His face grinning like a corsair pillaging a galleon of sound, François Houle manipulated pre-recorded tapes of Malcolm X’ voice, looped the sound of two dissembled, simultaneously-blown clarinets, and then improvised over the conglomeration. Ron Samworth pushed his electronics even further out by attaching alligator clips to the guitar strings and then fiddled the contraption with a bow. Dylan van der Schyff modified the sound of his drum kit by rubbing transducer mikes on the drumheads. And Chris Tarry had his own bass secrets well hidden from prying eyes: while his left hand moved with deceptive simplicity across the frets, the complexity of his sounds seeming to derive from his feet cross-referencing electronic switches.

Houle and his quartet had played Vancouver’s “sugar refinery” club over the course of several months in 1999 elutriating electro-acoustical skills while composing Au Coeur du Litige. The audience, mostly half Houle’s age, was agog with attention. Virtually the only conversation was from those who asked the tippy-toed waitresses for another beer or a plate of nachos. It was amazing to sit among a club-crowd that listened not to themselves but to the music.

In February 2001, Houle played Vancovuer’s Western Front with Montréal’s Fibonacci Trio, a new-music ensemble. The audience was composed of the kind of who applaud the musicians before they have played a note. On this evening the ensemble presented Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, a masterpiece of 20th Century music. The composition is based on the Apocalypse of St. John in which angels come to earth and announce the end of time. Written during an enforced sojourn in a Nazi concentration camp during WWII, the score requires precise reading and exquisite execution to realize the composer’s intentions and emotional experiences.

Over the past decade his Vancouver International Jazz Festival experiences have woven a tapestry of music. One concert at the Dr. Sun Yat Sen Gardens featured traditional Iranian music with tar master Amir Koushkani and percussionist Sal Ferreras. Then there was a post-midnight musique actuelle gig with American pianist Marilyn Crispell and Swedish percussionist Raymond Strid. He has twice presented the music of American clarinetist/composer John Carter. The first time was in 1998 in the company of Dave Douglas, Mark Dresser, Dylan van der Schyff, and Peggy Lee. The second time was with Dutch clarinetist Ab Baars in 2002. And in the 2001 edition of the festival, he worked mainly with that genius musician Michael Moore and pianist/composer Benoît Delbecq.

Musicians frequently cross-over and dabble in musical forms in which they are not particularly proficient. These exercises provide variety and learning experiences for a musical mind. They are usually fun, and may even be lucrative from a marketing point of view. But Houle is no dabbler. His work encompasses electro-acoustic, contemporary classical, improvised, world, and jazz-inflected music. He is a musician who consistently masters each genre he approaches, adeptly imbuing each genre with a conspicuous creativity. He tackles a plurality of musics with aplomb and seems to come up with a bell-ringer each time.

Musicians, interested listeners, and music critics have long known that Houle has an exceptional ability to articulate the clarinet. His chops were evident in jazz circles from the early 1990’s when he transited from the strictures of 20th century classical training into the arena of contemporary creative music. In a 1991 interview for Coda Magazine he told me that Paris Blues, a duo collaboration between Gil Evans and Steve Lacy, had shocked his artistic consciousness and compelled him to delve into the universe of improvisers. He then had made a conscious decision to work his way through the musical language of jazz and to radically alter the classical motifs he had lived with for the previous 20 years.

Houle is a determined man: after deciding on an artistic goal, he researches the subject matter and carefully charts the route over which he can achieve the desired result. He studied with or listened to the discography of the outstanding contemporary improvisers, people like Evan Parker, Anthony Braxton, and Steve Lacy. Of critical importance was a book by the British improviser Derek Bailey (Improvisation: It’s Nature and Practice in Music) which delves into the art of improvisation not as a western and recent phenomenon but as a tradition found in the music of many countries. But Houle’s classical background kept catching him by surprise. “I’ve had to figure a way of using my classical training in an improvisational setting. The more I do that, the more I am able to open up my palette of sounds,” he said at that time.

In the decade since that interview, Houle has published over ten CDs, either under his own name or as an egalitarian collaborator with musicians like Georg Graewe, Joëlle Léandre, and Marilyn Crispell. In the Vernacular, the Music of John Carter is the only one of his projects not entirely composed or co-composed by Houle.

The flip side of these improvisational projects is Houle’s work in New Music. His work as a member of the Vancouver-based group Standing Wave and collaborations with the Fibonacci Trio are examples. This genre requires conscientious interpretation of the composer’s intentions. He says, “The proficiency of musicianship in new music is quite amazing. You have to be completely engaged in it to pull off a good performance. You can’t fake your way through it. But it complements what I do in improvised music. When you work real hard at New Music, and get beyond thinking about the notes and the rhythms and the orchestration, you can get to the same place as with improvised music. Being able to play in these different genres gives me a better picture, technically and emotionally, of what music is about.”

Houle’s approach to reconciling these different genres is to “let myself be influenced.” In a recent interview he told me, “Many of my ideas about music come from things that are completely outside of music.“ In one instance that led to a recording project, he was profoundly taken by the sociological impact and physical devastation of the Québec ice storms of 1998. And while riding on a train in Europe, he drifted into a reverie about an artist friend who had committed suicide. That experience led to the composition “Prayer”. His latest CD, Cryptology, comes from his fascination with encoded messages. He says, “Sometimes we are afraid to lose focus, thinking that because we are musicians, we have to do music 24 hours day. That approach might work for some people, but not for me.”

Since Houle has a strong introspective trend, he often dwells on the dynamic tension between playing of music with exactitude and of letting the imagination leap into unknown hereabouts. But leaving aside his internal struggles as an artist, what really counts is the output. And what we can hear is a musician who has produced a remarkable body of work at his age. His track record indicates we can expect at minimum one major project per year turning into a CD.

Perhaps Houle’s lowest-profile CD has been the superbly recorded The Clamourous Alphabet, a collaboration with writer Catriona Strang. He had already recorded a duo CD with Marilyn Crispell (Any Terrain Tumultuous), music wordlessly based on Strang’s poetry. For The Clamourous Alphabet Houle and Strang wanted to explore the relationship between words and music but had zero interest in a one-to-one correspondence between the two disciplines. Instead, they decided to blur the associations. Houle worked out the musical ideas from the poetry, but in the process changed the words to suit the music. Strang in turn then re-modified the words. This cross-filtration exchange process was carried though until they were satisfied.

The recording utilizes a variety of arrangements. On some duets, the words are spoken and then there is a solo reply from the clarinet, a kind of call and response. On others, such as “Broil”, the two artists speak and play in a rhythmic-harmonic synchronization. In others, Strang’s voice is electronically looped and the timbre re-colored. On “Shuffle One” Houle plays an extended note behind Strang’s voice. But when she says “All plenitude’s lyric plunder,” the suggestion causes the clarinet’s voice to swoop radically away from the previous pattern: the notes become both abundant and abruptly disconnected. Plunderphonics. Usually, however, the words and music have a much less obvious connection to each other and frequently the name of a clarinet solo comes from an excerpt of the previous duet, as in “Tender Lippy.”

While the “The Clamourous Alphabet” is not a widely circulated work, it provides the opportunity to hear Houle as a solo artist. One of the compositions is the twenty minute “Slap Circ.” Now, listening twenty minutes of extended-technique clarinet technique requires hard mental work and unusual discipline. I was severely taxed to keep my mind and emotions fully engaged the first time through. Perhaps only hard-core types, or young musicians wanting technical insight, will make it all the way through “Slap Circ” in one session.

But the effort is worth it. It confirms that Houle has absorbed the legacy of John Carter, the musician who restored the clarinet to the lexicon of contemporary American creative music. Houle uses musical devices similar to Carter’s, like breaking the upper harmonics into discrete and simultaneously well-differentiated tones while circular breathing. Houle’s lengthy improvisation on “Slap Circ” –one complete take, no over-dubs- uses accelerations and decelerations of tempo as well as rapid ascendancies and decendancies between the high and chalumeau regions of the horn to achieve tension-release cycles. Carter’s solo excursion “Les Masses Jigaboo” (Tandem 2, Emanem 4012) serves as a reference point for Houle’s creation.

The performance is beautifully recorded. The subtleties of breath, the landing of the keys on their pads, the articulation of silence between notes in the slower passages are all revealed to be well controlled through the whole piece. About half-way through, one begins to wonder, “How long can he keep it up?” But Houle never falters and by the last note one realizes that a technically flawless, compositionally satisfying, and artistically adventurous work has been created.

In 1995 Houle collaborated with pianist Marilyn Crispell to produce the CD Any Terrain Tumultuous. My review in the defunct Seattle journal 5/4 Magazine opened with the following sentence, “Some landscapes are so terrifyingly beautiful and forbiddingly austere that only the most masterful musicians dare navigate them.” Through repeated listenings to Any Terrain Tumultuous, I had formed the distinct impression that within Houle’s artistic consciousness is imbedded a vision of landscape, that his music contains as a core-value the extreme and dramatic contrasts found in Canada’s geological formations. This inner-eyereach provokes him to project powerful and raw emotions in his music.

The life of a city-person, or of someone who sees the wilderness only from a car window, cannot prepare a soul for the vehement power of nature. But Houle has spent time in the wilderness and became imbued with the lush beauty of mountain flowers on sunny days. Such radiant days can turn, ten minutes later, into the terrifying splendor of the horizontal sleet-storm whipping the breath from a hiker’s lungs. From such extreme natural experiences can come both tender balladry and wailing overtones.

From this point of view of view, it is no surprise that Houle seized upon the Québec Ice Storm of 1998 as CD project. What emerged was Houle’s most adventurous work, a radical musical geography called Au Coeur du Litige (The Heart of the Matter). The environmental context for this CD and performance-work was the tempest that buckled hydro-electric towers under the massive tonnage of encasing ice, crippled the maple-sugar industry by uprooting whole trees, and isolated heat, energy, and food-deprived villages for two weeks. Houle was half a continent away in Vancouver. With access to the television and radio that his relatives were denied, he knew more about the situation than they in the storm centre did.

But this perception of understanding also defined an apprehension of powerlessness. He could do nothing to help his relatives. Thus began an artistic response, a radiophonic work of ten solo and twelve quartet electro-acoustic improvisations which were later defined into a CD at the digital mixing board.

Houle has long blown two clarinets simultaneously, dissembling the instrument and using a trumpet-like embouchure to play a horn bereft of the mouthpiece. During the period when he played live with his electro-acoustic quartet at the sugar refinery, as well as his long-standing work with French pianist Benoît Delbecq, he apprenticed himself in the use of electronic manipulation and prepared piano.

To these he added radio recordings and poetry from Catriona Strang. A strong suite of Au Coeur du Litige is the manner in which the words from the human voice are repeated, then electronically looped and then transubstantiated as intimate plosive shrieks of the storm. With the further edition of Dylan van der Schyff on percussion, Chris Tarry on bass, Ron Samworth on electric guitar, each with their own personal brand of electronic sound manipulation, Houle had an arsenal of sound to work with. The resulting music is a dense, multidimensional collage, a sensual experience that transcends the human and natural events it describes.

Around the time of completing Au Coeur du Litige, Houle received an invitation to record for the German label, between the lines (btl). No mean feat this, for the label hosts only renowned improvisers, musicians who have career track records as advanced artists. Houle is most likely the youngest leader to record for the label. The enticement was without condition, he could record what he wished. Upon completion of the project, he would go to Germany for a concert, an exclusive engagement for the financial organization which owns btl.

Houle turned his attention to systems of encryptation, ideas that have intrigued him for years. He explained: “I researched how, over the course of western music history, composers used mathematics to generate notes, series of notes, and structures to create music. A well-known example is how Bach used the letters of his name (B-flat, A, C, and B-natural (H)) to compose the Art of the Fugue.

“Xenakis has composed music generated from mathematical figures and logarithms, scientifically architectural music called stochastic music. Pitagora and Guido D’Arezzo, important theoreticians from the Renaissance era, wrote a lot about music and mathematics, calculating the frequencies of certain pitches, of just intonation. The [western] intonation system we use today is basically a refinement of those mathematical formulas.”

The end result was Cryptology. But the concept of Cryptology went beyond musicological research. At the time, Houle was reading Neal Stephenson’s novel Cryptonomicon. The book fictionalizes the breaking of the German and Japanese military codes during WWII and relates these events to the development of electronic binary codes used for modern computers. Cryptonomicon is filled with literary inventions concerning cryptologists and their relationship to music. Houle was also reading Robert Graves’ novel I, Claudius. In one section of the book, Claudius discovers the key to his mother Livia’s “black book” describing the secret criminal activities of Rome’s highest officials. Claudius found a copy of the Iliad which had numbers above the letters of the first one hundred words. His natural curiosity led him to remember his father’s frequent consultation of that particular volume, and his subsequent deciphering of codes allows him to consolidate his power.

The discovery of these delightful literary sources set Houle on a composing pathway. He developed a lexicon, or as he said during our interview, “a list of key words of methods, people, and anything that influenced my thinking at the conceptual level.” The lexicon can be seen in the CD package as columnular groupings of five letters. It is a relatively simple task to decipher his lexicon,a nd in it one can make out important creative people, literary, and other influences in his life.

He explained his methodology: “I took the letters and assigned specific pitch to them like Bach did, then encrypted them and threw away the key, getting a whole new set of numbers that I would reassign to pitches. In other words, I was modulating the original set of pitches I had, transposing or changing them altogether with encryption. That in turn generated a whole new set of material. The words in the lexicon are not necessarily used or applied: they are things that influenced my thinking at the conceptual level. Peggy’s [Lee] name is in there as is [frequent collaborator] Benoît Delbecq’s, transformed into a melody either in the compositions or in the improvisations. It was simply a different way of generating material to put some compositions together.”

In spite of this and other inspirational approaches to his art-making Houle has been plagued on occasion by critics whose writings display an ignorance of the artist’s goals and methods. Houle received one American internet criticism saying that his lexicon approach was “kind of cute, but no cigar." Houle laughed when he showed me the review and said, “I thought, ‘yes, it is cute,’ but the point is that if you start digging into the lexicon, you will find names and stories that don't make any sense until someone asks me ‘What does this have to do with Augustus?’ I can tell them the story and how it is connected to the conception of the album.”

In addition to long-time road- and studio-mates Tony Wilson (guitar), Peggy Lee (cello), Dylan van der Schyff (percussion), Houle asked Brad Turner to participate on trumpet and piano. Houle has used these last two instruments only sparingly in the past. The addition of Turner, who is well versed in classical, jazz, funk, and instantaneous composition, added the possibilities of new colors to the music.

On Cryptology Houle solos much less than on other works. One hears more of precision ensemble playing, the individual and group improvisations semi-hidden within the structure of each song.

When I asked Houle about this feature, he said: “I wanted to get to the essence of each piece, stating them, playing and concluding as soon as possible. I like to state a theme, go through a series of improvisations, and have a conclusion that is a variation of the original theme. I often compose with open-ended forms that don't necessarily have to get resolved. If the form does get resolved, the resolution is in a different place than you would expect. I don't believe in always telling a story where the end is the same as the beginning. In literature, it certainly does not work that way. I love a feeling of suspension, of non-resolution.

An example of this approach is Le corps abstraite s’abandonne à la lumière (The Abstract Body Abandons Itself to Light). The dominant sound in this composition is a bell-like ring produced by Dylan van der Schyff using a mallet on an automobile brake drum. The pitch of the brake is C-sharp, the ringing sound of the brake-drum is relentless –obsessively so- throughout the song. Lee and Wilson improvise around this pitch. The composition has an indiscernible reference to a melody that never materializes, and thus the title (which came to Houle after the completion of the composition). The intrigue in the piece is its unresolved drama: music almost always has a resolution that the ear welcomes. The only real changes that occur in Le corps abstraite are an increasing tempo and a gradual fading of the instrumentation at the end. The psycho-acoustics of the composition are such that each time I hear the composition, I am left with an unsettled feeling that is similar to the many oddities we experience in life. And my mind asks, without ever getting an answer: “Now what was that all about?”

An opposite emotional reaction occurs with Prayer, his fragile remembrance of painter Robin Costain. When originally recorded on Schizosphere, the trio format did not permit the playing of the three-part melody. Now with the instrumentation on Cryptology, he could record the full melody and still have the ostinato played on guitar. The long tones of clarinet and trumpet induce sadness and Peggy Lee’s solo has the feel of a human body whimpering during profound mourning.

And then there is the off-balance Asymptote. The title refers to mathematical equations describing the relationships between a straight and a curved line approaching infinity. When he wrote the piece, Houle was thinking not only of calculus, but also of the medieval European composers’ use of asynchronicity between pitch color and rhythms known as “talea.” Jazz frequently uses the device of counterpoint, in which counter-melodies continually complement each other harmonically. The psycho-acoustics of asynchronous structures are quite different. In Asymptote, the different lines only weave together at odd moments, and never totally lock together. Any resulting harmony is incidental and transitory: the straight line goes in one direction, and the curved line takes a different approach to infinity. The device of talea lends itself, like a medieval religious mystery, to a story that contains no only speculation but no final ending,

When we discussed Asymptote, Houle’s facial expression varied between seriousness and his characteristic corsair grin. The sombre expression came while recalling the characteristics of medieval music, while the take no prisoners look appeared when talking about his own composition: “I thought an asymptote was really neat, lines that get closer to each other, but never touch. How do you write a line like that? How long could you sustain melodies that never touch each other? In that piece there is a kind of ABC structure: an A, a B that has nothing to do with the A section, then a C section similar to the A. The whole thing is ABC-solo-B-C-A. It floats around a bit. The B section is like a pulse track inserted in between.”

Examining the decade in which Houle has emerged as an important artist, one is struck by the fact that the clarinet is still a rare instrument in the world of jazz and improvisation. Once upon a time it was a major instrument, think of Barney Bigard, Jimmy Hamilton, Artie Shaw, and Benny Goodman. John Carter was the foremost composer/clarinetist during his time, but there have been longstanding gaps in exploiting the instrument since the saxophone became the dominant instrument of jazz.

In this same last decade, The Vancouver International Jazz Festival has been the most important venue in North America for presenting the world’s most important innovators in jazz and improvised music. This Festival’s adventurous programming has allowed Houle, along with other Vancouver musicians, to play on the same stage with some of the most advanced improvisers on the planet. While Houle has undoubtedly benefited from this contact, a close watch on his development shows that he has been an independent thinker from day one of his career. In observing the hundreds of improvisers who have presented adventurous, complex, exciting, and intellectually challenging music at this Festival, I have formed the opinion that François Houle ranks in the 99th percentile. Houle himself is more modest in his own self-evaluation, insisting that he has only begun to enter the stage that follows apprenticeship.

What he has accomplished to date is significant. In jazz and improvised music, he must certainly be considered the foremost technical innovator on the clarinet today. His tonal command of the acoustic instrument restores it as an instrument of choice to express color and emotional depth. His use of multiphonics, circular breathing, and blowing two whole or dissembled clarinets simultaneously is forthrightly artistic. He is virtually the only clarinetist to adroitly combine the clarinet with electronics and thereby radically open the sound palette of the instrument. His compositions are innovative, containing elements of classical and contemporary western music, are often conceptually based on literature and natural phenomena. When he publishes and performs a new work he then rapidly moves on to a new concept: to date there has been no repetition in his work. A new project will be a solo CD in which he presents his own take on the jazz clarinet masters of the last century. One can only hope that he begins writing for a large ensemble.

Some advanced musicians have chosen to ensconce themselves in academia but Houle has equally chosen to remain a road warrior, presenting his new works in festivals and concerts. Like other outstanding Vancouver performers he has not moved to New York to stake out a territory. Instead, European art festivals have become a source of regular invitations. To the gratitude of Vancouver audiences he has ensured that his works are presented at home first. When he was playing the sugar refinery to prepare his major electro-acoustic work Au Coeur du Litige I asked members of the 18-25 year old audience why they dug Houle’s work. The essential answer I heard several times was that Houle wasn’t playing tired, overdone stuff from the past, that even though he was two generations removed from this audience, he represented the future of music for them. I can’t think of a higher compliment.

François Houle: Selected Discography

Dice Thrown. Benoît Delbecq & François Houle. Songlines SGLSA 1538-2, 2002;

Cryptology. François Houle 5. Between the Lines btl012, 2000;

Au Coeur du Litige. François Houle. Spool Field 2, SPF 302, 2000;

Pursuit. Benoît Delbecq 5. Songlines SGL1529-2, 2000;

In the Vernacular: The Music of John Carter. François Houle 5. Songlines SGL 1522-2, 1998;

The Clamourous Alphabet. François Houle & Catriona Strang. Periplum P0050, 1999.

Nancali. François Houle & Benoît Delbecq. Songlines SGL 1519-2, 1997.

Any Terrain Tumultuous. François Houle & Marilyn Crispell. Red Toucan Open Fields RT 9305-2.