Al Neil

Jazz pianist, novelist, sculptor, painter, Al Neil is an artist down to the bone. Exalted, energetic, whimsical, even cynical at times, he regularly changes skins and constantly remained in the underground ever since he dropped out of the bebop scene in the early '60s. Based in or around Vancouver for most of his life, he remains one of the least known and understood Canadian artists. A pioneering pianist in free jazz and experimental music, he has recorded very rarely. Often compared to Cecil Taylor, he actually has more in common with Michael Snow, another multi-faceted Canadian artist. Al Neil was born in 1924 in Vancouver. Classically trained from the age of nine, he began to give recitals in his teens and was looking at a concert career when World War II forced him to cross the Atlantic. Back home in 1945, he resumed his piano studies with Glenn Nelson and Jean Couthard. Wilf Wylie taught him his first rudiments of jazz and off Neil went to play clubs, leaving the classical repertoire behind. In 1956 he helped open The Cellar where he performed as a house musician, accompanying for the next few years an impressive number of West Coast players while experiencing first-hand the music of such visionaries as Ornette Coleman, who played his first international gig there in 1958. Through this West Coast networking Neil, got an invitation to put together a group to back poet Kenneth Patchen for a tour that yielded the LP Kenneth Patchen Reads with Jazz in Canada with the Alan Neil Quartet, released by Folkways in 1959. Fed up with modal jazz and the industry (Neil often performed for the national radio and television), the pianist took a few years off in the early '60s, immersing himself in philosophy and modern art. Ready to come back in 1965, he recruited drummer Gregg...