Gig: The Rent

The Rent

The Tranzac Club (Southern Cross Lounge). Tuesday, May 25, 2010.

With some time to kill before the gig I was going to, I was flipping through the listings and considering my options when The Rent at The Tranzac caught my eye. Poked around a enough to dig up who was involved in this project¹ — one of those purpose-built bands composed of musicians who are all busy in many other tendrils of Toronto's sprawling improvised music scene. This particular unit arose as a way for Scott Thomson to get under the hood of the compositions of Steve Lacy, which they've been doing for the past couple years, culminating in the recent release of their album Musique de Steve Lacy. Although I'm a casual sort of jazz enthusiast, I'd never really investigated Lacy, so I figured this would serve as a good introduction.

As I walked up to The Tranzac, I could hear a choral version of Queen's "Fat Bottomed Girls" wafting down from upstairs and a group of people were practising dance steps in the Tiki Room — a typical sort of night, I'm sure, at the beloved/dilapidated cultural hub on Brunswick Avenue. I felt mildly awkward when I stepped into the Southern Cross Lounge, being the first audience member on hand. Fortunately, another guy — who'd be greeted by name by the band — showed up a few minutes later, and we were the crowd at the set's beginning. After some intra-band discussion over the charts, things got going.

To my unsophisticated ear, the style suggested a bit of a collision, with tightly-structured compositions of the Ellington/Mingus lineage filtered through a more economical, freer approach. Though there was a rigour to the songs' construction², they still swung, such as an arrangement of "The Gleam" complete with a "cha cha cha" intro. "The Mad Yak"³, with Thomson's talk-y muted playing, was immediately appealing, and dispelled any notion that the composer or the players were going to sacrifice a good time for fusty academicism. Overall, the playfulness of the trombone offset the shriller soprano sax, finding a nice middle ground. And while the musicians were working from charts, there was still plenty of room to try things out, such as a mildly over-enthusiastic approach by Fraser at the end of "Prospectus". On the whole, though, the musicians were sympatico with each other as well as the material.

As the set progressed, a few more patrons dropped in. There were about a half-dozen by set's end — enough to outnumber the band. Occasionally, people using other parts of the facility would pop in to grab a drink from the bar, contributing to the casual air to the proceedings. But the community centre vibe shouldn't make one think this was some sort of amateur hour — it's mildly astonishing to me that you could drop in on most any given night at the Tranzac and hear such top-notch music. We take it for granted that there's so much talent close at hand.

So, indeed a most productive bit of time killing, and in between sets I cut out and headed off to the next gig. And remembered to put some Steve Lacy on hold at the library the next day.

Listen to a track from this set here.

---

¹ The members are:

Kyle Brenders, saxophone

Wes Neal, bass

Scott Thomson, trombone

Nick Fraser, drum set

The band also plays with Susanna Hood, who provides vocals, but on this night it was just the instrumental foursome.

² That construction sometimes seemed to take the form of a structural roadmap (section A, then section B, etc.) at least as much as a staightforward tuneful determinism.

³ Like many of Lacy's compositions, this one was inspired by a poem — one by Gregory Corso in this case.