|
Alliance for Improvised Music |
John Shiurba
Scott Rosenberg & John Shiurba will play a show on Tuesday April 25 at Go! Studios that will include a collaboration with Micro-East Collective, hopefully starting around 9. They will play in a trio setting with percussionist Ian Davis at Humble Pie in Raleigh on Wednesday April 26, starting around 10.
Guitarist John Shiurba has been an active participant in the Bay Area creative music scene since the early 1980's. While in school at UC Berkeley Shiurba met a handful of like-minded musicians with whom he formed several different short-lived groups, playing at parties and on the Berkeley sidewalks. This loose group of players eventually formed the legendary art-rock group Eskimo. Eskimo has earned critical acclaim over the years for their Beefheart-inspired combination of raw rock sounds with a complex, jazzy compositional style.
Although art-rock and punk have informed him since early in his career, Shiurba has made a name for himself in the improvised music community as well. He has developed a razor-sharp, highly responsive approach to acoustic and electric guitar, often using household objects and spontaneous preparations to elicit sounds not normally associated with the instrument. Shiurba abandoned the more "traditional" tabletop method of playing prepared guitar in favor of a more flexible setup. "I found that putting my guitar flat on a table limited my possibilities too much. By sitting with the guitar held "properly" I can play as usual, and then prepare it as needed, flipping it flat on my lap if necessary," explains Shiurba. "I have recently become increasingly interested in the 'unprepared guitar" and finding ways to use my hands to produce a similar array of "exotic" sounds, which then allows me to shift gears more quickly, without having to "un-prepare" the instrument."
When asked how he began to experiment with unusual techniques, Shiurba recalls, "I remember when I got my first guitar, I played around with it for hours on end, just scraping the strings, snapping the strings really hard, rubbing the wood, etc., hearing all the weird noises it made, and my mother warning me that I shouldn't be doing this before I learned how to play it properly, lest I develop bad habits."
Shiurba's "bad habits" and highly original playing can be heard on a number of recordings with some of the Bay Area's best-known improvisors. Shiurba's own Limited Sedition label features his work with Myles Boisen, Gino Robair, Matt Ingalls, Tim Perkis, and Morgan Guberman. He has collaborated with multi-reedist Scott Rosenberg in a variety of settings ranging from duets to large ensembles. Their improvisations move rapidly and telepathically from idea to idea. Without the benefit of stereo separation, it would be difficult to discern who is playing what. Rosenberg is capable of producing harmonic, feedback-like tones from his reeds one second and percussive, string snapping sounds the next. Meanwhile Shiurba is coaxing a seemingly impossible amount of sustain from his acoustic guitar, adding to it a reed-bitten timbre. Then the duo can just as easily bring you back into familiar territory as they engage in a more melodic dialogue.
Scott Rosenberg/John Shiurba will play a show on Tuesday April 25 at Go! Studios that will include a collaboration with Micro-East Collective. They will play in a trio setting with percussionist Ian Davis at Humble Pie in Raleigh on Wednesday April 26. These should be fine additions to what has already been a stellar couple of months for improvised music performances in this area. They bring with them quite an arsenal of experience, technique, and a playful willingness to take chances. Ultimately, says Shiurba, "playing the instrument interests me the most when something unexpected happens, when something surprises me, when I hear something and have to ask myself: "did I do that?!"
- Chuck Johnson, 4/00
![]()