Somewhere There March 2009 Newsletter

February was simply the busiest and best month Somewhere There has seen. Odradek completed their two-month residency with tremendously creative programming that culminated with their live soundtrack to the extraordinary 1920s animated classic, The Adventures of Prince Achmed. The Element Choir also completed its residency with massive turnouts and tremendous collective music-making, with momentum and spirit generated through their Barnyard Records recording project, mid-month – we look forward to the record (and to the record release party!) A related project heard a vocal ensemble comprised primarily of choir members working with visiting composer and conductor, Sarah Weaver. And, last but not least, the Evan Parker Interface Series, February 13-15, was a wonderful musical and social exchange, by all accounts. Rumour has it that an extensive review is in the works for Signal to Noise, so keep eyes open for that. Thanks to the AIMToronto Board of Directors for running to joint so smoothly during the Interface weekend.

This month’s residencies have more to do with jazz music in general than they have pretty much at any point in Somewhere There’s history. Thursdays in March will continue to feature Drumheller drawing on the wonderful material from their expansive book of tunes by all five members. Wednesdays host a new residency by Drumhellerite, Rob Clutton, primarily with his newish band, The Cluttertones (with Lina Allemano, Tim Posgate, Anthony Michelli, Brodie West, and Ryan Driver), though other weeks will feature guests like Marilyn Lerner and Paul Cram in small groups featuring Rob. The Sunday 6pm slot has been taken on by Jeremy Strachan, and features similarly newish bands, Canaille (with Mike Smith, Nick Buligan, and Colin Fisher, and Dan Gaucher) and a duet with Mike Smith on guitars and banjos. With a record twenty-nine shows booked in March, there’s still certainly no shortage of live music at Somewhere There. We hope to see you around!

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.

January 2009 Newsletter

Somewhere There wishes you a happy new year, one filled with optimism and excellent music. We closed out the first full calendar year with a relatively light program – I took essentially two weeks off during the holidays – but still managed to squeeze in 22 shows last month. Highlights include the arrival of the Leftover Daylight Series (Fridays), bumping up activity to six nights a week; the excellent (if lightly attended) Interface Series with fabulous Montréal turntablist, Martin Tétreault; and a successful Christmas Fundraiser, with edible and monetary proceeds going to the food bank. It was also terrific to host the CCMC reunion residency, and to get to know some of the long-ago membership with whom I wasn’t acquainted like John Kamevaar, Jack Vorvis, and Al Mattes. Somewhere There wishes Al a speedy recovery from long-awaited hip surgery that kept him from the last Sunday in the residency series, and a quick return to music-making.

Looking forward to January happenings, two exciting new residencies are afoot: Odradek (Wednesdays) and the return of Christine Duncan’s Element Choir (Sundays 6pm). Odradek is typically a trio of Michelangelo Iaffaldano, Andy Yue, and Jim Bailey but, for the residency, they’ve augmented the band in some cases with special guests and some delightful and delightfully oddball concepts – see below for details. The Element Choir held one of the very first residencies at Somewhere There and, week by week, filled the place with inclusive and glad-hearted music-making by a variable cast who may not have otherwise been drawn to the studio. I am keen to have them back, to hear how they have changed musically during the last year, and to watch them gear up for new performing and recording projects that may be in the works. Pianist and guitarist Simeon Abbott continues his Thursday-night residency with (at the time of writing) mystery programming. The guest curator for the Leftover Daylight Series (booking one set every Friday) is the rangy and affable guitarist and composer, Holger Schoorl, hot on the heels of his Wednesday-night residency in November and December.

Also, please note that I’m forced to raise the base entry cost to $8 in a hell-bent effort to actually cover my rent. It’s unfortunate that I have to do so, but rest assured that nobody at Somewhere There has ever or ever will turn away listeners who cannot afford the cover. You are welcome!

Click here to see the full calendar.

Hardscrabble Songs – Part One

AIMToronto’s Interface with Montreal violinist Malcolm Goldstein this past weekend was significantly different than any of the previous Interfaces. For one, every note was played at Somewhere There, and it’s increasingly gratifying to be moving away from the odd acoustics and questionable comforts of the Arraymusic Studio, and to invite (force?) audience members to get closer to the action as they do at ST. For Malcolm’s music, in which the lightest bow-brush can carry utmost resonance, such dynamics here are absolutely ideal, as I hear them. An even bigger difference for the event, however, is the way Malcolm’s compositions took centre stage, with four of the six sets of music throughout the weekend featuring his composed works. Ad hoc collective playing, which usually represents the brunt of Interface activities, is not very interesting to Malcolm under such circumstances, though he genially took up the challenge twice during the weekend. Instead, the event was dominated by his very particular composerly aesthetic, one in which subtle, surprising sounds live as good and long a life as they possibly can, and in which instrumental technique and chops are reconsidered, reformatted, and redirected toward collective and, ideally, egoless ends.

Three Toronto ensembles took up the challenge of his conceptual/graphic/directed improvisation pieces, which take bows in the direction of his New York School forbears (Christian Wolff and Earl Brown in particular, at a guess). Each ensemble spent a three-hour rehearsal working with Malcolm in advance of the evening shows, and the task was clearly to find out the aesthetic and philosophical closures on which he’d quietly insist amid all of the objective openness furnished by the scores. Intriguingly, it was the eight-piece band-for-a-day, Ensemble for Now, assembled by Joe Sorbara, that had the clearest view on Saturday night. “Yosha’s Morning Song” was an ostensible feature for Susanna Hood, whose vocal part Malcolm cribbed from his boy’s babysong, and who cooed and whinnied brilliantly and with stunning concentration amid the tiny events and interjections from the rest of the group, which surrounded the audience from the circumference of the room. Language was the theme for the program, as it moved from its evolution to its devolution in the second piece, “Regarding the Tower of Babel,” as close as the music ever got to theatre all weekend. Here, ensemble members unraveled the meaning of a Babel parable by Kafka with the recitation of dictionary definitions that swirled and doubled back on each other, echoed by the lumpen pulses and parlando effects on the players’ instruments, until the piece left a still confusion – perfectly eerie on so stormy and foreboding a night – as its only residue.

Confusion was also on order to an extent on Friday night, when the found-sound improvisation trio Odradek (Michelangelo Iaffaldano, Andy Yue, Jim Bailey) interpreted two of Malcolm’s pieces: “The Seasons: Vermont (Summer)” and “Frog Pond at Dusk.” The former features a recording of sounds from around Malcolm’s farm in Vermont that merge with the operations by the ensemble. Michelangelo, as always, was right in the middle of the music-making, and the sound he extracted from his miscellany maintained a productive tension between synthesis and contrast with both the recorded sounds and those of his partners (including Malcolm, who sat in on the piece). Jim, on the other hand, seemed at a bit of a loss at times and, when he defaulted a few times to fairly bland mimesis, much of that tension was unfortunately lost. “Frog Pond” was particularly striking due to the way the score seemed to bewilder the group. These pieces are so open that it’s difficult to discern successful from unsuccessful interpretation, but there was an undeniable (if intangible) switch that took place – beautiful if disconcerting – as a clear view of the piece’s roadmap was replaced by anxious, furtive glances, tentative sounds, and general uncertainty. I loved it! Jim, Miche, and Andy, while committed music-makers, never seem to take anything overly seriously, and I thought I distinctly perceived a revelry in their own discomfort that is all too rare in this insecure world – musical or otherwise.

Expect a follow-up on the other sets, including Malcolm’s improvisations with Nilan Perera on Friday, and with Rob Piilonen and Chris Willes on Saturday, as well as his solo violin set and the AIMToronto Orchestra set on Sunday, in the next few days.