In search of diversity

Artistic talent is a great quality to have, especially when one has talent across several artistic media.

Walter Vella is one such a person – while many will know him from his long-standing involvement in the local jazz scene as well as other musical projects, he is also a talented artist with a string of ‘art in glass’ exhibitions to his name.

However, his most recent exhibition, supported by the Malta Arts Fund, was entirely different; 2010’s Advanced Decomposition bridged his passion for music with a new artistic expression.

So what first ignited Vella’s artistic passion? “Well, when I was eight or nine, I joined the local band club and started to learn how to play the clarinet,” he remembers fondly.

That, however, was cut short when his family moved to Canada a year later, but they came back after about three years, and within a week of returning, Vella was at the band club, starting all over again.

This was the starting point for Vella’s eventful journey in music, which went through many phases – a journey he assures me “will continue to evolve as long as I am able to play”.

Among his several musical experiences, Vella mentions a band called The X-Bones. “We used to play soul music, which worked fine for me since I was playing saxophone by then,” he says.

He admits that even when he started playing clarinet, his ultimate goal had always been the saxophone. He finally did study saxophone under Mro Paul Arnaud, and even taught himself to play the flute.

Apart from The X-Bones, Vella got into the hotel circuit, playing with Mro Sammy Galea’s band. Later, he moved to Sweden, where he joined a travelling circus band.

“At first glance, people may think a circus band is a novelty act, but that band included some high-calibre musicians; the band leader Steve Frankovich, for example, was a sideman with Lionel Hampton and a session musician with Blood, Sweat and Tears and The Mahavishnu Orchestra; the keyboard player was a session musician with Abba, and the rest were also jazz musicians.”

After further stints performing in Norway and Sweden, Vella returned to Malta, jazz music having become an integral part of his musical character.

Aside from playing the flute with local folk ensemble Qawsalla, his main musical focus was jazz and he quickly became a fixture on the local scene alongside musicians like Paul Giordimaina, Charles ‘City’ Gatt, the late Bernard Scerri and others.

He played at the Thursday jazz nights at BJ’s for about 16 years, until 1998, and joined Etnika in 2000, where he was able to blend elements he was already familiar with, as well as pushing his boundaries further as the folk collective sought to embrace new elements into its hybrid sound.

“By that time I had developed an interest in world music and the many different ways that sounds and instruments can be used to create new sounds and musical diversity,” he says.

Diversity came to play a big part in the way Vella’s career progressed, and apart from albums with The Jason Paul Band, Vinny Vella and Dominic Galea, he was also seeking out new elements to explore beyond jazz and especially new methods to compose and create music. The music on the Advanced Decomposition album, which to some extent can be classified as an exercise in improvisation, is a case in point.

“Actually, that album goes beyond improvisation,” Vella is keen to point out. “One must first understand the circumstances that inspired it.”

Those circumstances were related to the theme of Vella’s art installation, which featured various natural and synthetic objects in advanced states of decomposition.

“I thought of various ways to represent the human aspect, but I decided to do it through music. In fact, the seven pieces on the CD mirror the life experience, the journey from conception to man’s twilight years.”

Rather than sticking to the established ‘improv’ approach, Vella sought to dig deeper into the music.

“Rather than working within or around the chord structures, my one brief to my fellow musicians (pianist Dominic Galea and drummer Joe Micallef) was to start out with a brief motif as our point of departure and move away from it entirely.

“The idea of fluidity, in line with the art installation it was to be part of, was to decompose the music; to create new, separate musical shapes from those same notes,” he says.

He compares this challenging exercise loosely to the way Maltese għana spirtu pront works in terms of spontaneity.

More than that, he says, each musician is free to express himself in the moment, with the more dominant expression pushing the others to take their cue from it and push it further.

He admits he had no idea if this approach would work at all. “It wasn’t calculated at any stage.

“It’s the same when I am working with glass: I get inspired by something or other and it sparks off a whole artistic process in my head; in the end, what I create can be totally different to the original inspiration that sparked it off.”

Trying to explain this in words is far more complicated than listening to it on the album, and it gets more complex as Vella says the recorded version is just one of several interpretations.

“Each rehearsal was different from the previous one, and even the three public performances we have given produced different interpretations.”

Most musicians would be displeased by this, but not Vella. This was exactly what it was all about to him. The fact that each performance was different strengthened the initial artistic concept.

Advanced Decomposition was staged three times last year, and as far as Vella is concerned it is now confined to the past.

“I’m that kind of artist,” he says. “I immerse myself in what I’m working on, but that project has run its course.

“Right now, I am focused on reviving Trania, a project I had launched a few years back with percussionist Renzo Spiteri and keyboardist Mark Attard.”

Trania was first launched during 2007’s Notte Bianca and had been critically acclaimed.

The idea to launch Trania came to Vella after he had performed the Etnika Karavan Petlor concert earlier that same year. The band had become quite big by then, and he felt that this had its disadvantages, but it wasn’t his band.

When Etnika folded, Vella had some folk-inspired ideas of his own he wanted to work on, and to do it he went in the opposite direction to what Etnika had grown into. He wanted to do something that was compact, so he decided Trania would be a trio.

Working in a trio was nothing new for Vella; it was the set-up he had recorded the Take Off album with Nazca in 2003, so this was familiar terrain.

“Further to Trania’s three performances at Notte Bianca and another at Barrakka Gardens, we wrote more material and went in to record our music, but at some point the project got shelved.”

Vella feels that now is the right time to revive Trania. He went through the music they had already written and sorted out which pieces would still be valid for the project as it stands now.

Vella’s idea for Trania was to involve the traditional flejguta (Maltese reed instrument) more in the music.

“More than that, I challenged myself to actually produce decent melodies from this instrument, which is known to usually produce a discordant sound,” he says.

Vella also mentions another item on his agenda which stems from his time with Etnika. He feels Etnika successfully stepped out of the typical Maltese idiom and expanded its rhythmic patterns by crossbreeding it with other styles.

“This is something I want to delve deeper into as I strongly believe that Maltese music is missing a period in its history – that part related to vibrant rhythms.”

He explains his theory by comparing Brazil and Cuba’s dominantly rhythmic music to the more languid folk of those countries where the Church or, rather, the Inquisition exerted a lot of power and influence.

“It seems the beat of the African drum was regarded as evil and was practically abolished. Given that the drums that drive Latin music originally came from the African heartland, which geographically isn’t so far away from us, and I feel it is impossible that Maltese folk absorbed Sicilian and certain Arabic elements but none of black Africa’s expressive rhythms, which were introduced into Europe by the Arabs through Spain,” he says.

An interesting outlook by all means, and certainly one that augurs well for Trania’s objectives, making this project something to look forward to.

www.waltervella.com

bugeja.michael@gmail.com