Ensembles

Paul Cram Orchestra

Featuring exclusively the writing of two time Juno Jazz Nominee Paul Cram the orchestra rocks its way across a landscape of intense beauty with ferocious solos and deadly ensemble. The music rummages around in the twentieth century and tosses up a blueprint for the next.

“unlike anything anyone else is doing in Canada these days”
Mark Miller- Toronto Globe and Mail, Sept. 6th, 2001

Personnel

Paul Cram - leader, composer/arranger, tenor sax, clarinet
Don Palmer - alto sax, soprano sax, flutes
Jeff Reilly - bass clarinet, clarinet
John Scott - electric cello
Rick Waychesko - trumpet
Tom Walsh - trombone
Steven Naylor - piano/keyboard/sampler
John Gzowski - guitar
Al Baculis- electric bass
Dave Burton - drums

List of Works

Trouble in Paradise, Life of Crime , Immortal Coil, Urban Desperado, Have a Heart, Zebra Zone, Campin Out, Kafka’s Chair, Walkin the Wall, High Ground, March of the Philistines, Side Orders from Bb Restaurant, Eye of the Storm, Taiwanese Bootleg, Tip of the Ice-berg, Thunder, Revolutions, Dminor Diner.

Paul Cram - Band Leader

Paul Cram has been a freelance musician for most of his life and a composer for the past 25 years . Growing up in Vancouver his interest in creative music began in the early seventies when he first heard Charles Mingus, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Cecil Taylor, Sam Rivers, Anthony Braxton, Willem Breuker and a host of others. Possibilities were presented that he felt had limitless potential and in 1982 he embarked on a career as a composer and bandleader touring small groups around Canada. In 1985, in response to a request from the burgeoning Toronto Jazz Festival, he started the first rendition of the Paul Cram Orchestra. With the help of the Canada Council, the band recorded one Juno-nominated record “Beyond Benghazi” (“the sleeper of 1987” - Philadelphia Enquirer) with special guest saxophonist Julius Hemphill. The band played several concerts in the Toronto area. Ten years later he formed the new version of the PCO in the Maritimes. He re-arranged compositions from the original Orchestra, the Hemispheres Ensemble, and the Upstream Ensemble and created some new works. The new ten-piece band is composed of some of the finest musicians from Atlantic Canada including three from away, all of whom are stellar interpreters and improvisers.

The group debuted at the Atlantic Jazz Festival in 1998 and performed there again in 1999.In the Spring of 2000 the band toured Canada for the first time with dates in Halifax, Toronto and Ottawa and at the International Festival Musique Actuelle Victoriaville in Victoriaville, Quebec. The PCO completed its second Canadian tour in September 2001 in support of the band’s first CD on the Victo Label entitled “Campin Out”. The group played in Halifax , Ottawa (National Library of Canada), Guelph (Guelph Jazz Festival), Vancouver (Western Front) and Montreal (Salla Rosa) on the eve of 911. In July 2002, the group completed a cross-Canada tour that took them to the Yardbird Suite in Edmonton, the Vancouver Jazz Festival, the Off Festival in Montreal and the Atlantic Jazz Festival. On completion of the tour the band recorded its second CD “Walkin the Wall”. The band was recently nominated for a National Jazz Award for Best Big Band, while Paul Cram was nominated for best composer.

The orchestra is actively pursuing future engagements abroad and is contracted to perform on August 8th, 2004 at the prestigious Jazz em Agosto Festival in Lisbon, Portugal.