It’s that time of the year again, when winter evenings are packed with jazz vibes. Jazzfest is set to return between December 5 and 7, at Dalhousie Institute. It will feature nine bands/collectives, representing 11 countries. We caught up with Light Star Guiding, which will perform on the second day.
The contemporary music collective from Warsaw, Poland, blends improvisation, psychedelia, and spiritual depth, led by saxophonist Ray Dickaty. Known for being in popular bands Spiritualized (90s psychedelic rock) and Moonshake (post-rock), Dickaty, founder of Warsaw Improvisers Orchestra and Solar Fire Trio, weaves transcendent saxophone and flute, scoring theatre and film.
Guitarist Mikolaj Poncylijusz, a Chopin School and Katowice Academy graduate, drives jazz-fusion HoTS and WerMik Studio, fusing modal riffs with post-rock. Keyboardist Michal Zaleski electrifies with Moog and bass. Drummer Dominik Mokrzewski, who powers Niechec and Infant Joy Quintet, anchors LSG’s tribal pulse.
Here’s what Dickaty has to say before the gig.
What do you want listeners to pay attention to during your JazzFest set?
How we work as a unit, with not one soloist in the conventional sense, but with the combined force of four people producing music where a solo will emerge and have space to breathe, therefore being the soloist for that particular moment. But we tend to view pretty much each instrument as having equal importance. So I would like the audience to appreciate how we work with this idea of it not being a traditional band plus “soloist” out front, but a more egalitarian proposition as a band.
What inspires you most when you sit down to write or improvise?
Sound itself inspires me. Like any good musician, it takes some time to find your sound and then finding the right equipment to help push and focus your sound takes time.
Like a guitarist that has the correct amp/guitar combo for a specific sound, I always appreciate that someone has studied what they are after and made the effort to reach for that goal.
After the fundamentals of sound, I guess for me it’s my mood, or how I feel on a particular day. I often return to familiar riffs, melodic motifs and exercises, and try new ways of approaching them. Maybe repeating a phrase through a number of cycles with slight changes, or approaching a melody at a different tempo than was initially intended. Sometimes I am inspired by a certain groove or harmonic moment in a piece of music I hear.
This also can be a source of inspiration, in the sense of ‘What would happen if I tried that idea..?, how can I implement that groove or melodic idea into a new piece of music...?’ It may even be as simple as a single note played and placed in a certain way....
Everyone’s talking about artificial intelligence. What does AI mean to you and does it have a place in your music?
Certainly not, AI has no place in my music. I like machines in music but not music made solely by machines. Although, having said that, I recently heard some AI music that was truly good...and I hate to say that. What is unfortunate is the sheer amount of AI music that is choking up Youtube, Spotify and so on. Playlists such as “smooth jazz to study by” or “relaxing hip hop” have become ubiquitous on social media.
And due to algorithms, these are always the top hits and I worry for younger generations who absorb this music as “normal” not realising the difference between this and music made by real people.
The other really worrying factor is that AI is trained on the entire history of music and it calls into question copyright and royalties. Battlelines are being drawn now to protect any copyright issues. But AI is flourishing at an incredible rate and lawmakers are struggling to catch up, and I fear that once again the creators of original music are being taken for granted and not being financially rewarded for their work.
