SeeChangemakers conversation with the unique West Coast musician who charts improvised sonic landscapes into unknown waters.
During the first few days of my arrival, I realized that Meredith Bates was playing in another festival in Montreal. Meredith Bates is a West Coast musician who locates herself on Salt Spring Island with her partner, jazz pianist and producer Chris Gestrin, and their son. She’s a perfect example of a musician who chooses to explore sound collaborations and compositions through a lens of curiosity. She creates these acoustic virtuosic sounds to build upon improvised sonic landscapes.
Hearing her incredible musical depth and explorations in sound compositions, she became a top-tier person of interest for SeeChangemakers. I was considering reaching out when I returned from Montreal, but fate suddenly stood on my doorstep. So, as the saying goes, “nothing ventured, nothing gained,” and I reached out. She agreed to meet right before her show at the Suoni Per Il Popolo with Aleida Perez (Violin) and Adriana Camacho (Contrabass). Such incredible timing and what a gift!
Career Navigation BOOK I
Meredith Bates, as a “mid-career” musician, has collaborated with some of the West Coast’s best jazz musicians such as Tony Wilson (R.I.P.), Chris Gestin, and Peggy Lee. Her foundations are in classical music, with both parents influencing this aspect of her musical growth. However, she really loves pushing the boundaries in music, which led to the initial years starting in 2008 with Juno Award-winning instrumental band Pugs and Crows. In an interview with EARSHOT, a campus and community e-zine, she discussed what made their music unique within the jazz genre.
Career Navigation BOOK II
Her solo endeavors have been a recent focus since 2020, when she brought out “If Not Now” in December. After this release, the experimentation continued into an exquisite exploration in unique futuristic soundscapes.
Listening to some of the Bates’ collaborations, on the 2021 Sound Migrations production, with Lief Halls and Josema Zamorano, I was brought back to my post-secondary art school days. For instance, they used an octophonic surround sound system with her live acoustically processed violin performance, which was intermingled with projected video compositions. The performance was shared with a small, appropriately distanced group of spectators during the first full year of COVID.
After that came Tesseract, which was nominated for a 2023 Juno in the Instrumental Album of the Year category. It didn’t win, but being nominated with such a unique sound is victory itself.
The most recent production, The Observer Effect – Books I & II, I must admit, has been my favorite so far. On Observer Effect, Bates works on an over two-hour songline which she says she felt as though “…the songs existed 100 years before I started playing it and will continue to exist long after I finish playing…” Much like Aboriginal songlines, they live in a quantum field of relative time. As I sit here and listen to the album now in its entirety. I am at the 4th Incantation (memory), I feel it pulling me up and out of myself. It feels bigger, fuller, and to some degree otherworldly. My perception shifts.
Honouring the Process
I loved reading the Bandcamp notes on the album, and there are many.
“A noteworthy fact about Bates’ process that makes the richness of this body of work all the more astounding is that the constituent compositions—even the collaborative ones—are actually generated live in the studio with very few edits or overdubs.”
All in all, the interview that concludes this article was too short to delve into the depth of work this artist contributes to new exploratory instrumental genres. But I was so grateful for a chance to sit with Meredith Bates and “drop into” her musical sphere much like people have done throughout time with songlines.