Jesse Zubot has not been near a tractor for a long time, but he still has the long-distance gaze of a man who grew up where the horizon is always visible beyond the next quarter-section. He speaks slowly in a baritone drone and, on the day of our meeting in a Vancouver café, he seems much more like guys I knew years ago in rural Alberta than a big-city improvising musician for whom the horizon is the only place worth heading for.
Zubot is a violinist, record producer and label owner who seems to be involved in almost every part of the booming western Canadian scene for improvised music. Listening to him recount the details of his absurdly full schedule, I had to wonder whether he has a secret twin who does some of the work for him.
His Drip Audio label alone sounds like a full-time job. It has put out a dozen albums since he started it 2½ years ago, and he has five to 10 more discs lined up for release over the next six months. Zubot does almost everything himself, with some help from his girlfriend and anyone else who is handy with a microphone.
The label has made a satisfying splash with its diverse offerings of free jazz, structured improvisation and avant-pop. Zubot now turns down one or two album proposals a week, which in his view proves how skimpy the Canadian infrastructure for what he calls creative music really is.
"It's almost non-existent, and I think that's absolutely ridiculous, because the talent is world-class," he said. "The potential is massive. There's no reason we can't be at the same level as in Chicago. There's probably 30 labels in that town that support this kind of thing. They have groups touring the world that are being respected for what they do."
He has three bands (Fond of Tigers, ZMF Trio and LaConnor) in the forefront of his playing career, and two more that are still in action to some degree (Zubot & Dawson and Great Uncles of the Revolution, both of which won Juno awards), and he shows up on sets and albums with everybody from cabaret songsmith Hawksley Workman to experimental songwriter Chad VanGaalen to bassist Joe Fonda, a veteran of Anthony Braxton's improvising ensembles.
He has been in a hurry since he arrived in Vancouver at the age of 17, fresh from the family farm near Mendham, Sask.. He had already been playing country fiddle and rock guitar, gorging his ears on his father's collection of free-jazz albums, and figured that a few years of jazz study at Capilano College would be the quickest way to get the technique to do whatever it was he had to do.
"I didn't know what the hell I was doing, I just knew I needed to be a musician," he said. He also knew that he didn't want to become the kind of jazz violinist who works over a repertoire of standards night after night.
I first encountered him as one half of Zubot & Dawson, the folksy, musically erudite duo he formed a decade ago with guitarist Steve Dawson. That group satisfied a deep urge to make music that people can dance to, something Zubot first experienced when he played fiddle tunes at the age of 10 with his grandfather's country band. But dancing implies a regular beat, and large dollops of familiarity and repetition, and during the past three years Zubot has felt a strong urge to get away from those things.
"I find it bizarre that a lot of listeners expect musicians to be happy doing one or two things their whole lives," he said. He prefers not to do one or two things for a whole record. His recent disc with Fond of Tigers, his "post-everything" band, includes shaggy canons, cloud-like essays in texture and density and simple chant-like melodies that act as clotheslines for improvised counterpoint. Circle the Path, a new disc with the ZMF Trio, features aspects of blues, jazz and a free-range kind of improvisation that is always on the hunt for something that feels real.
It's high-risk music that comes on quickly and doesn't ask for a lot of editing. Circle the Path was recorded in a single day, just four days after the players had convened for the first time. But Zubot can also see the day when his restless current music may evolve into something more patient, and maybe more danceable.
"Five years from now, I'll probably have the urge to be doing the simplest singer-songwriter things ever," he said. It's all part of the same journey, and for Zubot, not knowing the destination is part of the fun.
Jesse Zubot and Fond of Tigers play with Chad VanGaalen tonight at Richard's on Richards in Vancouver, and tomorrow at the Lucky Bar in Victoria.