Recording: Barwin-Betts-Lee

Artist: Gary Barwin / Gregory Betts / David Lee

Song: Kit Talk [composer: Paul Dutton]

Recorded at Supermarket ("Celebrate Paul Dutton at 70"), March 4, 2014.

Barwin-Betts-Lee - Kit Talk

Full review to follow. More than just a birthday party, this event was planned as a tribute to Paul Dutton's "four decades of challenging the borders of literature and music". I mostly know him from his excursions in the latter realm, so it was interesting to hear the musical stuff freely mixed in among readings and reinterpretations from his poems and prose. (I did not know that Dutton had written a novel, but I left with a copy of Several Women Dancing.) Not that there's a hard boundary between those two fields, given that they're both based around the free expressiveness and infinite variability of the human voice.

David Lee brought along his cello to support the stereophonic speech-sputtering. Never in my life have I seen so many people staring intently at sheets of paper in order to read things like "p-p-pa-pa-p-p-pa-po".

Recording: Broomer-Bull-Vespaziani-Lee-Stach

Artist: Stuart Broomer/Arthur Bull/Bob Vespaziani/David Lee/Eric Stach

Song: [excerpt from an improvization]

Recorded at The Tranzac - Main Hall (The Second Annual Somewhere There Creative Music Festival – Show 1), February 21, 2014.

Stuart Broomer/Arthur Bull/Bob Vespaziani/David Lee/Eric Stach - [excerpt from an improvization]

Full review to follow. Although I had some things to say about the Somewhere There Music Festival, there were several strands I left out for brevity's sake. One thing I held back that was on my mind was the notion that when you're making resolutely uncommercial music you're probably not too worried about "making it", and instead of a chase for the golden ring, a career is more of a lifetime pursuit.

It worked out nicely, then, that one of the festival's threads was an attendance to the historical context of improvised music in Toronto. David Lee gave a spirited discussion on the roots of the scene, reaching back to the 60's to talk about the links between the visual arts and experimental music. And after that, he brought together a group of musicians that he has played with over the years, including Stuart Broomer (who as a youth played in the Artists' Jazz Band, the first-ever free improv unit in T.O.) and Eric Stach (who has been central to London, Ontario's creative music scene for several decades). This starts with some nifty guitar interplay between Broomer and Arthur Bull before the whole band joins in. There's a lot of decades of experience in this group, and a lot of now.

Recording: Roblin/Bull/Lee

Artist: Diane Roblin/Arthur Bull/David Lee

Song: [excerpt from an improvisation]

Recorded at Array Space ("Somewhere There"), December 29, 2013.

Roblin/Bull/Lee - [excerpt from an improvisation]

Full review to follow. I'd recently noted Diane Roblin's name popping up a lot in show announcements at The Tranzac or elsewhere, but I had no context for her work. Returning to active duty after some time away from the local improvised music scene, she's recently convened a couple different units (the fusion-y Reconnect as well as the free-improv Happening) and, as this gig attests, is out looking to experiment with new sounds. Her work on the piano here was supplemented by a mini-keyboard iPad app, and she was joined by guitarist Arthur Bull (who I'd first encountered just a couple days previously) and double bassist David Lee. Keep an eye out here for a chance to hear Roblin in all of her guises.