above and previvous page: Andrew MacKelvie on the shore of Long Lake in Halifax, Nova Scotia in fall 2023. Long Lake is the location of the annual dawn concert presented by MacKelvie's ensemble New Hermitage in the late summer.
30 musıc works #147 | winter 2023/24
At all times, it seems, Andrew MacKelvie is listening. Not just in the sense of having one’s ears turned on in order to avoid peril, but focused listening—to the wind over Long Lake, where his ambient improvisational ensemble New Hermitage puts on its annual dawn concert; to the resonance of the big church hall in which he helps direct the Creative Music Workshop sessions; to the sounds of the audience at Ramblers, the Halifax café and bar that hosts the monthly New Hermitage & Friends series.
Even while driving in hellish Halifax rush-hour traffic, MacKelvie listens to the questions being lobbed his way and responds in a calm but engaged manner that exudes a buzzy peacefulness. He is visibly excited to chat about music, showing no trace of the jaded cynicism often held by seasoned musicians. New Hermitage, MacKelvie’s main group, is one of many in which he plays the alto saxophone. The quartet—cellist India Gailey, guitarist Ross Burns, harpist Ellen Gibling, and MacKelvie on woodwinds—imagines a world in the not-so-distant future where most major cities have become inhospitable due to high levels of toxicity in the soil, air, and water. While most people have taken to nomadism, wandering through the wastelands between cities, one group has returned to the cities “armed with patience and tenderness” to live in a new hermitage where they work in concert with the natural world in an attempt to restore ecological balance.
“They give shape to the world as the world gives shape to their work,” MacKelvie explains as he drives. “And that’s an allegory for how we play; we are listening to the space and listening to each other, and as the sound—the music—is telling us, giving shape to our performance, we give shape to the music.”
This idea of serving the music is central to MacKelvie’s musical practice. He was raised in Nova Scotia in the town of Pictou (population 3,186) on the Northumberland Strait and grew up with the swinging sounds of Colin James and the Little Big Band blasting through his dad’s car stereo. Entranced by the horn section, he decided to learn saxophone and started playing in junior high, eventually heading to Antigonish to study the instrument at St. Francis Xavier University, but the competitive nature of the music program wasn’t for him.
“I would look at the saxophone in its case and want to throw up,” he says. “I quit music.”
In 2008, between his first and second year at university, MacKelvie participated in the Creative Music Workshop (CMW), the long-running intensive summer music program founded by the late Jerry Granelli, a legendary jazz drummer who served as its creative director for many years. “[Bassist and longtime CMW faculty member] J. Anthony Granelli, Jerry’s son, at one point started talking about [the concept of ] listening to the aggregate,” MacKelvie says, explaining, “If you listen to everything that’s happening, the music can often tell you what it needs. That’s the idea of service. And, you know, it’s going to be different for every person, depending on their thing. It blew my mind. It was the thing I was searching for. That moment changed the whole trajectory of my life.”
In 2010, MacKelvie started working as an assistant to Laura “Lulu” Healy, the artistic director of the Halifax Jazz Festival, and as an assistant coordinator of the CMW sessions. Despite his lingering negative feelings about the saxophone, MacKelvie felt he had found a kindred
H O R S E M A N
M A T T
B Y
P H O T O S
