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The latest concert from DreamPlay features what can only be described as musical treasures.
For one thing, there’s the instrument that will be featured most prominently: the button accordion, which has played a key role in musical cultures from France to New Orleans to Ukraine. The music of all of these places and more will be on full display in Spirit Reel: The Musical Worlds of Jim Hiscott, which is the other treasured element of DreamPlay’s concert.
Hiscott, who has been a Winnipegger since the 1980’s when he moved here as a producer for CBC Music. Since then, he’s become a fixture in the city’s musical community as a performer and composer, including of the piece that gave this concert its name.
“The idea of this concert is to have a mixture of all these things and go various places,” Hiscott said in an interview on Morning Light, “partly some examples of different music, partly just some variety of repertoire, partly some of my own personal history and music and how that comes out in some of these pieces.”
A true jack-of-all-trades when it comes to repertoire, Hiscott will be sharing the stage with bassist Gilles Fournier, drummer Daniel Roy, violinist Chris Anstey, and instrumentalist Glenn Buhr, the curator of DreamPlay. Together, they will share music from Newfoundland, the intersection of Texas and Mexico, France and Ukraine.
As wide-ranging as the repertoire will be on Spirit Reel, Hiscott notes that the program only scratches the surface of what the button accordion can do. The curation of materials of this concert are largely informed by the people he’s performing with, and their blend comes naturally.
“I hear them together all the time,” says Hiscott of the music, “but in putting together this program, here they are one next to the other, and I’m sort of trying to justify to myself, ‘Why could that piece go here or go there?’.
The ultimate unifying nature of the music in Spirit Reel is its folk roots. Hiscott first performed the title piece in a Winnipeg context in the early 1980’s when he first moved here, but he recalls a memorable performance at the Vancouver Folk Music Festival for an audience of 12,000.
What really makes Spirit Reel sing for Hiscott is the people; the folks embodying the folk. “In the end, yes, there’s different styles and it’s fun to listen to all this stuff, it’s fun to get your body moving with the dance, but it’s really listening to the voice of all these players and myself,” says Hiscott. “That’s the most significant part of listening to music is a voice that people here and can identify with so they can think about their own voice in that kind of context.”
“I would not call it a conversation because it’s more emotional than that. It’s more intense than that and more exciting in terms of rhythm and stuff like that.”
Spirit Reel: The Musical Worlds of Jim Hiscott takes the stage in the Main Hall of the Winnipeg Art Gallery at 7:30 p.m. on May 22. Patrons can learn more about the concert and acquire tickets at DreamPlay’s website.