[…] Mi riferisco alla nuova opera del chitarrista/compositore Tim Brady che con My 20th Century ci regala la sua personalissima sintesi del secolo appena concluso. Dapprima è la narrazione per chitarra sola di Strumming (curiosamente dedicata a John Lennon), una sorta di crocevia tra il Fripp più estremo e una sorta di Mike Oldfield in formato lisergico. Poi tocca al post-serialismo di Traces, composizione molto ardita per quintetto semi-acustico che, successivamente, lascia il campo ai quasi venti minuti di Hommage à Rosa Luxemburg. Anche qui siamo proiettati nel cuore delle avanguardie del primo novecento dove un lacerante paesaggio elettronico ospita lunghi fraseggi per quartetto d’archi, situazione che — sebbene con una dose di ulteriore drammaticità — viene riproposta in Double Quartet (Hommage à Dmitri Chostakovich) articolata in tre movimenti: Impossible Pizzicato Machine, An Infinity of Four e Hockey Canon, Fugue che vede nell’armonizzazione introspettiva del movimento centrale il suo momento migliore. L’uscita è completata da un dvd che ripropone le medesime composizioni abbinandole ad un percorso visivo.

The name of Tim Brady regularly appears in the columns of Vital Weekly. This time with his multimedia project My 20th Century, subtitled as a ‘music/video/theatre narrative in 4 works’. CD and DVD contain the same compositions in the identical performance. The dvd has as an extra the beautiful videos from artists Martin Messier and Oana Suteu that were shown during performance. To exclude any misunderstanding, the dvd contains no pictures of the performance. Usually I feel very ambiguous about multimedia-projects. Personally I don’t need pictures if the music satisfies me, nor the other way around. But with each dvd-release like this one, I try to put my prejudices aside. And in this case I have to reconsider my views on this point. Music and the videos are very worthwhile, and I felt no urge to put one of them down. On the other hand, whether the combination of these two media produce something that is bigger then their sum, is still a question for me. BradyBrady started this project in 2003 when the first work was composed. The others followed in 2005. The works are performed by his own ensemble Bradyworks and Quator Molinari. Strumming (for John Lennon) is the most accessible of all four works. It is written for multiple guitars and built from limited musical material. Simple riffs and repeated and alternately textured. Because repetition is a key element is this composition it has a hypnotizing effect. This is underlined by the video that is constructed from pictures of a hand of a person strumming a guitar. Traces is a work for guitar, piano, percussion, saxophone and sampler and brings tribute to another guitarist, namely jazz musician Charlie Christian. Brady deconstructed a guitar solo by Christian hat he played in concert with Bennie Goodman in 1941. By doing this BradyBrady abstracted from jazz and choose a pulsating, tight and severe sounding new music jacket as we know from earlier works by BradyBrady. Hommage à Rosa Luxemburg (Casino Adagio) is written for string quartet plus electronics. The electronic environment is ever changing and full of detail. For this work BradyBrady took inspiration from a painting by Jean-Paul Riopelle, “a work obsessed with ghostly images of birds and nature”. The CD closes with Double Quartet, divided in three sections this ambitious work reflects on the life of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. It features a “virtual string quartet” plus piano, saxophone, percussion and electric guitar. How the collaboration between BradyBrady and video artists Martin Messier and Oana Suteu came about I don’t know. From the pictures I suppose that they were chosen and created in function of the compositions by Brady. Oana Suteu did the video for Hommage à Rosa Luxemburg. Martin Messier made the other three ones. Martin Messier is a composer and performer as well, and the fascination for the relation between sound and images, unites his talents. Oana Suteu is from Romania, where she studied at the Film and Theatre Academy in Bucharest.

Bradyworks & Quatuor Molinari together constitute the audio half of a compelling new multimedia project, My 20th Century, by Montréal-based guitarist/composer Tim Brady. The two compositions align many styles Brady has previously employed but, right off, seems best suited to the voluminous chamber. With a film by videographers Martin Messier (also a renowned French-Canadian musician) and Oanu Suteu exhibited alongside four guitar-led narratives, Brady eloquently melds important artistic and social developments of the 20th century. Together, through abstraction and recognizable archetypes, it’s all very moving, at times even overwhelming. An interesting project, but Brady’s half of the deal is what I’ll casually return to.

Tim Brady is perhaps the most ambitious guitarist and composer to emerge from Canada over the past couple of decades. He rarely seems to be tied to any one category like jazz, classical or progressive rock, although his music involves all of those and more. This double disc (CD+DVD) set is Tim’s most ambitious work yet. My 20th Century features two ensembles: Bradyworks (el. guitar, piano, saxes, sampler & percussion) and the Quatuor Molinari (string quartet) plus video. This work is broken into four parts, each one an homage to an certain artist. Strumming (for John Lennon)> is first and it was inspired by the John Kennedy assassination, the arrival of the Beatles and the way TV brought the world together for these monumental events. The piece features multiple electric guitars and a looped video image. I dig the way a melody and then some guitar noise is trying to break through the multiple layers of strumming. Each of the various layers of guitar parts evokes different ways the electric guitar effects our lives. Traces (for Charlie Christian) was inspired by a famous early jazz guitar solo (Solo Flight from 1941), in which Mr. Christian joined Benny Goodman on stage at Carnegie Hall, thus breaking down racial barriers. This piece features Bradyworks, Tim’s working quintet, and it is a deconstruction of Mr. Christian’s solo. I like the way that this work turns the original melody inside out, so we hear it in different ways, speeding it up and slowing it down in places. Hommage à Rosa Luxemburg was inspired by a painting by Jean-Paul Riopelle, “a work obsessed with ghostly images of birds and nature”. This piece features the Quatuor Molinari string quartet and samples of the casino where the painting was hung. It is long and consistently fascinating with slowly swirling layers of strings punctuated by selective samples. The final piece is called Double Quartet and it does indeed feature both groups. It is dedicated to the composer Dmitri Shostakovich and was inspired by the composers’s long life in Russia under various regimes and the great music that he composed. This piece is the most ambitious yet and is about 30 minutes long, broken into three sections. As I listen to this piece for the third time in 2 days, I am still amazed by the many things involved: Zappa-like quirky writing, tight inter-connected lines moving together and around one another like with the precision of a successful train schedule (not NJ Transit). The video DVD provides another source of stimulation to be dealt with and again it takes time to absorb the many different ideas involved. A great deal of preparation and work obviously went into wonderful double disc set, so please take the time seriously study this grand work. It will be well worth it, I can assure you.

It took a few years (Hommage à Rosa Luxembourg goes back to 2005), but here it is, finally on record, Tim Brady’s My 20th Century. The idea was to use various century historical or anecdotal events of 20th century to tie together four of Brady’s works into a performace of music, video, and narrative. The narrative aspect is somewhat weak, but musically, this is Brady’s strongest work with Bradyworks since… Revolutionary Songs, perhaps? Four pieces (10-30 minutes each) bringing together contemporary chamber music and electric guitar. Strumming is a jewel of single-minded madness, very intense. And the Shostakovitch tribute Double Quartet is some great Brady: complex, systematic, elegant, sitting right on the fence between genres. This is album is out as a CD+DVD set — the DVD includes the same studio recordings, supported by the Martin Messier and Oana Suteu videos shown in live performances of the works. It’s not a live recording and you don’t get to see the musicians.

Translated from French.

Avec ce CD/DVD, le guitariste Tim Brady frappe un grand coup. Il célèbre le 20^e anniversaire de son ensemble, Bradyworks, et invite le Quatuor Molinari, mais c’est nous qui avons le cadeau: un excellent CD et de superbes vidéos (pas très genre MusiquePlus). Il prouve encore une fois qu’il est l’un des compositeurs québécois contemporains les plus intéressants. Grâce à cet alliage de musiques contemporaine, électroacoustique et «pop» (plutôt en sous-texte), il démontre qu’il a vu passer le 20^e siècle et qu’il en a assimilé les enseignements. Pour rendre hommage dans une même pièce à John Lennon, Charlie Christian, Rosa Luxemburg et Dmitri Chostakovitch, il faut de l’imagination.