JAMES FRY’S NEW CD featuring Ian Avery, Cam Cumming, Tobias Meis: West Coast cool jazz – folk noir tradition: nine ‘more original songs’

 By ‘GOYO DE LA ROSA’

James Fry’s latest  CD, a collection of nine originals, is a humble gem, and destined to be a significant classic in the history of Victoria’s self-produced independent music scene.   

  The promising power of his own lyrical composer’s voice evident in only one song on his last CD called ‘ballads‘ (mainly a collection of covers of jazz and folk classics) is now more manifest in his very topical CD entitled ‘more original songs,’ just released.   Like ‘ballads,’ it’s dedicated to his wife, the Neo – Symbolist painter Virginia SmallFry, and is a Magic Canvas Production.   A black and white photo of one of her paintings is printed on the CD itself.

  Here James is accompanied by Ian Avery on a melancholic 1920s – sounding cornet, Cam Cumming of Earbone Studios on an electric bass guitar, and Tobias Meis on double bass.

  This is the living Pacifican North West Coast Psychedelic Folk-noir Jazz Music Tradition personified … via Croydon, England, Guelph Ontario and Fernwood, Victoria, Vancouver Island, Pacifica.  The melodies are memorable, the poetry is stream – of – consciousness Romantic Surrealism, the musical style is West Coast cool jazz meets Bob Dylan, the literary influences are Fante, Hemmingway, Bukowski + Dylan (again).   The underlying philosophy to it all is basically Wiccan Buddhist (or Buddhist Wiccan) pacificism.

  Nine songs, all written by James Fry, are arranged in a minimalist jazz trio format.  James sings and plays lead guitar, drums, harmonica and percussion on all cuts, with some cuts using the electric bass guitar of Cam Cumming, others the double bass of Tobias Meis.

  This CD could be understood as pages of history from the multifaceted life of James Fry, nine pages of James Fry’s episodic history, each episode refined into a song.

  The CD opens with ‘Pages of History,’ with James’ solo guitar and voice entering, and then the bass and percussion layering coming in a slow crescendo of volume. James Fry’s Buddhist – inspired philosophy is evident right from the start:

‘Pages of history, plaster the walls

The bigger the empire, the harder the fall.’  

The English Canadian immigrant knows a thing or two about fallen empires.

  In ‘No One to Blame,‘ a basically cheery melody is contrasted with apocalyptic scenarios and stern admonishments:

‘Don’t follow leaders, the leaders don’t know

They got lost in the woods, they got stuck in the snow

And this folly continues and the lies never end

But there’s no one to blame but ourselves’.

  Once again there is somewhat of a reproving or admonishing tone in the lyrical content and mocking intonation of James Fry’s ‘Home of the Brave,’ a critique of our neighbours’ and our own complicity:

‘A warrior with steely eye defends me when I need to fly

and raise myself above this lie.

And the meaning of this mystery 

is lost inside this parady of living like we do.

Like we choose to do.  In the home of the brave.’

  As if to provide a respite from the generally gloomy philosophizing, the next song ‘Like I Do’ is the only one taken from his last CD ‘ballads,’ and is basically a Romantic love song to his wife Virginia.  Even this is tinged with Buddhist agnosticism:

‘And in the end we reap the seed we sow

The journeys end we can not see

There’s only one thing that I know for sure

Nobody’s ever gonna love you like I do’.

  The melody to ‘Ode to Bukowski’ is basically cheerful, in contrast again to the harsh life of seclusion, booze and degradation shown to us in the lyric:

‘Henry Chinaski waved the world away

Locked the door, drew the window shade

Took misfortune as a lover

Raised a finger to the moon’.  

It’s very easy to imagine Tom Waits doing this.

  Returning to a more  Buddhist Romantic theme, ‘Sometimes’ seems to be aspiring to a more free world beyond the ever-morphing ambiguities of our own relatively minor personal relationships:

‘And now the world is watching you, tell me now what will you do

Tell me how can you believe it’s all true

So close your eyes and look at me, tell me now what do you see

Outside of you and me, outside of a hope and dream

Outside in a bigger world, outside where a man breathe

Outside where a man breathe’.

  ’Hurricane Approaching’ could very well become the most classic of all the songs on this James Fry CD: certainly it is the most Dylanesque.  It has the relentless, driven apocalyptic nightmare aspect of the best of Dylan’s songs in its Symbolist lyric content, pounding tempo and anxious sung intonation:

‘I heard a hurricane approaching, I could feel it on the wind

A premonition of the future, intuition from within

I saw a flaming sword above me and a hollow place below

And a feeling of uncertainty engulfed my troubled soul.’

  As if to hammer away at the theme of our mortal life’s uncertainty and the relative instability of all relationships, ‘Dhamma Chant’ has an almost martial beat and repeats the chorus:

‘Life of uncertainty, wheel of eternity, dodging the bullets of karma.

Something inside of me, says what will be, will be.

 Better just leave it to Dhamma.’

  This ‘Dhamma Chant’ is performed by the ‘Dhamma Chant Choir,’ comprised of Miranda Pidwerbetsky, Colleen Pillar, Virginia SmallFry, Dylan Fry, Mike Kuakanon, Serena Hurvitz, Lawrence Kerman and Cam Cumming, complete with kazoo.  It is easy to imagine Harry Manx, Paul Horn or even Delhi 2 Dublin doing this one.

  Finally, as if to reassure his listeners that he isn’t completely resigned to a destiny of karmic fate, James Fry ends ‘more original songs’ with ‘Dreaming of the Future‘.   Beyond hesitancy, ambiguity and doubt, he still wants to end up believing in a way:

‘But I won’t stop believing that this world will find a way

And the shadows will be lifted like the sunrise lifts the day.’

 

All lyrics are copyrighted by Magic Canvas Production

Contact: smallfryenterprises@shaw.ca

1 – 250 – 216 21 39

 

LA ROSA REVUE review by ‘Goyo de la Rosa’