Listen up—it’s Corbin Keep, Wild Cellist
As a kid, Corbin Keep just wanted to play guitar. Unfortunately
for him—but fortunately for anyone with ears—the 44-year-old Bowen Island-based
musician was forced to take up the cello in his sixth grade band class.
“It was the closest thing to a guitar,” says Keep, who performs under the
moniker “The Wild Cellist.” “Guitar wasn’t an option. You could have a band
instrument, or you could have a violin or a cello.”
What began as a marriage of convenience has transformed into
an all-consuming love affair, with Keep pushing boundaries and
transforming this thickly traditional instrument into a tool
for musical experimentation. “To some extent it’s simply a much
more unexplored instrument than, say, guitar,” he says. “If you look at
guitar as being one mine shaft and cello as another, really a lot of it has
been mined out by guys with guitars.”
His music is schizophrenic in scope: humour gives way to
intense introspection about the nature of our existence before jumping
into a tune that drives like a train with a choo-choo beat. It’s often
cinematic, and sometimes strange. One of his songs (“Aliens”) blends no
less than three musical genres and features a voice reminiscent of Dr. Who’s
Daleks, stimulating the unmistakable urge to leap up and dance like a robot,
Michael Jackson-style.
Unlike other experimental cellists, Keep doesn’t rely on
any external effects or electronic devices for the strange noises
that he coaxes from his instrument. With the exception of his vocal
renditions, everything at his solo shows—from the sound of
waves crashing on a beach to the seagulls flying overhead—is generated
entirely on an acoustic cello.
“You know when you’re in a kitchen and you’ve got limited
ingredients, you’re not able to go to the store to get everything
you want . . . the lima beans have to substitute for the fish,” he laughs.
"It’s a little bit like that for me. I like keeping the limitation of the
acoustic cello.”
In spite of these limitations, or perhaps because of them,
Keep still manages to discover novel approaches to creating new sounds
using nothing but a cello and his imagination, and he doesn’t see it stopping
any time soon.
“The reason I’m so motivated with it is that I keep finding
so much more to do with it.”
—Jason Gondziola
Monday
Magazine (Victoria, BC) Jul 31 - Aug 6, 2003 issue
Wild Cellist Prowls by Night
Let me introduce you to my neighbourhood. It's a typical suburb in many
ways, full of hard-working adults and quick children, minivans and dogs,
bicycles and crows. Yet there are some differences. There aren't any streetlights,
for one: the stars and the moon provide the only illumination, and on a
clear night it is possible, despite the glow of the nearby city, to see the
vast swath of the Milky Way. There are no freeways, either, although there
is noise: the boom of the ocean on a rocky beach, the rustle and sigh of
wind in the trees. And although there are no clubs and few concert venues,
there are a lot of musicians.
Up the street, just beyond where the kids line up for the morning bus,
there's Rob Thompson, cover-band singer supreme and a regular fixture in
the Whistler pubs. The magnificent jazz drummer Buff Allen lives across
the street, along with his singer wife, Louise Escallier. Moritz Behm, who
infuses traditional fiddle music with his classical background, grew up on
this road, although he's living elsewhere now, and on the next street over
there's Ruta Yawney, a bell-toned singer and virtuoso on the harplike Ukrainian
bandura. Songwriter Julie Vik has a house just up from her, and a little
higher lives Corbin Keep, a self-described "wild cellist".
A wild creature he is too, skinny and intense, and if you walk the local
roads at night, after the rest of the hard-working adults have retired to
their beds, it's likely he'll be the only other human afoot. With a houseful
of kids and cats, his nightly peregrinations are presumably his way of
relaxing. But with the release of Keep's first solo CD, Call of the Wild
Cello, it's clear that his night-owl exploits are also part of his quest
for artistic inspiration.
Consider the CD's final track, "In Silent Awe". Both gentle farewell
and anthemic statement, Keep's lyric compares the blue of his daughter's
eyes to the blaze of a comet he saw on one of those nocturnal strolls, then
links them both to the coastlines and forests that surround his home.
"There's something about the wooden, elemental quality of the cello
that connects with the woody, elemental quality of our natural surroundings
here," he says, echoing a theme that emerges in Call of the Wild Cello's
meditative, chantlike "Pulse of the Forest". Yet part of the appeal of Keep's
music is that it can be both mystical and playful: one minute he's deep
in druidical reverie, the next he's mugging his way through the sci-fi flavoured
"Aliens", the most popular number in his concert repertoire.
Part acoustic Black Sabbath, part tango, part Balkan rave-up, the tune
dances to a peak of absurd speculation, referencing Star Trek, UFO abductions,
and conspiracy theorist David Icke along the way. It's a hoot, and Keep--who
plays the North Shore Unitarian Church in West Vancouver on Friday (November
28) and the Carousel Theatre Rehearsal Hall on Granville Island on Saturday
(November 29)--isn't at all sure this is a good thing. "That song's going
to follow me to my grave," he grouses good-naturedly. "I'll be 89 years old
and still having to play 'Aliens'!
"I had a woman call me up about a month ago," he adds. "And she said,
'Corbin, listen to this.' Her kid is three, and he has this ritual: he
puts all these pots and pans on the staircase in their kitchen, and then
he puts on that song and bashes the pots and pans during the verses, then
stands at attention to sing along during the chorus. So I guess it's funny
and goofy and kids seem to like it."
Keep himself has been playing cello since he was 12, following an earlier
infatuation with the guitar. "I got my first guitar when I was eight, at
Griffith Furniture in Bellingham, Washington," he explains. "I pushed nine
dollars and 99 cents, mostly pennies, across the counter, which was about
as high as my forehead. And, interestingly enough, that first guitar was
much like a cello, this gigantic acoustic guitar with f-holes. My sister destroyed
it within months, but in Grade 6 I was given the opportunity to play the
cello in school. I loathed band instruments, but the cello seemed okay because
it was the closest thing to a guitar."
Although he still plays the cello's six-string cousin, Keep is clear
where his loyalties lie. "What does the cello give me that the guitar doesn't?"
he asks. "Well, let me count the ways. For one thing, the overtones are
way richer; it's just a way richer, fuller tone. I also like that this kind
of alternative cello-playing is territory that's been less well explored."
Whether searching for comets on a midnight stroll or taking the cello
into new terrain, Keep continues to be an explorer--and in the process
he's making my neighbourhood, and the musical world, a wilder and more
entertaining place to be.
- Alexander Varty
From The Georgia Straight (Vancouver, BC) Nov 28/03
Testimonials
CD Reviews
