News, October 2005 • October 27, 2005, 1:13 PM

Sci-fi writer David Gerrold, in his book Yesterday's Children, quoted the I Ching as saying that change is the only constant in the universe. There have been a lot of changes in my career in the last two months.

First of all, I haven't yet started playing for Harmonia this season. I didn't get used all that much in performances last season, and anyway choral music has a tendency to demand that the accompaniment be as close to what's written as possible. Because I wear so many different hats as a musician, and my style is so improvisation-oriented anyway, I don't quite fit the bill. However, their current pianist is reportedly pregnant, and will eventually have to go on maternity leave, at which point I may be called to fill in. I haven't been approached yet for that, but in the meantime I'm glad to have my Wednesdays free for the time being.

Secondly, the Soul Review Board has disbanded. Because it was a twelve-piece band, it was difficult to manage, and not everyone was able to come to practice on a particular day of the week. We had a series of personnel changes over the course of my time with the band—we went through a string of bass players and were unable to secure a new guitarist after our original one moved to London, Ontario to study music there. As a result, we cancelled our Maverick's gig for October 7, and a New Year's Eve Gig we had been organizing, which would have been a charity ball at the Capital Music Hall, appears to have been scrubbed too.

That's a shame, because Stone Soul Picnic might have done that gig as the opening act. Stone Soul Picnic has fallen victim to a number of cancellations and rescheduled gigs in the last couple of months, but is currently in the process of setting up a gig at the Casino du Lac Leamy for late next month.

Hot Ice is also losing one of its singers as a result of personality conflicts between him and the other band members (Cathy especially) and a less than satisfactory performance from him. As a result, our November 19 gig has been cancelled.

The life of a musician is not always easy—it has its ups and downs. But on many levels, the down times present a good opportunity to develop ways to be more of a success in the future. As German soccer coaching legend Sepp Herberger put it: "After the game is before the game. The next game is always the hardest." And hard though my next game will be, I'm still working toward making it a success. Stay tuned.

Since I last updated my web page, my career has exploded—not yet to the ultimate level that I'd like it to, but to a significant step forward. I now play in three bands again, the third one being the Soul Review Board. I used to work with its leader, Horace Roxborough, years ago in a band called Incity Dreams. Soul Review Board was scheduled to do a gig at Maverick's earlier this year, and all of a sudden Horace was temporarily without a keyboardist—his regular keyboardist is in the military and had just got called off on assignment. He then thought, Who do I know that would be able to pull off that much material on such short notice? and managed to track me down. I've been with that band ever since.

Hotter than Ice has been in something of a hiatus mode for the last several months, as it has been training new personnel, including Elijah Tinker on bass and Cathy Ghattas on vocals. Cathy had announced she was thinking of moving to Montreal, but just before she could make the final decision to go, she got a new roommate and two job offers, so she'll be staying. Way to go, Cathy!

After a hiatus of several months from Stone Soul Picnic, I've been working with that band for a number of gigs at the Aylmer Marina, and I've heard the band might do a series of gigs at Mont Tremblant this coming winter.

On the choir front, Harmonia will be starting its third season in September, and a few months ago its choir director, recently appointed choir director for the Cumberland Community Singers, has had me in mind to take over as accompanist for that choir too. So, counting my church choirs, I might be involved with four choirs come September.

I'm beginning 2005 with a reduced workload, but economically speaking, it wasn't exactly the kind of workload reduction I had in mind. As a result of irreconcilable differences, I am no longer part of the Edsels.

For me, I think the beginning of the end was the Rideau Carleton gig we did in September. At one point we were doing a tune—I've forgotten which one—and I started my solo with the wrong instrument sound by mistake. Abruptly—in the middle of the show—the bass player came up to me and had me change the sound to a brass sound.

While he had a valid point from the standpoint of keeping our performance true to the original recording, I was indignant with him. If you make a mistake in a performance, you never stop and correct it, because then the audience will know you made a mistake. For all the audience knows, your mistake might be a deliberate change to make the tune more interesting and more your own interpretation. And who's to say that any interpretation of a song is any less proper than another? If the audience doesn't like that interpretation, let them come and tell us. I was so irritated at our bass player that I had a hard time staying enthusiastic that night.

Ideally, that sort of mistake should have been handled at our rehearsals, and to some degree it was, but I remember my last half-dozen or so rehearsals with them, in which we basically skimmed through our set lists, saying, "'Come Go With Me' is okay...We're okay on 'Breaking Up is Hard to Do'...'I Got You Babe' is fine..." and so on. Looking back, were they really? Perhaps there was a tune among these in which I was liable to make such a mistake in a show if we didn't correct it now in the rehearsal, but if there was such a tune, I don't recall us ever working on it and ironing that problem out.

It could be argued that these mistakes were something I should have worked on at home, but there are two points to consider here. First of all, it's one thing to rehearse to a recording, but another to rehearse with the band you're working with. No matter how closely you follow a recording, the musicians you're working with will always have different influences and different playing and improvisation styles than the musicians who worked on the original recordings. You're rehearsing to perform with the band, not a recording. You can't pull off as top-notch a performance if you don't stick to what you've been used to rehearsing. It's the same fundamental reason John Travolta insisted on doing his famous dance in Saturday Night Fever to the Bee Gees' "You Should Be Dancing" as he'd rehearsed, instead of to another tune, when the time came to shoot the actual dance sequence.

Secondly, I didn't have much time to run through the material on my own to correct such errors. Unlike the other band members, I don't have a nine-to-five job, and no one ensemble that I have ever worked with has ever paid me enough to make a living. They were simply never big enough for that. As a result, I have to take on multiple projects, multiple jobs, multiple clients. Which of course means a greater workload. The only thing I regret in this area is that the Edsels didn't see all the work I had to put into the other projects so they could recognize the enormity of it for what it was.

The Edsels also took exception to my relative lack of flexibility in some cases—for example, the fact that our New Year's Eve gigs were in Chesterville, a town about an hour's drive southeast of Ottawa, meant that I had to help set up in the afternoon, head back to Ottawa so I could do the 4:30 mass (which is my job, and in the Roman Catholic Church January 1—which this mass represented—is a holy day of obligation), and then head back to Chesterville to do the gig. Theoretically I could skip that mass, but that would mean I'd lose money as a result. Now, since the other band members have day jobs, what I make per mass might not seem like much to them, but in my case, it represents nearly 17% of the bare minimum that I usually make in a month. I can afford to lose that once in a while, but not all the time—remember, my involvement in two other bands meant those bands would have the occasional gig requiring me to give up a mass too. If the Edsels couldn't accommodate me, they should have given me more lead time on that point so I could make other arrangements—for example, swap gigs with someone; i.e. have him sub for me at the 4:30 mass, and then I could sub for him some other night.

Anyway, this is a large part of the background behind the band's decision, and while I can understand their reasoning—after all, I didn't grow up with much of the material the band plays, and my background has always been of something of an improvisational nature—I take strong exception to the way they handled my dismissal.

As you will recall from my last newsletter, the Edsels, aware of the many hats that I wear, brought in another keyboard player to train him so that he could sub for me in the event that I couldn't make one of their gigs. According to one of the band's guitarists, he called me toward the end of September to indicate that I was being let go. I remember having a conversation with him, but none of the details of that conversation except for his statement that the band hadn't forgotten me—and if he did say I was being let go, he must have said it in an oblique way, because obviously I didn't pick up on it. And my recently-increased workload as a result of my work for my friend in Chesterville and my involvement in Harmonia were giving me little time to think about much. As of this writing the Edsels have still not taken my photos off their web site, and even in a chance meeting with the band's drummer in early November—which is how I found out about the cancellation of the Ganaoque gig last month—I never got any sense that the second keyboardist was ever going to be anything more than my understudy. As a result, I continued to believe that I was active in three bands instead of two.

The drummer said that the next Edsels gig on the calendar at that point, a December 18 gig that had been booked since the mid-summer and for which I'd always had the date wide open, was still on. He said at the time that I should get a call from the band in the next couple of weeks. When those two weeks went by, I started to get worried. I'd been out of the loop for over two months, and if I was still involved in the band, now was the time to get me back up to speed with them. The gig date came and went, and still I'd received no call.

The gig after that, as far as I knew, was New Year's Eve at the Chesterville Legion again. When Vijay Agard, the lead singer from Stone Soul Picnic, offered me the chance to do a New Year's Eve gig with him at the National Arts Centre, I couldn't give him a straight answer right away. Then it occurred to me that even if the Edsels had done that gig on December 18, they wouldn't necessarily do two rehearsals over the holidays just to polish up for their own New Year's Eve gig. And by the time of the gig, I would have been out of the loop with them for three months—and two rehearsals wouldn't have cut it. So I called the Stone Soul Picnic singer back and agreed to do his gig instead.

When, just after Christmas, I finally learned about my Edsels dismissal, I felt as though I had been lied to. I can see how the Edsels would feel they had always been honest with me, and it's likely they were honest in their own way, but here's a classic example of the veracity of that old maxim, "Clarity is power." If you're not crystal clear with someone, you run the risk of them believing something other than what you wanted them to believe. I don't ever recall any of the Edsels coming up to me and saying, "We feel the time has come to let you go"—especially in mid-September, because if they had been up-front with me and each other about this in September, the drummer, in my chance meeting with him, would certainly have said something different about my involvement in the band.

It would be an understatement to say that I am upset with the Edsels and hurt because of the way they've handled this. Don't get me wrong—I still consider them a good band and everything, and I wish them well. But from here on in, they're on their own, individually and collectively, because I don't believe I will ever feel comfortable working with, for or through any of them again.

By the way, I'm looking into the idea of moving this web site to a more reliable server. In checking out the site here on mywebpage.netscape.com—which is a bit of a mouthful of a domain name to begin with—I've noticed that some of the files don't always load. Netscape insists sometimes that it can't find a given file, even though it is there (except, of course, for the French and German translations thereof—I still haven't had time to work on them). And if I'm encountering this problem, it's likely you're encountering it too. I haven't decided yet whether I'm going to move this web site to rogers.com or get my own domain name and move it there. In the meantime, if you see a "can't find the file" message for the English version of this page, keep clicking on your Reload button, because the file is there.