Marc-Olivier Lamontagne, Jonathan Barriault, Tim Brady, and Simon Duchesne on the cover of the new IoH album (courtesy of Starkland)
About a month ago, Starkland released its second Instruments of Happiness (IoH) album, entitled The Happiness Handbook. I covered the debut album in this series back in 2016, when I was writing for Examiner.com; and, a bit to my surprise, parent company AXS has now transported that article to their own Web site. However, it is still worth repeating myself a bit to recall that IoH is a project developed by Canadian electric guitarist Tim Brady that involves three different approaches to performance, an electric guitar quartet, a twenty-piece orchestra, and a 100-piece community-based ensemble. The name comes from the principle that “you can never be sad with a guitar in your hands,” a proposition that Brady attributes to guitar manufacturers Robert Godin and Paul Reed.
Like the debut album, The Happiness Handbook is a quartet recording; but Brady is the only performer to appear on both albums. On the new album he is joined by Marc-Olivier Lamontagne, Jonathan Barriault, and Simon Duchesne; but both albums focus on the virtues of a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. The debut album was devoted primarily to Brady’s own music, his “symphony” entitled “The Same River Twice,” which is performed both as a quartet and in a solo version. On the other hand the title of the new album is that of a commissioned composition by Canadian composer Emily Hall. The album showcases six composers, all Canadian; and Brady’s offering is one of the shorter pieces. The other composers are Scott Godin, Jordan Nobles, Maxime McKinley, and Gordon Fitzell.
As Allan Kozinn’s introduction to the accompanying booklet observes, the six pieces were “road-tested on a Canadian tour in early 2017.” In other words all of these pieces were composed for performance in front of an audience, rather than as “studio projects.” Whether or not those audiences had the benefit of the notes that the composers prepared for the album booklet, there is no questioning that each selection connects with the listener through its own unique rhetorical stance, regardless of whether that rhetoric aligns with either the title or the composer’s comments.
Since I know the guitar repertoire only as a listener, rather than as an amateur performer, my own focus can only be on the nature of the listening experience. As a result I am struck most by how much diversity of sonorities one can encounter through the combination of plucked strings with different forms of electronic post-processing. Mind you, as guitar master Andrés Segovia made clear, there is far more breadth to the sonorities of an acoustic guitar than most listeners might imagine; but IoH is not trying to compete with Segovia. It has its own terrains to explore, and the composers on this album find their way through those terrains with thoroughly engaging results.
Nevertheless, given the premises behind the creation of IoH in the first place, I find it hard to avoid suspecting that Brady’s objectives are as social as they are musical. The mere fact that there are multiple ensembles suggests that, as is the case with the best of both classical and jazz concerts, the in-the-moment immediacy of acts of performance are probably more important than any of the marks on paper followed by the performers (let alone the “capture” of those marks through studio recording techniques). As a result I find myself coming away from both IoH albums wondering if Brady will take one (or more?) of his ensembles “south of the border,” preferably as far as the city of San Francisco!
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