musical experimentation. At this Sunday’s
concert, Crissie Trigger joins the ETT on saw. Yes, you heard right, she
plays the saw. The trusty cutting tool of the handy carpenter doubles as a
musical instrument. Trigger first heard the saw played during her tenure as
a member of a touring improvisational theater troupe that traversed across
Europe in the ’70s. Originally from London, England, she relocated to
Springfield a few years ago. Earlier this year when she saw another saw
player it rekindled her interest in the idea of playing the sharp-toothed,
metal-bladed implement.
“I seemed to have a knack for it,” she
says in her definitely English accent. “So I traded my bass banjo to
a musician from a band in Bloomington for a saw.”
Trigger’s artistic background of instrumental
music and improvisational theater prepared her well for a foray into
freejazz which she interprets as, “a combination of notes and sounds
creating a soundscape of color with music instead of paint.” The
actual physical workings of saw-playing consists of bending the saw into an
“S” pattern, then running a bow across the flat or
“sweet” spot, as in bowing a stringed instrument. Trigger
estimates the range of notes available from an average saw between
“an octave and a half to three quarters” with some specifically
designed saws reaching an entire two-octave range.
If you think we’re kidding here, you are wrong
my friend. Just ask the members of the International Musical Sawplayers
Association at their annual festival in Felton, Calif. Or listen to the
amazing, internationally acclaimed sawyer Natalia Paruz, who performs with
various symphonies and was a recent guest on “A Prairie Home
Companion.” For those of you about to saw, we salute you. Complete
starter kits are available online at www.musicalsaw.com, where for the fair
price of $104.55 you receive a two-octave baritone saw, bow, resin, case
and a “two-page sheet of instructions,” plus an offer to
engrave your name into the saw for only a few pennies more. As you can see,
this musical saw business is serious stuff.
The only other saw sighting in Springfield I can
recall was a dark and stormy night many years ago in some shadowy tavern
when Doc Hughes, a cohort of Springfield Shaky, pulled out his saw to rip
on a few old blues tunes. With an ethereal, moaning sound best heard and
not described, Trigger’s saw-playing combined with the stirring work
of End Times Trio should be nothing short of a hauntingly beautiful,
post-Halloween experience. So, shall we see you at the sawing?
This article appears in Oct 23-29, 2008.
