John Fordham 

Elliot Galvin takes a rollercoaster ride around Dreamland

Later this week, the young jazz pianist takes part in a multimedia event at Turner Contemporary that remembers the famous Margate amusement park
  
  

Dreamland
Dreamland … Source of inspiration Photograph: Brian Harris/Rex Features Photograph: Brian Harris / Rex Features

Jazz musicians have sometimes been typecast by the unconverted as a pretty surly bunch – preoccupied with technical minutiae, offended by the prospect of explaining themselves, contemptuous of the mainstream. Thathas always been a caricature, but some jazz movements have balanced experimentation and communication better than others, and the UK’s young Chaos Collective have lately been showing a particular aptitude for it.

The group first came to wider notice through the ovations that greeted their gifted co-founder Laura Jurd, but lately other Chaos members have begun pulling new audiences with fresh confections of improv, composition, music-theatre, comedy, and visual art. One of the most inventive participants has been Jurd’s regular piano partner Elliot Galvin, whose trio won the European Young Artists’ Jazz award in Burghausen, Germany, this year.

In a typical Chaos-inspired event this Wednesday and Thursday at Margate’s Turner Contemporary, Galvin presents the multimedia installation Dreamland – a project joining a sound-sculpture by Stuart Brough (Tracey Emin has described his work as “a mean left-hook”) and saxist and electronics artist Joe Wright, video from film-maker Alex Morley, and live music by Galvin’s trio with bassist Tom McCredie and drummer Simon Roth. Dreamland expands the personal stories Galvin introduced on his debut album of the same name this year, when he made his own childhood fascination with the famous but now burned-out Margate theme-park the subject of an eclectic mix of old and new jazz, tweaked classical music, raw sound, and Brough’s vivid album artwork.

Brough’s and Wright’s Dreamland Memory Recorder (a steampunk audio device made out of an old box-office window) has recently been capturing the memories of Margate visitors about the Dreamland amusement park, and the results will fuel the installation’s mixture of electronically treated speech, video, and live music.

“Dreamland fascinates me,” Galvin says. “I guess it’s something about the contrast between a phenomenon that was designed to be commercial and poppy and kitsch, which after the fire [in 2008] has become this abandoned, destroyed wreck. Margate’s appears to be getting quite gentrified now, but behind that facade there’s still a lot of poverty and deprivation. Also, I’d never got to go there myself as a child, so I was also interested in collecting the memories of people who had – and then trying to find a way of putting those recollections in a different setting.     

“We’ll come in and perform with the installation three times a day through Wednesday and Thursday,’ Galvin concludes, “with a mix of new music and pieces from the Dreamland album, so though this is new, it’s not a break with anything I’ve been working on recently. I’ve always been interested in contemporary classical music as well as jazz, and in studying jazz in depth - and it feels like the further I’ve gone back into the canon of jazz, the more it’s opened out possibilities for connections between all kinds of contemporary art-forms. Actually, I’m thinking about writing an opera for improvisers next. That’ll be a pretty interesting challenge too.”

The Elliot Galvin Trio, and Dreamland installation by Stuart Brough, Joe Wright and Alex Morley, are in the Turner Contemporary’s Summer of Colour on 13 and 14 August. Details here.

 

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