PREVIEW
LAPPELECTRO
Calgary Folk Music Festival
July 26 and 27
Prince’s Island Park
Smooth trumpet creates a mellow soundscape, intermingling with bass and organ while electronic samples produce a hypnotic drum and bass backdrop.
Close your eyes and a dark club might be the first place that comes to mind, not the grassy field of Prince’s Island Park on a sunny day. With a variety of jazz-like compositions, supplemented by electronic loops and samples, Daniel Lapp and Lappelectro do not provide your typical folk fest fare.
But increasingly, many festivals have thrived on presenting music that pushes the boundaries of tradition. It makes sense, then, that Lappelectro introduces Calgary audiences to what has been referred to as jazz-based electronica. After all, breaking boundaries is something Daniel Lapp and Lappelectro members Rick May (bass), Ryan Stewart (drums) and Danuel Tate (keyboards) have been doing since they started the ever-evolving project in January 2001.
Lappelectro was born in the dark clubs of Victoria, B.C. A DJ played vinyl samples while Lapp and the rest of the quartet played their own compositions, improvising amidst the beats and loops. According to virtuoso multi-instrumentalist Lapp, the live DJ suited the group’s approach at the time.
"It was exhilarating to find this new form where I could improvise freely overtop of records," explains Lapp, who contributes horns, strings, guitar and vocals. "But after exploring that as far as we could, the problem was that the records are limited – the melodies and what you can improvise overtop isn’t limited, but we wanted to get away from vinyl and start writing our own loops and samples."
Which they did. The problem then, according to Lapp, was that the electronic aspect began taking over – not in a Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines kind of way, but it was a constraint nonetheless.
"The electronics were sort of in control for a while, and until we started to understand more (of) the possibilities, we were limited as to how we could improvise," he says.
The group then discovered how to deal with some of the challenges they faced through the use of electronics.
"One limitation was that if you’ve composed a beat and it has a specific tempo for one song, how can it work in another song that’s got a different tempo? But we’ve found ways that we can start working around that, and are at a point where any sample we have on our computer can be dropped in on any song and it will be in the right tempo," he says. "And that just opens up a whole new vocabulary and library."
Yeah, but can they play a jig? How do loops and samples fit into the world of folk music?
The key, says Lapp, is in the spirit of the music – a concept that very much drives the musical direction of the group.
With strong rural roots in Medicine Hat, where many of his relatives are farmers who fiddle, Lapp is able to infuse this tradition into Lappelectro without necessarily being obvious about it.
"I’m not going to play the ‘Black Velvet Waltz’ or some old-time fiddle tune with Lappelectro, but with subtle little suggestive motifs, you can bring the spirit of that music onto the stage," he explains.
"I’m playing the fiddle, but I’m not playing a tune – I’m playing a groove. So that’s the neat crossover that we can do with Lappelectro at folk festivals or jazz festivals that is quite unique. What we’re learning is to bring just the spirit of it, so you bring the spirit of fiddle music into a song, or the spirit of Dixieland or Ornette Coleman, without having to play the specific tune."
So when you’ve got that, why settle for just a jig? |
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