From the Ottawa Citizen, April 11th, 2005 To hear some jazz musicians talk, New York is a grueling, competitive place where only the most swinging survive. Even the renowned tenor saxophonist Joshua Redman, in this month’s downbeat magazine, says that he moved from Berkley, California to New York “to get my ass kicked, to be in the thick of it, to be constantly inspired and terrified and intimidated.” On the other hand, Canadian saxophonist Peter Van Huffel sounds like he is having a much less traumatizing time in New York. After two and a half years there, the 26-year-old Kingstonian gushes about the camaraderie and support giving wings to his forward-thinking jazz. “Whether they’re your peers, or people that you used to idolize when you listened to them on recordings, everybody’s really into just helping each other out,” he says. “Everybody wants to see each other succeed.” There are some dog-eat-dog jazzmen, but Van Huffel avoids them. “I don’t really go out to those late-night jam sessions,” he says. “Those kinds of environments or crowds can be a little more cutthroat.” Instead, Van Huffel runs with like-minded people “who are very focused on original projects, contemporary progressive compositions,” he says. Several times a wekek, he meets with other young musicians to run through each other’s music. He is in several groups, and they play at some of New York’s best small jazz clubs – 55 Bar, Cornelia Street Café – and even the old punk-rock haunt CBGBs. Tomorrow, Van Huffel’s New York quintet plays at the Bayou on Bank Street, as part of a weeklong Ontario tour. As well, New York’s thirtysomething star saxophonists – players such as Chris Potter, Donny McCaslin, Dave Binney and Tony Malaby – provide mentoring and moral support for the up-and-comers, Van Huffel says. “They’re all willing to play with us all the time. They come out to see our shows. It’s a really nice environment that way,” he says. Potter, the It guy of jazz saxophone these days after stints with bosses such as Dave Holland, Dave Douglas and Steely Dan, even played on Van Huffel’s Manhattan School of Music recital last year. “He’s really supportive. When I asked him to do my recital, he was in town that night and really into playing,” Van Huffel says. In just over a decade, Van Huffel has gone from being a jazz neophyte to sharing the stage – and holding his own – with Potter. When he was in Grade 6, the first horn that he played was a clarinet. But a year later, he was so drawn to the alto saxophone that he convinced his parents to buy him one and he began teaching himself to play it. “After a few months, I wnet about finding myself a saxophone teacher,” he continues, “which kind of shocked my mother when she got a call from some guy saying her son had called, looking for sax lessons. I was about 13 at the time.” He began listening to the meat-and-potatoes jazz of the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s – Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, Stan Getz, and, most of all, the bebop revolutions of alto saxophonist Charlie Parker. “I listened to Charlie Parker non-stop for, like, two years,” Van Huffel says. He absorbed the essential lessons of Parker, working through a book of his transcribed solos and playing along with his recordings. Before he graduated from high school, he was also driving once a month to Montreal to take lessons from saxophonist Janis Steprans, a jazz instructor at McGill University. But while he enjoyed the classics of the jazz canon, Van Huffel was drawn to more contemporary sounds. By the time he attended Humber College in 1997, he was investigating more open or angular music by musicians such as Kenny Wheeler and Steve Coleman. “I was stretched more and more in that direction, trying to check out newer sounds, what people are doing with music that’s really changing it from where it was 20, 30, 40 years ago,” he says. Van Huffel is on that course now in New York, after graduating first from Humber and then last year from the Manhattan with a Master’s Degree. He has also twice attended the famed Banff International Jazz Workshop, where he studied with musical heavy-weights including pianist Kenny Werner, trumpeter Douglas, and Potter. The music Van Huffel plays with his quintet has one foot in the modern jazz mainstream and the other in the avant-garde. “Whether we’re playing really free or we’re playing something with a lot of structure, we can be loose all the time and stick to the music,” he says. “We’ve allowed ourselves to be free with the structured tunes as well. It creates a lot of spontaneity all the time. The music’s different every night.” Sometimes, New York can seem a lot like Canada to Van Huffel. He shares an apartment north of Harlem with Ottawa saxophonist Mike Webster and another Canadian. His circle includes singer Yoon Choi from Toronto, drummer Greg Ritchie from Montreal and bassist Fraser Hollins and trombonist Mike Fahie from Ottawa. “There’s a large Canadian community, definitely,” he says. But for now he would rather be an ex-pat than be repatriated, having applied for an artist’s visa that would allow him to add three more years to his U.S. stay. “Musically, things are going in the direction I want them to. Financially, things are starting to sort themselves out. I can’t really think of anywhere else I’d want to be right now.” |