Peggy Lee and Cole Schmidt - Forever Stories of: Moving Parties
Released 15 November 2024, on digital and CD
Peggy Lee - cello
Cole Schmidt - guitar
Cellist Peggy Lee and guitarist Cole Schmidt are quite simply two of the most important composer-improvisers to have emerged from Vancouver's vibrant creative music community. Both wield vast vocabularies on their respective instruments, and with them they can coax out a seemingly endless array of sonic colours within just as many stylistic frameworks. They're also united by their shared gift for a particular sort of melodicism—one that can sneak its way into multiple idioms and expressions
This potent combination of attributes has been over the past decade in groups such as Echo Painting and SICK BOSS. It's also what propelled them into a 2017 residency in Montréal and later what animated this new project, which first came about in 2019.
"This project was born out of Cole and I playing in each other's bands," explains Lee. "We decided to regularly get together to play as a duo, regardless of whether there was an upcoming gig or not. We would improvise and workshop new compositional ideas." Initially they would also play live in a trio formation, inviting a different drummer to join each time.
Although Forever Stories of: Moving Parties seems to be billed as a duo record, a more accurate way of looking at it is right there in the title. "The initial concept for the record had to do with hosting a party," remarks Schmidt, "[one] that included all kinds of people and characters connecting on different conversations in different rooms of the house." Funnily enough, Lee and Schmidt's birthdays are only a day apart from one another each year, which has led to them celebrating together in the past.
The pair serve as the album's gracious co-hosts, sharing compositional duties, the auditory limelight and seemingly divvying up the allotment of guests. Each brings several close collaborators to the sizeable cast of friends: international luminaries such as Wayne Horvitz, Frank Rosaly, Erika Angell, Meredith Bates, Sara Schoenbeck, and Dylan van der Schyff, all make appearances, plus fellow members of SICK BOSS like JP Carter and James Meger.
The diversity of material across the record's 14 tracks is consistent with the metaphor above. Each piece has its own clear identity—some pieces employ proggish structures that allow the players to dart between odd-meter acoustic passages and electric improvisation, while others offer cinematic fusions of folk and jazz. Elsewhere you'll find voice-driven pieces, electronics-heavy abstractions, and even molten rock-outs. Opener and first single "Blame" exemplifies the underlying warmth and amicable spirit that infuses even the record's darker moments. Unhurried gestures intertwine and evolve within a poised, luminous arrangement anchored by Mili Hong's wafting drum phrases. According to Schmidt, the piece was built on "a melody that had been circling in [his] head for over 10 years" and was ultimately finished in May 2020.
Captured in vivid detail by Seb Fournier at Hotel2Tango in Montreal, John Raham at Afterlife Studios in Vancouver, as well as remotely from homes & spaces in Gothenburg, Melbourne, Amsterdam and New York City in 2022 & 2023, Forever Stories of: Moving Parties is an invitation to celebrate two of Canada's most ingenious and multifaceted performer-composers amongst some of their brightest peers.
“She can scrape and stridulate as required, but her cello playing also grants due place to clarity of line and sweetness of tone.”
“Lee is soft-spoken and incredibly modest, but she is arguably the most prominent improvising musician in the rich musical community around Vancouver... Her success beyond the local scene may be due to her unique sound. Though she plays with a lyrical richness, she does not reuse the overtrod blues licks or standard bebop vocabulary that is the lingua franca or so many jazz players.”
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1. Blame: (Cole Schmidt) was a melody that had been circling in my head for over 10 years, and was finalized in May 2020. JP's trumpet solo was captured on the first take, and one of the many moments on this record that I continue to be amazed by.
2. Removing clocks from a heated house: (Cole Schmidt) was written on an acoustic guitar during the first lockdown in a family house in the forest next to a woodstove, while discovering Adrianne Lenkar's second solo album. Peggy helped with the melody on this one.
3. It Will Come Back and Fallride: (Peggy Lee) These two pieces, to our minds, are paired as each one features a vocalist telling a story over a somewhat moody melody (think rainy Vancouver fall weather!)
4. Doctor Dawn: (Cole Schmidt) is a piece that we play and recorded with Cole's band SICK BOSS, that was written for a doctor that passed away a few years ago, who provided some urgent care when he was a kid. Jaimie Branch also performed this track live with us in February 2020, so it is often played with her music and spirit in mind as well.
5. Mercy (Peggy Lee): There are two parts to this one... the opening feels quite somber but out of it arises a bass ostinato and a harmonic sequence and one can hear the light shining through via JP Carter's beautiful trumpet solo.
6. Absences: (Cole Schmidt) is a simple meditative drone in Ab with a slowly shared melody that floats between major and minor, and allows it's improvisers, (Peg, Frank, and Sunny), to create surprising textures and colours. The title has to do with noting with gratitude when certain things are absent: fear, noise, clouds, toothache etc..
7. Try to Waltz (Peggy Lee): This piece has two short sections that are repeated three times, each time getting a little fuller and involved until by the end the material is quite transformed...
8 Gloop (Peggy Lee): This is the jam room at the party... fading in at first and gradually descending into full on chaos.
9. Sun Gods: (Cole Schmidt) was somehow written on a beach in Mexico, even though it's one of the moodier pieces on the album. The title comes from the local ice rink/swimming pool in the town where I grew up.
10. 7:02pm (Cole Schmidt): is dedicated to the medical workers that continued to provide support, long after we stopped with our daily 7pm salutes during lockdown.
11. Old Rookie (Cole Schmidt): is dedicated to my dad. It was composed during our first trip to Europe together in 2019.
13. For Ron Miles (Peggy Lee): A wonderful musician and human being passed away in 2022. I had the great privilege of playing with Ron for many years in Wayne Horvitz's Gravitas Quartet which also featured Sara Schoenbeck on bassoon. We were really happy that both Sara and Wayne could contribute their unique voices to this track. Ron was such an incredibly beautiful human being, never mind his otherworldly playing and musicianship. Truly anyone who encountered Ron or had the great fortune to make music with him would agree.
14. Coda (Peggy Lee): It feels appropriate to close the record with a short duo between myself and Cole. A sort of 'goodnight, sleep tight, until next time...'