Freer than Jazz

Fond of Tigers leave the egos at home


photo by Jessica Eaton

Fond of Tigers bandleader Stephen Lyons isn't the kind of musician that likes to go about things in the usual fashion. For starters, his group plays a fusion of avant-garde styles that's too jazz-infused and improvisational to fall under the heading of “post-rock”, but too anthemically stormy and fluidly collective (Fond of Tigers is virtually solo-free) to qualify as jazz per se. The closest thing to Fond of Tigers' music might be the late-period fusion of Miles Davis or the omnivorous progressive rock of The Mahavishnu Orchestra, but any comparison is bound to fall short of the mark. Find of Tigers are that truly rare animal in the contemporary musical landscape: a genuinely original and eclectic experimental band. What's more, their fine grasp of melody and tension gives them an accessibility far beyond those audiences who routinely investigate “experimental” music.

When we meet for an interview, however, Stephen Lyons isn't interested in talking about influences, day jobs, or any of the conventional elements of the publicity routine, which seems to amuse him as much as it frustrates him. “I find it actually really interesting, the relationship between what people think you are and where you are actually at,” he remarks, as we discuss the confusions and misrepresentations that inevitably arise in the professional musician's grind of recording albums, releasing them, and promoting them with tours and gigging. For example, Fond of Tigers has existed in one form or another for eight years – first as Lyons' solo project, and now as an all-star septet that includes drummers Skye Brooks and Dan Gaucher, bassist Shanto Bhattacharya, keyboardist Morgan McDonald, trumpeter JP Carter, and violinist Jesse Zubot of Zubot & Dawson – but they only released their debut album, A Thing To Live With, last year (on Zubot's well-connected Drip Audio imprint). As the only extant document of the band, then, the disc can't possibly suffice to encapsulate eight years of evolution. In the beginning, as Lyons notes, the band's music “didn't bear any resemblance to what it is now at all.” Thankfully, Fond of Tigers has a new EP out soon and a new full-length is currently finished and in the process of being mixed and mastered. “The next one will have a little more melody in it,” Lyons discloses. “It's not crazy, it's not like we're mellowing out and doing la-la-la stuff, but you can hear a lot more of the layers and there's just a lot more variation.”

In search of other opportunities to get off the beaten path, Fond of Tigers regularly plays gigs with an abbreviated lineup (it's hard to coordinate seven players), usually under the name Limbs of the Stars, which Lyons refers to as, “a Fond of Tigers tribute band. Vancouver's premiere Fond of Tigers tribute band, in fact. We know the stuff pretty well.” Lyons' other ensemble, Heartwarmongering, not only offers him the chance to work with other musicians, but also to experiment with different approaches to recording and gigging. “We were playing a lot of shows for a while,” he explains, “and they weren't all good. We'd play at Pat's Pub, for instance, and I couldn't hear the other players or the audience and they couldn't hear me. It's the kind of music that really needs a mood or a setting. That has been my psychological battle.” As a composer of fluid and extended pieces, Lyons is keenly concerned with the particularities of location and duration with regard to hearing and producing music, so his solution to Heartwarmongering's problem has been to abandon the idea of live performances with the band and devote himself to building a recording in the the studio, one performer at a time, with a very open-ended outlook. “It's sort of different from what I've been doing for a while,” he says. “And I'm putting a really long timeline on it. I'm not concerned with having an end result in six months or a year.”

When not wrapped up in either of his main ensembles, Lyons occasionally improvises with Vancouver artist/musician Lee Hutzalak under the name Collapsing Lung. “It's really minimal,” Lyons tells me. “Extremely minimal. Lots of crackling, humming, buzzing, whirring. Not a lot of playing guitar.” He finds the minimalist approach freeing, however, in contrast to much supposedly “free” jazz, where the pressure to perform in a certain way often hems in what is an ostensibly unbounded form. “I like not playing a lot,” Lyons admits. “Some of the worst improvisation I've played in is when people won't just let things occur.” This patience and willingness to let things occur on their own is connected, in a way, to Fond of Tigers' focus on collective playing rather than soloing. There's a lack of ego there, coupled with a sense of generosity and seriousness, that gives their music much of its heft. “If it wasn't a little bit about ego,” Lyons admits, “I'd just play at home and not get up on a stage. But playing music is about a moment of putting yourself out there and seeing how people receive it. So there's a sense of ego there, but also of losing it. Giving it away. I'm really interested in that.”

This article will be appearing in abbreviated form in this week's Westender