SOUNDTRACK: CANADIAN GUITAR SUMMIT (RIK EMMET, ALEX LIFESON, LIONA BOYD, ED BICKERT)-“Beyond Borders” (Guitar Player Magazine, July 1987).
I was not familiar with this recording and just happened upon it this weekend while looking up Rik Emmet. So it turns out that back in 1987, around the time of the release of the final Triumph album with Rik Emmet, Rik had created this instrumental composition. It features four superb Canadian guitarists. I didn’t know Liona Boyd (classical) or Ed Bickert (jazz), but if course I know Rik and Alex.
Evidently Rik wanted to do something which fused genres together (Rik plays all manner of guitar quite successfully).
Fusing different musical forms is hardly new in the guitar world: The marriage between jazz and rock has survived nearly two decades, while jazz and classical get together fairly often. Of course, the more styles you try to blend, the less probable success becomes and the greater the risk of producing something whose sum is smaller than each individual element.
Rik Emmett, leader of the rock power trio Triumph and the author of Guitar Player’s Back To Basics column, was fully aware of the artistic hazards involved when he proposed a Sound page recording to Editor Tom Wheeler in late 1986 that would fuse rock, jazz, and classical. While such a project promised to be the most complex one of its nature since the Sound page’s debut in the Oct. ’84 issue, after hearing Emmett’s concept and who he had in mind to fill out his guitar quartet-Alex Lifeson, Liona Boyd, and Ed Bickert-the go-ahead was given.
The resulting composition-Emmett’s masterful “Beyond Borders” -succeeds in melding its various elements on a number of levels. Although brilliant playing abounds, the piece is more than a vehicle for virtuosic displays as it integrates various styles and weaves in and out of different moods, textures, tones, rhythms, key centers, and time changes. The players receive ample solo space; however, the emphasis clearly is on interaction-a surprising outcome, considering the ever-present temptation to fall back on excessive blowing (Emmett discusses “Beyond Borders” on page 80; the Sound page and musical excerpts are on page 82).
It’s a really lovely piece with each musician playing to his or her strength but also doing some unexpected things. I feel like Alex has the most fun with th epiece as he seems to create a lot more textural stuff that actual solo material.
This recording is available on line in many places, but I chose this one because the sound quality is quite good.
During this lengthy piece in Guitar Player, there’s an interview with all four guitarists as well as some background information about the piece itself.
There’s also this explanation from Rik about who plays what, so you can follow along:
“Beyond Borders” is basically 120 bars long, and it begins with an adagio section with a tempo of 72 beats per minute. I do the lead guitar off of the top, and Alex plays the atmospheric stuff in the background, which includes low weird things and floating sound effects. Ed comes in with a little melody that lasts from bar 4 into measure 5, and then Liona’s little melody enters at bar 6. The lead that comes in at measure 8 is Alex. In measure 15 Liona plays a little classical lick that Richard Fortin wrote. At bar 17 I play a long feedback melody that continues to measure 26.
Liona begins her classical tremolo solo at measure 22; in the background you’ll notice the feedback guitar part. Liona’s and Ed’s parts cross at bar 28, as Ed takes over with a rubato chord-melody solo. At measure 33 he kicks into an allegro tempo of 140 beats per minute. That’s where I back him up with a simulated bass guitar part that I play on my Yamaha arch-top. For the warm bass sound I rolled the treble back and played with the fleshy part of my thumb. Ed does a cadenza at measure 64, and Alex plays an atmospheric technique where he holds a chord and brushes the strings quickly with the fleshy pads of his right-hand fingers; Lenny Breau was the first person I saw use that.
Bar 65 has an adagio tempo of 70 beats per minute. I play the lead guitar, and Alex adds the arpeggiated electric guitar part behind it. That continues to bar 76, where Liona plays her Lenny Breau octave harmonic lick. That’s also where I begin using the Coral Electric Sitar, with echo repeats on it. Bar 77 is semi-country acoustic fingerpicking with an andante tempo of 90 beats per minute. I play the acoustic steel-string, and Liona plays nylon-string in unison, all the way to bar 102; sometimes I break into harmony, but it’s a unison part essentially. During that same section I also play the Dobro part and all of the electric fills that have a Pat Metheny-esque sound. Alex did the violin sounding swells in the background with a volume pedal.
Where measure 101 crosses over to 102, I did a little lap steel thing with a volume pedal and echo that goes up from a fifth to an octave; it’s kind of a Steve Howe cop. Measure 102 is the beginning of the end. Liona plays the little classical part, and then I break into the harmonies above it. During this section I did all of the wire choirs, which are triads with some of the voices doubled, and I also played the 6/ 8 melody lead guitar fills on the tag right near the end.
It’s really great.
[READ: June 4, 2019] “Javi”
This was a wonderful, slowly evolving story that was one thing on the surface, but had so much more roiling underneath.
As it opens, Javier has knocked on the house of a “lady” in the middle of nowhere, New Mexico. The person who answers the door doesn’t like that word and to Javi’s mind he’s not sure if the person is even a woman. He clarifies that he’s looking for the painter. She concedes that she is the only painter in the area. He says that his moms heard she needed help. She asks how old he is. He replies “I’m four– I’m sixteen.” The painter says she is 82, how can a young boy help her? He lists the various things he can do for her–cook, clean, drive etc. She is concerned that people are talking about her but he assures her it was for his benefit, not hers.
He explains that he walked the twenty miles from Pueblo. If she’s impressed by this it’s hard to tell. She is rather inscrutable. She is supposed to go to an old age home, but if Javi can help her, she can delay that for a year or so.
There’s plenty of wonderful details that unfold slowly, because that is how she is: ‘watching her work is calming, hypnotic.”
She lets him stay in the garage and she leaves a note in her truck that Javi is working for her. He explains that he has been stopped by the police a number of times. “Can you imagine the shitstorm if they find him behind he wheel of a vehicle known to be the property of the famous lady painter?”
She asks what he told the police when they stopped him. He says when they ask if he’s Mexican, he says he is Native. He knew a rez boy and is able to get by with that boys’s story. She is proud of him for saying this and says she will get him a fake I.D. Which she does.
A few days later when someone drives her her lengthy driveway, Javi hides until they realize the woman, Diane, is there to interview the painter about her works. They talk for two days. The woman works for a wealthy man who had bought many of her paintings,.
The painter resumes her work when the lady leaves but something is different. Then she simply stops. She says she doesn’t feel anything anymore. She believes that her fame is seen as some sort of vindication of her work, and she can’t have that.
Diane is very upset about when she finds out about the painter’s behavior and feels like it was her fault, But the painter can’t be bothered about Diane. She has other worries. Because out of the blue, Javi’s mother and friend have shown up. Javier had been going home on the weekends to be with her but the women were forced out, yet again.
They mostly sit around in silence. The painter doesn’t speak much and the Mexican women feel guilty about speaking in Spanish. They also don’t know what to say to her. Javi’s mother is also mad because she feels it is her responsibility to be in the kitchen cooking. Eventually Javi’s mother gets her way and she shows the painter how to make tamales.
After some time, Javi’s mother says she has heard of a church in Los Angeles which offers sanctuary for someone like her and her friends (whom she met over the years working at various low-paying jobs) . It seems like the only chance that these women have, especially when the painter moves to the old folks home. At least “until the day that a new Administration abolishes the old one’s rulings.”
The ending of the story is like a kick in the gut.
I love how the dystopia of this situation is hidden beneath a revolutionary painter’s story.
I Just Read About That... 
Leave a comment