FROM JAZZ STREET VANCOUVER

Pianist, improviser, composer, multi-media artist, author, and one of the founders of the Cellar, Vancouver's first jazz club in the 1950s, Al Neil is a gem of Vancouver history. Neil originally made a name for himself as a self-taught bebop pianist. He later embraced a convention-shattering, experimental style that may arguably have preceded that of Cecil Taylor. His artistic vocation, which spans over 50 years, had already begun during his service in World War II in the trenches of Normandy where Neil read about Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker in copies of Downbeat Magazine mailed to him by his mother.

Returning home to Vancouver in the late 1940s, Al Neil frequented Kelly's, a record store on Seymour Street, where he ordered bebop records (which were nearly impossible to find in those days, he says) and met fellow budding musicians including Billy Boyle, Jimmy Johnson, and John Dawe who were doing the same. In 1956, Neil along with Dave Quarin, Jim Kilburn, Ken Hole and other local musicians opened up a jazz club in a basement at Main Street and Broadway Avenue and called it The Cellar. Within a few years, The Cellar brought in many of today's world-renowned jazz legends including Charles Mingus, Art Pepper, and Ornette Coleman. In 1958, the Al Neil Quartet and American poet Kenneth Patchen performed to a packed house in what Neil describes as "our one and only jazz poetry gig" at The Cellar. The LP recording, Kenneth Patchen reads with JAZZ IN CANADA (1959) has been recently re-released by Locust Music.

By the time the Cellar closed down around 1964, Al Neil was no longer interested in playing bebop. Instead, he began experimenting with what he calls "playing inside-outside" with bassist Rick Anstey and young drummer Gregg Simpson. It was Simpson's idea to use a turntable (as well as many other 'toys') that would be used generate new and interesting sounds in the trio's improvised pieces, thus creating an innovative yet unclassifiable genre of sound-collage-music that most critics would call "avant garde." Neil explains, "We looked to getting sounds coming from anywhere of any kind of type." The Al Neil Trio: Retrospective (1965-1968), a 2-disc set re-released in 2002, offers a sampling of this music.

"Whatever I'm doing belongs right here in Vancouver, B.C.."
- Al Neil

"I thought there would be a way to collage music."
- Al Neil

"He was a wild man. He was a wild piano player."
- Ricci Quarin