François Houle & Håvard Wiik

This email interview with François Houle and Håvard Wiik took place during May-June 2013.

Tony Reif: How did this duo project come about? Had you ever performed together before the 2011 Vancouver jazz festival gig and this recording? François Houle: Håvard and I had played together in Vancouver at the jazz festival with members of Atomic, in duo and quartet with Ken Vandermark’s Free Fall Trio at Performance Works, and again at the Roundhouse Community Centre as a duo. I guess the response from our duo playing was such that it prompted you to ask us to record together, something we actually didn’t plan, so it was a nice opportunity to play some more together.

Håvard Wiik: We’d played together as a duo once before the session. Francois sat in with my trio at the roundhouse in 2009, and also with Free Fall before that.

TR: Håvard, you’ve had a duo with fellow Norwegian reed player Hakon Kornstadt – any others? Did you find your approach to interacting with Francois was much different than with other clarinet players (e.g. Fredrik Ljungqvist in Atomic etc.)? Can you say anything specific about the particular musical qualities of this pairing that sets it apart for you?

HW: Well, I’ve played duos occasionally with Ken Vandermark and Michael Thieke and I also have a more regular thing with Tobias Delius. It’s hard to compare different qualities when it comes to musicians on this level, and working with Francois was equally a joy.

TR: Francois, a similar question, given your long-standing duo project with Benoit Delbecq. And of course, these are two very different piano players!

FH: Well, totally different sensibility than Benoît, but the same great ears and deep knowledge of music. I don’t really want to compare their pianistic approaches, as the main thing for me is how a good musician and improviser will get inside your head and play what you’re about to play! Håvard has that, and then some…

TR: What is it about clarinet and piano anyway that makes it such a satisfying combination? Of course there are plenty of examples in classical music, but I think not so many in jazz.

FH: Having had a serious training as a classical musician, my relationship to the piano is deep, having had to learn most of the traditional repertoire, as well as playing tons of chamber music. Timbre is key here. Both instruments are basically metal tagged to a wooden resonating chamber, so they blend well together. There are very few instances for sure: Kuhn Brothers, Jimmy Giuffre with Paul Bley. Most influential recordings I know have bass or drums in addition. But the duo format that really caught my ears was the long-term relationship of Steve Lacy with two very different pianists; Mal Waldron and Gil Evans. Both really shed light on different aspects of Lacy’s playing. What I like about playing with piano is how it re-contextualizes what you do melodically into a harmonic framework. It forces you to listen more closely to how you connect notes.

HW: I’ve always felt that the instruments blend very well sonically, the clarinet takes up less sonic space than the saxophone which gives some more space for the piano. Not many pure clarinet-piano duos in the jazz-canon, that I know of, but some strong combinations with aforementioned Giuffre/Bley, Kuhn Brothers and Tony Scott and Bill Evans.

TR: Speaking of classical music, we decided to record in a small concert hall rather than a studio. I think the sound is spectacularly good, but apart from that, was there anything about the acoustic and setting of the hall that either helped or hindered the music?

FH: Having lots of room for the sound to blossom always helps. In this hall the natural reverberation is minimal, so it felt more like a recording session than a live performance situation.

HW: Â I liked the room a lot, but since this was my one and only time there my recollection of acoustic details are minimal.

TR: François, you’ve adapted various extended techniques to the clarinet and created some of your own. For example, the nose flute-like sound of “Ged’s Shadow” which you produce by removing the mouthpiece. Could you explain how you produce some of the others? Slap tonguing, for example (the staccato, thumping notes that are heard in “Woodhoopoe” and elsewhere)?

FH:Â Slap tonguing was pretty standard in early jazz, and for sax players. You’re hearing more and more clarinetists doing this, although with varying degrees of success. You also come across this technique in contemporary music compositions. It took me two years of refining my approach to doing this, after hearing Evan Parker and Jorrit Dykstra do it. (Jorrit does it wickedly on both saxophone and clarinet!) My approach is as percussive, but with more pitch than attack, so you get an African log drum type of tone.

TR: What about the guttural playing?

FH: Just the old classical flutter-tongue technique. Schoenberg was one of the first to employ this in his chamber music, Pierrot Lunaire notably.

TR: And in “Fallen Angel” the ‘shadow’ tones that follow the melody somewhere below it?

FH: It’s actually a 12th below. They’re fundamental tones with the 5th partial emphasized to generate a ‘duo tone’. Bill Smith (W.O. Smith, not Coda magazine Bill…) was the first to catalog those. Ab Baars wrote a wonderful tune called “Faded Yellow, A Portrait of John Carter” which is based around these types of sounds. I just developed my own repertoire of these.

TR: The pitch-bending in “Ursula’s Dream”?

FH: Good old Gershwin Rhapsody in Blue portamento, but twisted and mangled…

TR: A couple of the titles of your pieces here reference Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea series. These great young adult books centering around the mage Ged, which predate Harry Potter by more than two decades, create a haunting alternate reality while raising timeless moral issues about responsibility, life and death. What’s the connection in your mind between those stories and this music?

FH: The shadow that chases Ged around the imaginary world of Earthsea is one of the creepiest concepts I’ve ever read in a story. I guess it impressed me in some ways. I felt, as I listened back to the session’s music, that there was this undercurrent of things unsaid, that we as musicians feed off of. A lot of fleeting shadows of ideas flying by, with the two of us trying to catch on to, play with, and release. “Ged’s shadow” makes a nice metaphor for the state of mind you find yourself in while improvising. The rest of the album titles are all about birds. I love birds, their songs. As Messiaen probably thought, they are the greatest musicians on this planet, yet we tend to not really listen to them as much as we should. The songs on the album are not transcriptions, or trying to imitate any of the birds from the titles. Could we just say it’s a kind of tribute to their beauty and ability to enchant?

TR: Any plans for touring? And is there anywhere you’d want to take the music that you didn’t explore on the recording?

FH: No plans per se, but I guess we’re always looking for opportunities to play. I personally would like to play more in Scandinavia, as I really like the attitude of the audiences there. Really into the music, but in a different way than Continental Europe. I can’t really explain how, except to say that when I played there, people would come up to you afterwards just to talk about the music and wanting to get to know you. And most Scandinavians play hockey! We actually covered lots of ground with this session! We both brought original compositions, improvised new material, and played solos that were very much in the spirit of the moment. I like compositions, especially the simple, open structured ones we brought to the recording session. We could do more of that for sure…

HW: No plans for touring so far, but I’d love to play more with François. There’s always a lot of new ground to be explored in this setting both improvisational and composition wise.