John
Gzowski is a musician of many interests. Some were instilled by studying with
Alexina Louie, James Tenney, Ann Southam and Trichi Sankaran, to name a few,
and some he just developed himself. Originally studying classical guitar, John
switched to electric after developing a taste for rock and jazz. He played in
many groups in the Queen Street scene in Toronto in the 80’s, most notably
the Garbagemen. Around the same time he began playing with some more experimental
jazz groups, like Graeme Kirkland’s group, Tom Walsh’s N.O.M.A.,
Paul Cram’s early groups and doing free improv work across the country.
He then started listening to and playing world music’s, performing Romany
Gypsy music with the Altin Yildiz Orkestar, South African pop with Siyakha,
Greek and Arabic music with Maza Meze, and North Indian flavoured jazz with
Tasa, on instruments such as oud, tambouritsa, cumbuc, cello, and mandolin.
His work in New Music includes playing with Hemispheres for over 6 years, concerts
with New Music Concerts and the Canadian Electronic Ensemble. He has written
for Array Music, the Evergreen Club Gamelan Ensemble and Hemisphere’s.
An interest in tuning and temperament lead to the building of several instruments
designed for higher resolution tunings, including guitars in 19 and 31 tone
equal temperament, 31 tone 5 limit just intonation and a study of Harry Partch’s
43 tone just intonation system known as Monophony. He has lead the microtonal
group Critical Band, with concerts across North America, and built replica’s
of Partch’s instruments for the performance of newly commissioned music
and performances of several of Partch’s early works. His theatre work
has won him 4 Dora Mavor Moore Awards, two for recorded music and two for live
performance. For dance, he has written for Dancemakers, Kaeja D’dance,
Kate Alton, Michael Sean Marye and most importantly, for his love, Julia Aplin,
using instruments, electronics, bicycle bells, homemade instruments, found sounds,
multi speaker systems and anything else he can get his hands on. Lately he has
begun study with North Indian Sarod legend Ali Akbar Khan in California, learning
how to play North Indian classical music on the electric guitar, and also studying
Carnatic music with Mandolin Shrinivas in Chennai.