| The life and untimely death of jazz legend Lenny Breau – a guitarist known for his mixture of different musical styles and techniques – was the inspiration for Jeff Gladstone’s one-man show at Solocentric.
An actor, musician and Breau fan, Gladstone seeks to understand the live fast, die young melancholy associated with the jazz-musician lifestyle, using as a source the many addicts he encountered while working in an East End Vancouver hotel.
Gladstone traces Breau's tragic life with alternating bursts of energy and calmness, sort of like an addict going through withdrawal and then falling off the wagon for a quick fix. He also very cleverly interweaves the highs Breau experienced with his music with those he felt while abusing heroin. Gladstone accomplishes this with a creative use of guitar-scale manipulation and distortion, helping the audience enter into Breau's mind while he was using drugs.
In the same clever way, Gladstone draws a parallel between a guitar lesson (Breau did a lot of teaching towards the end of his life) and a shooting-up lesson, blending the technique of doing drugs with guitar technique in a moving scene that helps the audience understand Breau's helplessness.
Gladstone doesn’t just focus on Breau's addiction, however. He also explains what made the man such a groundbreaking guitarist by showing how he invented his trademark style of chord melodies and incorporated other elements, such as a walking base line, the pentatonic scale and various improvisation tricks.
In trying to understand why such a gifted musician could fall so hard, Gladstone portrays Breau's relationship with his country musician father, who didn't approve of his son’s love of jazz; Breau’s personal relationships when he moved from Winnipeg to Toronto to make it as a professional musician; and later on, his difficulties dealing with his father’s death. Ultimately, though, it’s hard to say if the guitarist’s self-destruction was a result of falling in with the wrong crowd or some other personal affliction, and to a certain extent Gladstone can only make guesses in his depiction of Breau’s life.
Still, Gladstone's performance is entertaining and inventive. Like Breau's musical technique, his dramatic technique in contrasting the musician’s talent and pain is impressive.
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