We Are Sunburning is available from Brian Cram by emailing:    briancram@mail.com
Or send $20.00 to:
Brian Cram, 711 Bay St., Apt. 421, Toronto, Ontario, Canada    M5G 2J8   Ph:  (416)  599  5863.


REVIEWS

Capital City, Ottawa  May 13, 1999.

Author:   Karen LaRocca

Headline:   Guh lives for chaos- Instrumental whiz kids lighten up.
     For unpredictable compositional ensemble Guh, even the national anthem isn’t safe from improv tweaking. If the Toronto group tried to attack the venerable tune with the precision of a proper orchestra - and they should know, their piper Henry Muth has tried it - their wild, flexible arrangements would distort O, Canada almost beyond recognition.

Wonky cabaret

     While their (mostly) intrumental collages accommodate drums, bagpipes, trumpet, trombone, flute, guitar, Rhodes piano and the group’s rattling percussion shenanigans, Guh rove like a band of nomads - from jazz forms to classical to wonky cabaret/circus oddities to vaguely Middle-eastern songs and east European stomps.

     On their latest offering, We Are Sunburning - they launch the disc Friday (May 14) at an all-ages gig at Club SAW - the group distills the theory of controlled musical chaos. "People write what they’re studying at the time, it seems", says a punch-drunk - or is that just drunk? - trumpeter Brian Cram by phone form Toronto, taking a stab at explaining Guh’s self-described composition workshop.

      "(Guitarist) Jason Clarke wrote one that he calls his Bill Frisell tune", he continues, with a chuckle. "He’s studying jazz really seriously now - I guess he had to get that out of his system".

     But the most rewarding moments on Sunburning, Cram reckons, are spent listening to the work of Guh’s newest songwriting contributors, Jesse and Jason Baird and Dan Salvendy - Blake Howard and Scott Good round out the eight-piece ensemble.

Music degree

     According to this jazzbo, who holds himself a music degree, these new aural attackers didn’t have to go through many hoops to be able to have good experiments - and I’m jealous". And then just when you think you’ve figured where they might travel next, Guh throw in a vocal track or two, including Gil Scott Heron’s Whitey On The Moon featured on the new disc. "A lot of people think we’re just an instrumental, crazy avant-garde, new music band", says Cram. "But it’s more like we’re somehow encapsulating everything we’re hearing or thinking at the time.

Busk relentlessly

     "We’re really creating vehicles for musical presentation", he says. "That’s basically what the songs are - a means to play".

     Day, night, afternoon gigs - Guh play anywhere, anytime. As unpredictable on stage as on their groove-centric record, they busk relentlessly, have (literally) played wedding marches, conducted an airport 'greeting concert' and performed at a high-school graduation in Europe.

      "We played recently at a hockey game between the Dale Morningstars and the Sonic Unyons and we performed all that hockey music - We Are The Champions/We Will Rock You and In A Gadda Da Vida - between the puck drops and during intermissions. It was so much fun". Any NHL teams out there? I hear Guh do great things with that O, Canada number.