ARTS & LIFE

Musician-artist with more
staying power than his work
TRIBUTE I At 81, it's much easier to find Al Neil than his books, collages
BY GREG BUIUM
VANCOUVER SUN

For more than two decades, the
idea of Al Neil — Vancouver musician, artist, writer and wild, subterranean seer — seemed to have more
staying power than his work.
Unless you remember him playing
bebop piano at the old Cellar in the
'50s, or his experimental multi-media
projects at the Motion Studio in the
'60s or his readings around town in
the early '80s, it's hard to find anything
solid to stand on. The Vancouver Art
Gallery owns a handful of his collages;
his long out-of-print books — partmemoir, part-acid-laced stream-ofconsciousness — can't be removed
• from the central library's stacks.
"He left fragments in every community he was in," says Glenn Alteen,
director of the Grunt Gallery, who
helped spearhead the four-part Al
Neil Project, the core event at this
year's LIVE Biennial of Performance
Arts. "Al was a huge interdisciplinary
artist in the '60s but as time went on,
all those works went back into their
disciplines and in some ways he disappeared."
So, during the next six weeks, the
entire spectrum of his performance
oeuvre will be celebrated, beginning
tonight at the Western Front with
readings, a screening of David Rimmer's film, Al Neil: A Portrait, and
vocalizations of text by Kate Hammett-Vaughan. The project continues
Friday at the central branch of the
Vancouver public library with
Michael Turner's reading series,
Under the Influence; Nov. 10 at the
Roundhouse Community Centre
with a concert by the New Orchestra
Workshop; and Nov. 25 at the Vancouver Art Gallery with images of his
performance art wedded to electronic music.
Now 81, Neil himself won't be performing. He hasn't played piano publicly in more than 10 years. He hasn't
written in far longer, although he still
gathers stray material — some might
say junk — for assemblages at his
Dollarton cabin, the legendary spot
he's maintained since the mid-'60s.
"That they're doing this, I'm
pleased and embarrassed at the same
time," Neil told me recently when we
spoke in the Strathcona duplex he
shares with his longtime partner,
artist Carole Itter.
Sitting with him in his beautiful,
bright Hawks Avenue home seemed
in its own way a kind of surreal,
three-dimensional collage. Here was
a small, gracious old man: neat, short,

WARD PERR1N/VANC0UVER SUN

Al Neil has influenced the Vancouver Art community during the last 60
years. Several events will honour him during the next six weeks.

thinning grey hair, black pinstripe
dress shirt, new Levi's, socks and sandals. Art, both his own and Itter's,
packed'the walls, a copy of Retrospective, the only CD available from
his '60s trio, on the shelf.
This wasn't some 21st-century
Beat-pad of his past. The images of
him performing in outlandish, homemade costumes, long-hair and
scratchy beard, in near complete disarray, a kind of shock and awe of
Dada experiments, sex, drugs and
subversion seemed a bizarre dream.
He considers himself a musician
first, an artist second. His early love
of bebop, when it still stood on the
genre's outer fringe after the Second
World War, was where his artistic life
began, although he soon tore down
its structures, too, following Ornette
Coleman and and Cecil Taylor into
freer forms. By the early '60s he had
become arguably Canada's first
avant-garde pianist. Hooking up with
drummer Gregg Simpson and bassist
Richard Anstey, his trio experimented with projections and text and electronics (Simpson even fiddled with
turntables) in a unique aura collage.
"I never really talked to them about
it," Neil says of today's Vancouver
improvisers, many with the current
New Orchestra Workshop, who have
been inspired by his example. "But I
put it together pretty easily. I broke

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with the past and was probably one
of the first to do that in Vancouver
when I gave up the bebop."
He was a talismanic figure to any
number of communities: diving into
performance art and poetry and, as a
devoted junk collector, a builder of
huge assemblages.
"I never used driftwood but I found
stuff off the beach," he remembered
when he began in the early 60s. "I'd
get old chairs that were no good anymore and would start loading them
with big pails of rusty wire and dolls
and things cast off in the lanes in the
West End. Rusty bed frames."
He just followed his interests, illfocused, perhaps, but authentic.
"Look at it this way, I had lots of
time on my hands," he explains. "You
can't play the piano 12 hours a day
and all the people I hung out with
were artists and writers and wouldbe novelists and so on."
Might he have had more renown if
he'd stuck to one thing?
"I never had the ambition to do
anything other than I did, so that kind
of thought if it occurred to anybody it
wasn't me," he says, bursting into
loud, warm laughter.
gbuium@png.canwest.com

For information about the Al Neil
Project contact the Grunt Gallery at
604-875-9516 or go to www.coastaljazz.ca and follow the links.