Squid Serves Up Much More Than Drumming

February 17th, 2006

By Stephen Pedersen
Arts Reporter
The Chronicle Herald

They ought to put precision drumming in the Olympics. No one watching Wednesday night’s opening show by Squid could help but be impressed by the amount of running, jumping and fly-by drumming they witnessed in Squid: The Evolution, at Alderney Landing Theatre. The show runs tonight and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. It is both an entertainment and an athletic event.

Drummers Matthew Guest, Daniel St. Pierre, Mark Jamieson, Ian Macmillan and Ryan Fraser, together with bass guitarist Terry Flick, beat-box artist Jay Andrews and dancer Stephanie Grant, deserve the national anthem and a moment on a spotlit podium for evolving their International Buskerfest routines into a full evening’s non-stop, high-energy show.

Against a red-on-black, bomb-burst backdrop created by students from Sackville High School, the drummers moved through five main percussion set-ups and brought on their own pipe-band drums, pausing to stand in line either singly or in pairs, trios and full quartet, eyes front, staring straight ahead, apparently unblinking, as their hands and arms rattled out fire from their drumheads.

They executed complexly choreographed sticking patterns, the meat and potatoes of pipe-band show drumming, juggling the sticks, tapping on the rim of the neighbouring drum, hitting anything that stayed still long enough and was hard enough to contribute to their sizzling tattoos.

Fascinating, even compelling, as those rolls and paradiddles and metrical acrobatics are, you can get used to it and, embarrassing as it is to confess it, you begin to look for something more. But not to worry. Squid always was an energetic group. The percussion setups created anticipation — especially the downstage right setup which consisted of three bass drums in a line with four bar stools placed in front of them. The seats of the stools had been duct-taped to the rungs. I cannot reveal why. It’s part of one of their many surprises. I can tell you that what they do is both witty and virtuosic.

Ryan Fraser played bagpipe tunes but without the drones, silenced because they proved impossible to tune with the rock guitars (bass and solo), played by Flick and Guest from time to time.

Fraser, kilted and wearing heavy white sneakers, tapped the floor from foot to foot in time with the tunes, MacPherson’s Lament prominent among them, and at the climax of the show, took the audience completely by surprise by executing a break-dance spin on one hip, horizontal on the floor, his sound continuing without a trace of a bump or interruption.

Highland dancer Grant participated in one of the more spectacular bits of showmanship, but it’s a spoiler to say anything more about it, except that the audience lost their minds in delight.

Squid: The Evolution takes a top busker act and turns it into a star stage turn. I have but one caution: those with sensitive ears should bring earplugs. Bass drums can cause pain at 40 paces. But the one they occasionally use in this show is amplified. It sounds like a pile driver. The theatre trembles and you realize to what all those guys who turn their cars into boom boxes and shake houses as they drive by, hope one day to achieve.