February 2009 Newsletter

January was unquestionably the busiest month that Somewhere There has seen. This fact is attributable not only to the increase to six active nights each week, but also to the surprisingly large crowds we’ve had this past month (in relative terms, of course). CoexisDance, which has been presented at Somewhere There bi-monthly for about a year, drew a record audience, for instance, and Christine Duncan’s Element Choir drew record numbers of performers during the choir’s Sunday residency with choir size at close to forty nearly every week.

February will be busy as well, with the key event being AIMToronto’s Interface Series with British saxophonist, Evan Parker, on 13, 14, and 15 February (bring your Valentine!) Nilan Perera has done curator work on this one, and has placed Parker in six thematically related groups of Toronto players that will challenge and provoke him. Simply put, it’s a great honour to have Evan at Somewhere There.

The Wednesday-night residency by Odradek continues until the end of February, and has already featured two CD release concerts. Andy Yue, Jim Bailey, and Michelangelo Iaffaldano have put together some fine programs that go from strength to strength (and, sometimes, from strange to strange), a trend that will no doubt continue this month. The Element Choir also continues their Sunday-evening romps, and I have to say that it would be a real shame if listeners miss the astonishing sound of forty voices in Somewhere There’s intimate confines!

Thursday nights in February and March feature the wonderful drummer and all-around charmer, Nick Fraser. Originally, Nick had hoped that Drumheller, the wonderful jazz quintet that he convenes, would be on hand every week but he has since intimated that schedules are making that plan next to impossible to execute. As I’m writing, I don’t know exactly what’s on tap, but hope that at least some of Nick’s Thursdays will feature the full band (with Eric Chenaux, Rob Clutton, Doug Tielli, and Brodie West).

Click here to see the entire month's programming.

Glances in the Rear-View Mirror

In an effort to keep tabs on a bunch of interesting stuff that’s happened at ST during the past few weeks, I’m offering up a few snapshots. I wrote these two last week but haven’t got around to editing and posting them before now:

Wednesday, 12 March

Arthur Bull, formerly of Toronto during the Music Gallery’s heyday, has long since set up shop in Digby Neck, NS. Luckily, he contacted me shortly after I’d opened ST while planning a Toronto trip and, since the program was still skeletal then, I was able to offer him a gig without any hassle. What luck! This guy is a real improviser’s improviser, and deals with the situation with a minimum of surface gloss and maximum ideas-per-minute. Since his original, exceptional trio with Nick Fraser and David Prentice in September, Arthur has been back twice, and this time with the ever-provocative pair of Nick and guitarist and ST regular, Eric Chenaux. Their music unfolded at a beautifully measured pace and, while each player was clearly taking the others' cues throughout, one could parse each player’s discrete musical ideas as they were introduced, developed, and wrapped up. Still, the lushness of Eric’s guitar and Nick’s exquisite snare attack assured that this was more than a musical chess match. To follow, March/April residents, Ronda Rindone’s Quorum, had a busy set featuring two-bassists (Aaron Lumley and Rob Clutton) that was lively enough, but no match for the subtlety brought to bear by Arthur, Eric, and Nick.

Thursday, 13 March

It was terrific to host two old friends from Montréal, gambist Pierre-Yves Martel (picture) and trumpeter Gordon Allen, who were joined by bassist Rob Clutton for a delicate and extremely thoughtful trio improvisation. It was lovely to hear Pierre-Yves and Rob hook up in actual or fanciful counterpoint, with plenty of little rhythmic and harmonic interplay, while Gordon (as he so often does) cleaved beautifully to his own breathy, almost ethereal furrow. The silences that permeated the set’s texture were an excellent contrast to the opening set, an in-concert development of their Piano Music collaboration by alto saxophonist Evan Shaw and drummer Jean Martin. Jean and Evan played extroverted duet music that kept an ongoing and productive connection with jazz tradition, without ever referring to it overtly. Jean’s capacity for simultaneous subtlety and ebullience, so often a key factor in any ensemble in which he plays, was certainly in evidence, but was muted a bit by his fumbling with an MP3 player to trigger saxophone-choir samples that is a hallmark of the duo’s recorded work. Unfortunately, each such moment brought the energy level of the music down considerably. Still, it was as-ever wonderful to hear these two deep thinker/feelers dig into long, jagged, superbly rhythmic streams of music for good chunks of their generally excellent set.

Critical Limits

For a few reasons, it’s a challenge to write about this weekend’s events at ST which, in quite different ways, expose my limitations as a critic. The first was Saturday’s series of solos and a duet by dancer Aimée Dawn Robinson and drummer Nick Fraser. No doubt, I lack the critical vocabulary to describe Aimée’s hugely compelling performance. This has to do with more than my cursory immersion in the world of contemporary dance. For one, I think Aimée’s command of space and form has little to do with (and could well be an active rejection of) the mastery of impressive techniques (which are super fodder for critical laundry lists). Instead, there was an intangibly complete and focused sense of time that she breathed into the room. Little, seemingly uncomplicated movements – a turn, a swung arm, a straightened neck – were markers of an ongoing time-feel – oblique but undeniable – that carried me confidently through occasional moments of confusion and non-understanding.

Nick – to state the obvious to those who have heard him – also played a bit with our experience of time. Both his solo and his duet with Aimée had him parsing his vocabulary on the drumkit (specifically the deep, fat sound of ST’s house drumkit, “Big Red”) down to discrete elements, then combining and contrasting them with near-clinical precision. Taking advantage of the optimal acoustics and attentive audience, Nick kept the dynamic level very low, and that allowed him to uncover blends of texture and timbre (particularly with mallets during his solo) that multiplied his ostensibly small music exponentially.

Though there was an overt austerity to the show, it certainly wasn’t without its playful moments. I may be grasping at straws here but, during their duet, Aimée alighted on a hunched-back, swung-arm motif that looked uncannily like a child’s pantomime of an elephant. Both her movements and the evocation pointed to the wonderfully lumpen swing that Nick had on offer. It soon gave way, however, to a more straightforward groove (to which he had been alluding all along, I think). Aimée, kneeling directly before him by then, maintained a push-pull tension with the groove with a series of tiny, tangentially related movements that alternatively questioned and responded to it – never obvious, and more fun for it.

On Sunday, I welcomed the revival of the NOW Series, which has beenon hiatus since its was shut down this summer by the fickle management at the NOW Lounge. Paul Newman curated the evening and played an impromptu trio with bass guitarist Michael Morse and his drummer-son Timothy prior to the Remnants Trio of Joe Sorbara, Ken Aldcroft, and Evan Shaw. Unfortunately, Tim laboured with some wrist pain, which kept him at a bit of a distance from the core of the music-making, while Paul and Michael followed each other’s primarily intervallic offerings through a set of rather discursive improvisations. It’s doubtless that both are deeply thoughtful players, but the uniform dynamics throughout the set had me increasingly craving a more energetic outpouring.

Not surprisingly, some energy was on tap when Remnants took their turn. This is the group that it’s most challenging to write about, given my deep familiarity with all three players with whom I have played for years with Ken Aldcroft’s Convergence Ensemble. Apart from a brief, rather unprepossessing sketch by Sorbara, this set was all improvised, and it afforded me yet another opportunity to hear the gradual evolution (or consolidation) of each player’s approach to improvisation.

John Oswald once described how Dutch virtuoso cellist Ernst Reijseger would prepare solo concerts of ‘improvisation.’ Reijseger, having identified the 117 (to pick a number) ‘things’ that he could do with a cello (isolated techniques and sound activities in nameable categories), would simply string a series of these things into a more-or-less composed roadmap for performance. Whether this is how he actually works (worked) or not, I hear in this description an analogy to how Joe Sorbara was playing Big Red on Sunday.

Though I’m sure that Joe doesn’t map out what he will play and relies, instead, on intuition to decide how he’ll approach any particular situation (as would Reijseger, I’m sure, in group performance), there was a clear, composerly ‘thingness’ to his improvisation on Sunday. I was tracking transitions between discreet (and occasionally overlapping) segments where a certain technique was a relatively static focal point for the moment. This sense is amplified by Joe’s huge toolkit through which he extends the kit’s timbral possibilities, and a particular material item (a bow, a mallet, a silly-sounding toy, a school bell) will frame his music’s possibilities until another transition takes place.

By contrast, guitarist Ken Aldcroft moves headlong through a more gradual, evolving exploration of material that, on Sunday, revolved around the distended and personalized vocabulary that Ken has derived primarily from jazz harmony. The word ‘revolved’ is appropriate, since his largely middle-register chording brought to mind Mark Miller’s comment about the “circular logic” of Ken’s playing. Though maybe more movement to the extremes of register might leaven his playing a bit, there was an impressively focused internal consistency throughout.

Alto saxophonist Evan Shaw, to my ears the most mobile improviser of the three, played rather parsimoniously, deferring for lengthy stretches to the others. However, the highlights of the night, without question, took place when Evan stepped out front and momentarily took over the music. At points, he played things I’d never heard from him before – for example, a tremendous volley of vocally overblown alto reminiscent the aforementioned Mr. Oswald. Just as exciting, though, was the seamless, deft switch back to Dolphy-ish intervalism that resides at the core of Evan’s aesthetic, a transition that was exemplary of what a supple, inventive player he is.