This story is part of the Comox Valley Record’s spring edition of Trio Magazine, published quarterly and available throughout the Comox Valley. The spring edition is available at the Record office (407D Fifth St.) and businesses throughout the Comox Valley.
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Mike Chouinard
Special to the Record
Music has long been Hornby Island guitarist Tony Wilson’s means of expression, but in recent years he’s been producing multi-media projects like Looking Back, which examine issues he knows all too well.
For this project he used a memoir for narration, along with music, projected images and improvised movement.
“I think it’s more interesting than just playing music,” he says. “These things don’t get exposed in music very much.”
For Wilson, this is no mere dabbling. As a kid in Ontario, he faced homelessness, addiction, running afoul of the law and a stay at the notorious St. Joseph’s Training School for young offenders — the source for the memoir.
As a young man, music then offered an outlet when he first came to Hornby in 1976. There, he found a place to stay with a local logger of Belgian ancestry, who on the surface didn’t like hippie kids like Wilson, but the two bonded, and the man needed an accompanist for the folk music he played on fiddle and accordion.
“I knew a few chords,” he says. “I didn’t have a guitar or anything.”
From Hornby, he left to spend a year studying music at then-Malaspina College.
“We started with Gregorian chants and worked our way through to John Cage,” he says.
He’s hesitant to drop names of people he’s played with over the years as part of Vancouver’s jazz and improvised music scene. Still, he has worked with many jazz luminaries, learning privately with Oliver Gannon, and he’s studied at Banff’s acclaimed arts program.
As an adult, Wilson lived in Vancouver for a decade from the late 1980s to the late 1990s, though he also toured in Europe at times.
“I used to play a lot of gigs in Vancouver,” he said. “It was the one time I played a lot of music.”
Married at the time, he came back to Hornby in 1998, though he still goes back and forth for shows. On Hornby, he was part of a group of musicians playing the local pub Friday nights, though of late, it has been closed, so they play elsewhere. On the day of the interview, he’s nursing sciatica that flared up during June’s jazz fest while he gets ready to play that night for people on Hornby.
Downbeat magazine once called Wilson a “talismanic” West Coast musical figure, but he doesn’t seem to fit labels. In conversation, he moves seamlessly from his difficult youth to social issues to the merits of Malcolm Lowry’s novel, Under the Volcano, to his old landlord’s folk art still gracing the entrance to his home.
As for coming up with new music, he says he doesn’t really have any particular approach.
“I used to write a little bit every day,” he says. “Something comes to you, and you go, ‘I like that.’”
Wilson’s own discography is diverse, and while his guitar lies at the root, he plays with different groups that explore different sounds and styles, sometimes working with newer artists like singer Patsy Klein or long-time collaborators like cellist Peggy Lee, whom he recently backed at the Vancouver festival.
Now in his 60s, he has seen and lived a lot, and while he knows the music scene has changed, he remains enthusiastic, especially when working with younger players.
Whatever he’s creating, he is wary of jazz becoming “codified” or rigid when it comes to new ideas — or even incorporating some new media.
“Jazz has become a repertoire music,” he says, though of his own playing style, he throws a bit of a curveball by adding, “I think I’m a pretty conservative musician.”
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