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Neil mixed sublimity, chaos

CITY SINGLES

By Alexander Varty
Publish Date: 13-Oct-2005
This
year's edition of the LIVE Biennial of Performance Art is dedicated
to the notion of the artist as prophet, shaman, masochist, addict,
and anarchist—and with that in m i n d , the event could find no
better figurehead than Al Neil, Vancouver's 81-year-old master of
interdisciplinary art, psychic exploration, and creative chaos.

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Neil's life is being celebrated in a variety of ways during LIVE's
seven-week r u n : with a concert and video screening at the
Western Front on Saturday (October 1 5 ) ; with a reading by
Downtown Eastside artists at the Vancouver Public Library's
central branch on October 2 1 ; with a NOW Orchestra-organized
big-band tribute at the Roundhouse Community Arts & Recreation
Centre on November 1 0 ; and with a performance featuring his
long-time partner and collaborator Carol Itter at the Vancouver
Art Gallery on November 25. But the biggest honour being paid
him is the fact that LIVE exists at all: without Neil's pioneering
work during the 1960s and 7 0 s , the performance-art scene in
Vancouver would be much smaller than it is, and it's likely that it
wouldn't be capable of supporting such an extensive survey of
the genre.

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Neil got his artistic start in the relatively conventional field of
classical music; surviving documents indicate that he was a
promising student of the piano. But the Second World War
intervened with his training, and during his military service he
was introduced to the music that would serve as a touchstone
through the entirety of his career: bebop, the then-radical jazz
genre that mixed advanced harmony with a vivacious sense of
urban life. He rapidly switched allegiances, and through most of
the 1950s was B.C.'s premier bop pianist, a position he upheld by
helping organize Vancouver's first avant-garde jazz club and by
producing concerts for a number of like-minded American
musicians, most notably Ornette Coleman. He also adopted the
bohemian lifestyle, which proved a mixed blessing: along with his
growing interest in the visual and literary arts came a taste for
heroin and alcohol, as documented in his autobiographical novels
Changes and Slammer.

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The '60s saved h i m . Art and acid freed Neil from the worst of his
addictions, while the counterculture gave him an audience for his
staged happenings, which mixed music, literature, and theatre
with elements of shamanic ritual. Just as bop offered Neil a way
out of postwar Vancouver's stifling conservatism, these new
multimedia productions introduced younger artists to a milieu in
which nothing was forbidden, and the pianist soon emerged as

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the local scene's equivalent of Allen Ginsberg In New York City or
Ken Kesey In the Bay Area: an intrepid explorer of psychic
conditions that might resemble madness, but that unlocked the
creative impulse in profound and unsettling ways. Locally, Neil's
legacy lives on in genre-bending institutions such as the Western
Front and the Video I n , in our city's thriving free-jazz and
experimental-music scene, in the memories of all those who had
the chance to collaborate with him in his prime, and, of course, in
LIVE.
Over the years, I've had a few encounters with Neil myself, and
they've ranged from the sublime to the psychotic. One highlight
was performing with him at the Western Front, as part of a band
that also included electronic- music pioneer Martin Bartlett on
Buchla synthesizer, author David Lee on upright bass, and sound
artist Howard Broomfield on percussion; I was thrilled to be in
such august and eclectic company, and deeply saddened later o n ,
when we lost Bartlett to AIDS and Broomfield to suicide. But I
also remember receiving menacing late-night phone calls after
Plunderphonics mastermind John Oswald and I had taken on a
project that Broomfield's death left unfinished: organizing and
duplicating Neil's extensive tape archive. We were primarily
concerned with making sure this body of work didn't disappear;
Neil, however, was convinced we were going to steal his ideas
and make a fortune from t h e m . Needless to say, that wasn't
going to happen—and it didn't.
More pleasant are my memories of the first time I visited Neil at
his legendary Dollarton squatter's shack sometime during the
early 1980s. After taking a hidden woodland trail to his rough
cabin—which, perched on top of a small, permanently beached
barge, seemed as much houseboat as house—we drank tea and
discussed art and music to the accompaniment of his cat, making
its delicate way across the keys of a battered upright piano.
Slanting through dusty windows, the sun lit up Neil's flotsam
assemblages just as surely the pianist's wayward yet erudite
conversation illuminated the idea that it's possible to build a life
around constant exploration. For that lesson, I'll always be
thankful, as will the thousands of others who learned it under this
madman, mystic, and living legend's persistent tutelage.
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