Marc perpetually reinvents himself
In latest incarnation, composer and guitar man puts together a foursome
As far as he knows there isn’t even a twist of the Gaul in his DNA but when Marc Atkinson was born his parents gave him the Frenchified spelling of his first name because they thought it looked cool. And it does, in a certain jené-sais-quoi sorta way.
What they couldn’t have suspected when he came along in the latter 1960s, a time when “digital” still meant your finger, is how handy a name it would be when it came time to nail down his own web page. The other, more common spelling is already long taken — he’s an American photographer — but www.marcatkinson.com is all his.
And it’s a good thing, too. It’s no easy deal to make your living as a guitar player these days but Atkinson manages by keeping various projects going and charted online, including the four- and five-piece The Bills, currently in the midst of recording their first album in five years; the much lauded Marc Atkinson Trio; the occasional gig with Mae Moore; teaching workshops at Hollyhock Farm on Cortez Island; teaching online via Skype; and now, the Marc Atkinson Quartet.
The big difference between the trio and quartet is the lack of Chris Frye’s rhythm guitar and the addition of a Kelby Macnayr’s drumming and percussion to Adrian Dolan’s fiddle and accordion and Joey Smith’s bass.
“It’s fairly exciting, actually,” says Atkinson. “It opens it up. All of a sudden there’s no rhythm guitar, the harmony opens way up and between Adrian and I, we feed off of each other. And we’ve been playing together in The Bills for 10 years now so this is a great opportunity to really stretch out.”
Some of the material is reworked from the Marc Atkinson Trio but mostly it’s new, quartetintended music, all of it written by Atkinson. The group played their first show last year in Vancouver at the Django Festival so this will only be their second time here.
When he’s not off touring or playing for Queen Elizabeth, as he did at Canada Day in Ottawa a year ago last July, Atkinson lives on Hornby Island with his wife and two young children. No big surprise there — he was raised on Quadra Island.
He started playing guitar at 13 and by the time he was 19 he was in Victoria honing his chops, playing the restaurant circuit. He had a regular gig at Pagliacci’s in downtown Victoria for 10 years, two or three nights a week. He’d be done by 10 p.m. and go off and do a rock gig at 11. You get pretty good at guitar after a while.
But for a long time now the focus has been on composing. He doesn’t need to warm up or practice any more, he just sits down, picks up the instrument and waits to see where his hands will take him.
“What happens to me is I play for a while and I stumble upon a motif,” says Atkinson. “A motif can either be a rhythmic idea or a melodic idea and I’ll just be looking at this, noodling with that and something just has a special sound to it. Then I’ll explore it in detail and I’m no longer noodling. I’ll keep working it until it finally becomes a piece of music. I love being able to look back and think now I have 48 tunes that I’ve recorded with the Trio and 35 of them are original. I like that I’m building a library.”