May 2009 Newsletter

Special-guest saxophonists are the theme of 2009, thus far. First, it was Evan Parker’s February Interface Series; check out Alan Stanbridge’s thorough review in the latest Signal to Noise. The next Interface is with an only slightly less renowned European improviser from Switzerland, Urs Leimgruber (pictured), 5-7 June (programming details to be announced). In the interim, Somewhere There has hosted excellent saxophonists and good friends from three other Canadian creative music scenes: Paul Cram from Halifax, Jean Derome from Montréal, and Coat Cooke from Vancouver. The night with Jean Derome, 25 April, was particularly fun, with a garrulous mid-sized throw-together band including Justin Haynes, Allison Cameron, Jean Martin, and Christine Duncan.

May marks the second month of trumpeter Nicole Rampersaud’s residency, featuring a set of solo trumpet followed by a set with (usually) a single guest (Evan Shaw, Germaine Liu, Kyle Brenders, Parmela Attariwala, and Matt Miller, for example). Nicole’s playing continues to mature at an incredible rate, and her solos demonstrate not only a keen moment-to-moment imagination and (of course) remarkable instrumental facility, but also a sense of formal development that is rare among solo improvisers. As austere as a set of solo trumpet may sound, it would be a shame to miss this string of shows that constitute a laboratory for someone who is quickly becoming one of Toronto’s leading musical voices.

New this month is bassist Aaron Lumley’s residency, also with a program of solo improvisation and small-group playing that will no doubt feature Aaron’s characteristically physical, gut-stringy style. Aaron has been playing a ton lately, in countless contexts – I just heard him play beautifully with David Prentice at Ron Gaskin’s VTO Festival at the Tranzac – and, like Nicole, he is honing his massive vocabulary of technical extensions toward becoming one of the more distinctive improvisers in the city. Finally, speaking of Ron Gaskin, Somewhere There once again wishes him a happy sixtieth birthday, and thanks Tim Posgate for organizing a small but festive party for Ron in conjunction with a Cluttertones date as part of Rob Clutton’s residency.

Folk Forms (or Folks Form)

Try to say that one ten times, quickly.

Due to some scheduling vagaries, I’ve had a string of Thursdays become available, and I was very happy to offer last night to violinist & violist David Prentice and bassist Aaron Lumley for a Valentine’s joust. This pair was here about a month ago (just before the inception of this site) and I was quite taken by the rapport between them and, once again, how totally brilliant David is. Last night, they picked up right where they left off, twisting knotty, this-follows-that improvisations into what may as well be folk songs. David has the rare ability among improvisers to play idiomatically ‘free’ but to develop his ideas tunefully and melodically (broadly speaking), as if a narrative logic overrides the temptation to shorten ideas within the gestural logic of the moment. It’s a capacity that he shares with the ‘likes’ of Leroy Jenkins, Paul Rutherford, and Mario Schiano, each a hero of mine for similar reasons.

Aaron is clearly the junior partner in this duo but, while he tends on occasion to default to ideas with short shelf lives, he demonstrated again how high he’s climbed on a steep learning curve. It’s obvious that Aaron relishes the big, Mingus-y sound he’s getting out of his gut strings, and he really digs into his instrument in an occasionally self-absorbed search and discovery of fantastic sounds, but last night he proved how fine and supportive an accompanist he can be in this kind of context. It’s a context, perhaps ironically, where a successful ‘accompanist’ generates roughly half of the material.

For the second set, David and Aaron invited audients John Oswald and myself (a group known in the annals as JOUST) to join them for a good-natured spar. No folk songs were in the offing here, since both John and I were feeling perhaps too fanciful to let things reside anywhere too simply. Instead, the quartet lived in a web of darting lines and little blats that resulted in a joyful disorientation. Great fun. For arcane reasons that tickle my most nerd-like sensibilities, I propose that the four-piece – if and (hopefully) when we play together again – be called PLUTO. We’ll travel the spaceways.