Snow, Michael

Michael (James Aleck) Snow. Pianist, trumpeter, composer, film maker, sculptor, painter, photographer, b Toronto 10 Dec 1929. Although more immediately identified with the visual arts (eg, the sculpture-graphic series Walking Woman,1961-7, and the films Wavelength, 1967, and La Région centrale, 1970-1), Snow has also been involved for many years in improvised music. He was encouraged by the boogie-woogie pianist Jimmy Yancey during visits to Chicago in the late 1940s, and played piano in Toronto traditional-jazz groups while a student 1948-52 at the Ontario College of Art. He took up the trumpet in the early 1950s.

Keywords

Pianists

After playing piano with the dixieland trumpeter Mike White 1958-61 and with his own bebop groups 1958-62, Snow was drawn to free jazz through his association with the Artists' Jazz Band in Toronto and with the free-jazz movement's leaders in New York, some of whom (Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, et al) appeared in his film New York Eye and Ear Control (1964). He has continued to perform with the Artists' Jazz Band and was a member 1966-7 of the Toronto New Music Ensemble and a founder in 1974 of the CCMC. The last, with which he has played piano, trumpet, guitar and synthesizer, served as the focus of his musical activities through the 1980s, although he also gave solo piano concerts in Toronto, Quebec City and New York.

Snow's solo albums, meanwhile, extend into the medium of sound the same extensive manipulation of a single idea theme or technique that is characteristic of his work in the visual arts - eg, the 50-minute Sinoms, in which he has multi-tracked some 20 voices, with as many different French and English accents, reading a complete list of the mayors of Quebec City, at some points making a simple juxtaposition of pronunciation and at others creating the effect of a choir. In his films, beginning with New York Eye and Ear Control, he has often drawn musical and visual elements together to create an 'image-sound composition'. Snow received a Molson Prize in 1979, and was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1981.

Discography

Music for Piano, Whistling, Microphone and Tape Recorder. 1970-2. 2-Chatham Square 1009/10

Two Radio Solos. 1980. Freedom in a Vacuum (unnumbered)

The Last LP. (1987). Art Metropole 1001

Sinoms. (1989). MUQ89D-02 (CD, included in Territoires d'artist: paysages verticaux, exhibition catalogue published by the Musée du Québec)

WITH OTHERS

Mike White Mike White's Imperial Jazz Band. 1958. Hallmark CS-6

Carla Bley (Jazz Composer's Orchestra) Escalator Over the Hill. (1974). 3-LP-EOTH

See also CCMC and Discography for the Artists' Jazz Band.

Bibliography

Hale, Barrie. 'The inventions of Michael Snow,' The Canadian, 31 Dec 1976

Snow, Michael. Music/sound, 1948-1993: The Performed and Recorded Music/Sound of Michael Snow (Toronto 1994)

Creative Canada, vol 1

Links to Other Sites

The Collected Writings of Michael Snow
A brief synopsis of "The Collected Writings of Michael Snow" the website for Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

Michael Snow
A biography and online gallery of art by the multitalented artist Michael Snow. From the National Gallery of Canada.

Improvisation, Representation, and Abstraction in Music and Art
Michael Snow and Jesse Stewart discuss musical improvisation and the intersections between the sonic and visual arts. From the website for “Critical Studies in Improvisation.”

The Music Gallery fonds
Information page for the "Music Gallery fonds" at York University. The Music Gallery is Toronto's Centre for Creative Music. Focuses on the creation, development and performance of art music from all genres.