!earshot Top 200 of 2021

Every Musician Should Be So Lucky

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Marc Atkinson at the Calgary Folk Club. (Photo:Todd Korol)The Marc Atkinson Trio, from Victoria, BC, is an acoustic jazz band that combines challenging arrangements of jazz standards and new compositions. These compositions show influences from classical music through to the gypsy music of Europe. Marc Atkinson on guitar, is backed by Joey Smith on bass and Chris Frye on rhythm guitar. They played at the North American Folk Alliance Conference and are also frequent performers at the acclaimed Festival International de Jazz de Montreal. They have also performed in Europe and throughout North America. Acoustic Guitar Magazine voted the Trio’s, The Marc Atkinson Trio II, one of the top 5 five CDs released in North America. This CD was also nominated for best jazz album by the 2003 Western Canadian Music Awards. The Trio released their much-awaited 3rd album, The Marc Atkinson Trio III, in 2005. Perhaps what is most unusual about this jazz trio is that Marc and Chris are also the founding members of a completely different band, The Bills (formerly the Bill Hilly Band), which also plays spirited and eclectic roots and folk music. The Marc Atkinson Trio made an appearance on Jazz Notes with Jim on CFBX FM in Kamloops, BC.

JD: Tell us who the Marc Atkinson Trio are and what instruments you play?

MA: Ok, we're three guys. We're the Marc Atkinson Trio . I'm Marc and I do most of the writing for the group, however I have a wonderful bass player here, Joey Smith, who is one of the finest in Canada , who does some of the arranging for the group and fellow musician Chris Frye, playing the rhythm guitar. Chris and I share another group called The Bills .. We have two acoustic guitars and the stand up bass and we just try to explore the outer limits and possibilities of the instrumentation.

JD: Well we know you have a whole bunch of CDs out because your people have been kind enough to send them to us. We have three of them now. Would you tell us about your new CD. It's called the Marc Atkinson Trio III and you were smart enough to label them; I, II, III , so people like me won't screw them up too much, although I already have, a little, but �

MA: (laughs) It's a marketing plan. If you like Marc Atkinson Trio III , you might consider that maybe there's a II and a I out there. I think we are most excited about the third album, just because the band has been around for longer. It's the same three members on all three CDs and I think we've really started to find our voice and our level of comfort and trust in the studio and in front of the mics and the music just spoke for us and just kind of took off. We recorded, tracked, the whole thing in four days, so it has the live off the studio floor sound and the focus is on the compositions - kind of a romantic year. You know I got married this year and the music reflects that time.

JD: You wrote the song called “The Proposal”, so tell us a bit about that.

MA: Well, with that song I wanted to employ the possibilities of two guitars stacked on top of each other. Chris is playing the lower voicings and I'm playing the top ones. Joey comes in with the solid bass, down there. It was kind of fun to make big, fat huge chords that you would need two guitars to do. That was the idea harmonically behind that, but if was a song that was in my head the time I was composing the whole album and when you think of a whole album at one you try to find out what flavours do you want to fill in the entire recording and to me it was important to write something that was kind of a ballad that had that little sort of jazz version of its own self in the middle of it, if that makes any sense to you?

JD: It does. What about the word 'proposal?' I think you have some news for us, don't you?

MA: Well, yes. There's a song called “Cinque Terre” and that's about a place in Italy , where I proposed to my wife Dierdre, and there's the song called Proposal and another song called Dierdre. You know, I just didn't hold back. I just went for the whole feeling. Also I was sharing a street with my friend Chris Frye, who plays rhythm guitar and also plays in The Bills. The name of the street is called Dunsmuir. Deirdre and I moved away to Hornby Island , so I ended up writing kind of a reflective song called Dunsmuir Road . So the whole album is reflective of the time, and that time of the year, and everything. It's good to have a concept, especially when you are writing instrumental music. You kind of want to have a theme to work with.

JD: There's theme and there's emotion in it. It's wonderful, just wonderful. Well obviously you guys have been influenced by Django Reinhardt . You can hear the gypsy in some of your cuts. Who else influenced you?

MA: Django Reinhardt is lovely because he's an acoustic virtuoso and so I'm very drawn and always have been drawn to the acoustic guitar - you know Jimmy Page inspired me to get going and jam down at the beach. Then I sort of got into guys like Pat Metheny - a little bit of a John Scofield phase, then he started to get nerdy - but I love all that. I keep getting interested in the raw playing, like Django's - raw not a lot of tricks and Jimi Hendrix. But, I think you might say the compositions are what excite me with the jazz musicians and Duke Ellington is my favourite composer in the jazz department. I also really enjoy Mingus , and Miles Davis , of course, who was brilliant at creating new shapes. Everytime he would put out a new album it would have a whole new mood. I really thought that was brilliant, and each album would have a mood of its own. So, it's not always guitar players who are influences. Often it's composers, Thelonious Monk for example.

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