John Bruce Wallace - Biography

Biography

John Bruce Wallace was born in Calais, Maine. Basically a self-taught musician, John picked up guitar in 1966, after having studied clarinet for a period of time. Concentrating at first on rock and the possibilities of instrumental performances in a progressive rock format, he became interested in freely improvised music, and solo performance options. Currently he is a free jazz solo performer interested in freely improvised music with a focus on generating extended sound statements within the options afforded through solo performance. His early influences include Sun Ra, Pink Floyd, Frank Zappa, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and Jimi Hendrix. Compositions are improvised extemporaneously on solo electric guitar without the use of tape, tape dubbing, computers or synthesizers. The improvised compositions often incorporate sonorous multi-tonal qualities, dense, interwoven passages embellished with harmonic and micro-tonal sound statements, or silence further defined by irregular syntaxed rhythms and primitive beats. His recordings have received considerable air play on alternative and college radio across North America, Western and Eastern Europe, along with reviews in leading trade journals and press. Artists on shared performance billings have included: Tim Hodgkinson, Evan Ziporyn, John King, Vladimir Tarasov, ZGA, Enver Izmailov, Burhan Ocal and Jazz Band Arkhangel'sk. Tours have included festivals in Russia and Lithuania, at the Vilnius Jazz Festival. His music was invited for performance consideration at the American Pavilion during the 1991 São Paulo Art Biennial, in São Paulo, Brazil. Academically he attended and holds a degree in Philosophy from the University of Southern Maine and the University of Oregon (as an exchange student) where he found interest in Philosophy and Political Theory with strong interest in Hegel, Marx, Husserl, Wittgenstein, and Nietzsche. He also developed an interest in Information Technology and has a degree from the University of Maryland University College in Information Systems Management. His other artistic interest is in the Visual Arts - painting and graphic arts. He has melded these diverse interests into inquires into how Consciousness and Artificial Intelligence influence approaches to the Imagination and the Creative Mind. He maintains devotion to each of these interests. In the early 1990s John became afflicted with Meniere's Disease which presented unique challenges to performances and recording, the resolution of these allowed an expansion of thought as to how sound production was perceived in terms of amplification and microphone placement.