Lisle Ellis

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Lisle Ellis (Vienna 2008)
Lisle Ellis with Wolfgang Reisinger and Andy Manndorff (Vienna 2008)

Lisle Ellis (born November 17, 1951 in Campbell River , British Columbia , partly also LS Ellis ) is a Canadian jazz bassist, live electronic musician and composer.

Live and act

Lisle Ellis began playing the bass guitar as a teenager and made his first appearances in studios, on radio and television shows and in strip clubs. Then studied at the Conservatory in Vancouver with Walter Robertson , then at Douglas College there . From 1975 to 1979 he also studied at the Creative Music Studio in Woodstock . Ellis first lived in Toronto in 1982/83 , and in Montreal from 1983 to 1992 , where he worked, among other things, in various musician organizations. He then moved to the United States, lived in San Francisco until 2001 , in San Diego until 2005 , then in New York City .

In Vancouver he worked with Paul Plimley , Paul Cram, Ralph Eppel and Gregg Simpson in the New Orchestra Workshop , with whom he still works on various projects. The album "Kaleidoscopes: The Ornette Coleman Songbook" was created with Plimley in 1989 on the Hat Art label, which was rated five stars in the Down Beat .

According to the Reclam Jazz Lexicon , the move to California in the mid-1990s meant that from 1995 onwards he increasingly played free jazz . The trio What We Live was central here , alongside Larry Ochs and Donald Robinson , who also recorded CDs with guests such as Wadada Leo Smith , Glenn Spearman and Dave Douglas . At concerts on the American west coast he was Cecil Taylor's bassist . In 1998 he presented his first album under his own name, Children in Peril (with Joe McPhee ). He also played with musicians such as Peter Brötzmann and Andrew Cyrille .

As a bass player, he increasingly gave up power play and switched to working with different timbres. In addition, elements of electronic music play a role in Ellis' music. In this area he worked with his experimental trio Audible Means (with saxophonist Ellery Eskelin and keyboardist Erik Deutsch ), which was active in the New York scene in 2006/07. Since arriving in New York, he has also worked with composer and keyboardist Tom Hamilton in the field of electronic music . In 2007 he wrote the Sucker Punch Requiem - A Homage to Jean-Michel Basquiat , the New York graffiti artist who had died twenty years earlier. Ellis also played with the Italy-based group Di Terra with pianist Alberto Braida and drummer Fabrizio Spera .

Discographic notes

literature

Web links

Commons : Lisle Ellis  - collection of images, videos and audio files