Gigs and Compositions

Bill plays guitar with Evergreen Club

A mash-up where rap meets Indonesian gamelan

Toronto rapper Andy Bernstein (Abdominal) has been inspired by an Indonesian gamelan performance to try a mash-up

Robert Everett-Green
From Thursday’s Globe and Mail
Published on Wednesday, Oct. 21, 2009

Most rappers are magpies who will rhyme over usable beats from any source, the more unexpected the better. Even so, Andy Bernstein didn’t expect to feel a rhyme coming on when he heard a concert by the Evergreen Club Contemporary Gamelan.

Bernstein is a Toronto rapper (stage name: Abdominal), whose 2007 album Escape from the Pigeon Hole was one of the cleverest, most entertaining rap discs of the year. He went to an Evergreen show in May at the prompting of his housemate and DJ confrère Nik Timar, whose father Andrew plays in the Indonesian-style percussion ensemble.

“I couldn’t help being struck by how beat-heavy some of their music was,” Bernstein says. “I was kind of rapping along in my head.”

After some discussion with the Evergreens, and a “gentle nudge” from a Globe review that suggested a gamelan-rap match-up might be a good idea, Bernstein and the band decided to try it out. A few more conversations with Music Gallery artistic director Jonathan Bunce got the cross-cultural mash-up on the agenda for the Gallery’s X Avant New Music Festival, which started Wednesday in Toronto.

“It’s never been done before, as far as I can tell,” says Andrew Timar.

To get Bernstein into the gamelan groove, Timar took the rapper to the community workshops he holds regularly in Toronto and put him in charge of a large Indonesian gong. Bernstein says the experience showed him aspects of gamelan music he hadn’t fully noticed while sitting in the audience.

“On the surface, it seems like a 4/4 beat, but when you’re playing in the middle of it, there are so many little counterrhythms,” he says. He selected a few of his rap numbers that seemed most likely to succeed with those beats and swapped with the Evergreen for tapes of their repertoire, which includes traditional pieces and new works by Western composers.

“We’ll be taking elements from our pieces,” says Timar, “and creating beats we can do with our instrumentation, that Abs can rap on top of. We might also give him a rhythm track without specific pitch, something just with hanging gongs. That can be more like drum-and-bass.”

Getting all the participants together before Friday’s show has proven to be a challenge, however, especially since the set will also include input from the Toronto turntable duo iNSiDEaMiND, last seen during the Toronto Fringe Festival in a multimedia show called The Discovery of Scatterpopia. The most intensive rehearsal is likely to happen during sound check, says Timar.

“I’m comfortable with that,” says Bernstein. “I’ve done a lot of work with a lot of different kinds of music and musicians. And I think there will definitely be a big chunk of freestyling.” The show will also include pieces by Besnard Lakes keyboardist and composer Nicole Lizée, who will present This Will Not Be Televised , with turntablist P-Love and chamber ensemble; and Karappo Okesutura (2006), for karaoke tapes, mezzo soprano, chamber ensemble and video.

This year’s X Avant, now in its fourth year, also features performances by electro-Krautrock pioneers Cluster (who played Wednesday); Czech violinist and vocalist Iva Bittova, with Pere Ubu percussionist Chris Cutler (Saturday); and a show by Continuum Contemporary Music that includes Chris Paul Harman’s deconstructions of Scarlatti keyboard sonatas (on Sunday).

The X Avant Festival runs through Sunday at the Music Gallery and other locations. For full program details, see www.musicgallery.org .

Playing kacapi, an Indonesian zither.

Kissed (From Evergreen Club CD: For There and Then)

Over the years I have had the good fortune to be connected with some of Canada’s finest musicians and art makers, working either as a performer or composer or arranger. In this site I will include some of the main groups I am affiliated with: Mosaic, Movie/Music, Pirate Jenny, Evergreen Club, Glass Orchestra, Ferro Baci and Ulysse. I will also include some of my writing, including excerpts from a recent novel, as well as music teaching materials.

Bill Parsons, guitar.

St. James (From Mosaic’s Passing Time CD)

Desert Drive