Recording: CCMC

Artist: CCMC / CCMC with Charity Chan

Songs: [two improvisations]

Recorded at Array Space, October 20, 2018.

CCMC - [set 1, 2nd piece]

CCMC with Charity Chan - [set 2, 1st piece excerpt]

Launching a new, ongoing residency at Array Space, CCMC was playing sans pianist Michael Snow. That meant the first set was as a trio of John Kamevaar, Paul Dutton and John Oswald, and for the second set the piano was ably manipulated by special guest Charity Chan, taping, plucking and ebowing the strings. As usual, the banter game was on point and there was some ambiguity about who had actually stopped or started — and in-between those endpoints that particular flavour of CCMC free improvisation.

[CCMC's residency continues at Arrayspace on Friday, December 21st.]

Recording: CCMC

Artist: CCMC

Song: [excerpt from first piece]

Recorded at Ratio (Burn Down The Capital Presents), June 13, 2016.

CCMC - [excerpt from first piece]

The CCMC crew lead off this evening of freewheeling improvisation fresh off a retrospective night mixing together members of the group's various eras. Back in the more familiar form of the current quartet, the group offered joshing banter and bouts of mutual musical destabilization. John Kamevaar was in fine form here, adding momentum with skittering beats and static-y whirrings underneath John Oswald's sax and Michael Snow's piano. Paul Dutton, with just one microphone in Ratio's smaller space, commented on the walls and ceiling drawing in while tossing in a few literary one-liners.

Recording: CCMC

Artist: CCMC

Song: [excerpt]

Recorded at The Music Gallery ("X Avant X"), October 15, 2015.

CCMC - [excerpt]

This year's X Avant not only celebrated the festival's tenth anniversary, but also the Music Gallery's 40th season. No surprise, then, that the festival incorporated various methods to look back at the MG's legacy. After a duet with Casey Sokol, Michael Snow was joined by John Oswald, Paul Dutton, and John Kamevaar — the current incarnation of CCMC, the improvising collective that founded the Music Gallery forty years ago. Filled with energy, the group brought a bit more "noise" to the table than the last couple times I saw 'em, with Dutton in fine sound-shoutin' form and the others following suit. Accompanied by improvised visuals by John Creson and Adam Rosen, the set ended with a visual cue, the lights slowly fading until they were fully off — "I guess that means it's over," Oswald could be heard to mutter in the dark room.

Recording: CCMC

Artist: CCMC

Song: [second piece]

Recorded at Array Space ("Audiopollination #29​.​3"), April 19, 2015.

CCMC - [second piece]

Although there have been some trios and other fragmentations, this was the first four-piece CCMC gig for nearly a year, though these longstanding collaborators fell right into their particularly unique shared space as if no time had passed. Snow had a chance here to play on Audiopollination's grand piano, while in this bit, you can hear Dutton working through various sound-squawks and mutters to arrive at a final statement that might serve as the group's statement of purpose: "Just keep going until you run out of steam."

[As always, you can listen a recording of this whole show over at the Audiopollination bandcamp. The next Audiopollination is Tuesday, May 12th at Array and features KGB (Karen Ng, Germaine Liu and Bea Labikova) together and in various recombinations.]

Recording: Oswald/Kamevaar/Liu

Artist: John Oswald/John Kamevaar/Germaine Liu

Song: [first piece]

Recorded at Array Space ("Audiopollination #29​.​3"), April 19, 2015.

John Oswald/John Kamevaar/Germaine Liu - [first piece]

This night at Audiopollination saw the first full-on CCMC gig in nearly a year came after the band was first split in half to play with some guests. This opening set saw John Oswald (sax) and John Kamevaar (syn-drums + laptop) playing alongside percussionist Germaine Liu, standing behind a kit that looked like an assortment of randomly-selected drums collected into the same spot on the floor, working out some complementary clatterings.

[As always, you can listen a recording of this whole show over at the Audiopollination bandcamp. The next Audiopollination is Tuesday, May 12th at Array and features KGB (Karen Ng, Germaine Liu and Bea Labikova) together and in various recombinations.]

Recording: CCMC Trio

Artist: CCMC Trio

Song: [excerpt from an improvisation]

Recorded at The Music Gallery, November 7, 2014.

CCMC Trio - [excerpt]

With Michael Snow out of the country, John Oswald (sax), Paul Dutton (human voice) and John Kamevaar (electro-acoustic noise/percussion) returned to the Music Gallery in a trio format to lead off the night devoted to Glen Hall's William Burroughs-celebrating "Rub Out The Word" project (and the launch of the 416 Toronto Creative Improvisers Festival). With just the three on stage, there was a little more room for each to explore and stretch out into their untethered soundworld.

Recording: CCMC

Artist: CCMC

Song: [second improvisation]

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

CCMC - [second improvisation]

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.

The night ended with Dutton taking the stage as a member of his long-running improvising group CCMC. A brief set, but a fitting end to the night, capping off the tribute and the revisitations of the past with something brand new + invented in the moment. The celebration (and the creativity) of Paul Dutton don't end here.