Preview
THE BILL HILLY BAND
Wednesday, September 24
Ironwood Stage and Grill
Getting in touch with the music of the Bill Hilly Band is like turning your ears into auditory fingers and laying them on a braille mosaic of sound. Different parts touch upon shards of street theatre, jazz music, classical allusions and Pied Piper moments while the sounds are smoked through with the flavour of European travel and music.
Music lovers who devour every note the band plays would agree with guitarist Chris Frye when he says the nine weeks they spent busking in Europe helped diversity to bloom in his seven-year-old band.
"We were developing, as it were, our ideology of music, which is ‘Don’t worry about labels or boundaries or musical constraints as someone else might see them.’ We played on streets and at cafés and stuff. We realized there’s all this incredible music out there. We were meeting gypsies and hanging out in Prague and in France and hearing all kinds of stuff," Frye says from his Victoria home. He said that although some of the band’s players have changed since Europe, the experience made an imprint that lasted when their line-up solidified in 2000.
One of his best memories was when the band was playing to a half-hearted audience in an Irish pub in Prague. At set break, the musicians went out onto the Charles Bridge over the river, surrounded by ancient buildings.
"(We) struck up a set there and really went for it and we managed to get a crowd of a couple of hundred people. We did three or four songs and got everybody into it. We started walking down the bridge, still playing, and almost all of the crowd followed us like the Pied Piper across the bridge, over the cobblestones, around the corner and into the pub. This huge mob followed us and flooded in and we played all night for them."
Moments like that helped Frye and company realize that while they are a musical group, they needed to learn a bit about theatrics to gain and keep an audience’s attention.
The Creston-born musician’s father was a music teacher, so Frye began playing music early in life. A move to Vancouver and then to Victoria fed variety into his developing musical ears. In Victoria, he met up with current band members Marc Atkinson (mandolin), Jeremy Penner (violin), Adrian Dolan (fiddle) and Glen Manders (bass). Atkinson has a jazz background and also plays with Frye in the Marc Atkinson Trio. Dolan and Manders have a classical background. But when it comes to the band’s free-spirited sound, Frye says location is everything.
"I think there’s something special about where we live on the West Coast. These places like Vancouver and Victoria are crossroads of a variety of travellers and cultures, and we’re connected to the ocean. And people in the last 30 or 40 years have been privileged enough to travel a lot, so there’s always someone bringing back albums from India or somewhere. All these international musical styles are flowing organically through the garden of Victoria. And we have very open ears." |
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