Recording: Ways

Artist: Ways

Song: [excerpt]

Recorded at June 21, 2023 at The Tranzac's Main Hall (TONE Festival).

Ways - [excerpt]

Although on paper Brodie West and Evan Cartwright's duo for sax and percussion was cut from the same cloth as the evening's headliners, they were also the inversion of the headliners as well — for while Zoh Amba and Chris Corsano would start with an explosion of sound and pull back into quiet moments, Ways' ways are to start with the smallest, most fragile of gestures and build up from there.

Recording: Ways

Artist: Ways

Song: [excerpt]

Recorded at the Canadian Music Centre (CMC/Riparian Acoustics presents), January 23, 2020.

Ways - [excerpt]

This pairing of Brodie West and Evan Cartwright was frequently spotted around town a few years back, but had gone to ground for a spell. With an album due in a couple months, the next phase is now opening up as the pair are putting themselves back in the mix. The time away has definitely lead to some refinements in the pair's sound, which on this showing was presented with a renewed sense of elegant restraint. Evan Cartwright's percussion was not so much propelling things along as keeping them aloft, while West's saxophone was more suggestive of a sphere expanding than a path taken.

[Ways will be back in action on Thursday, March 5th at the launch party for A Pigsty in a Single Grain of Rice, recent collages by Andrew Zukerman at Likely General, where they will be interpreting a graphic score by Zukerman. West and Cartwright will also be performing as members of Eucalyptus at the band's annual residency at Hirut restaurant, every Sunday in March (except the first Sunday). This season of CMC Presents concerts will be concluding at the Burdock on Thursday, March 5th with a special co-presentation with the Women From Space Festival featuring Elisa Thorn, Claire Yunjin Lee, Amy Brandon, and Susan Alcorn.]

Recording: Ways+

Artist: Ways+

Song: Jammers

Recorded at Dundas Video (Track Could Bend #12), March 1, 2016.

Ways+ - Jammers

Just a few days after seeing Evan Cartwright and Brodie West paring things down as a duo, it was quite fascinating to see West's compositions pushed in the opposite direction in this big-band version of the group. With Nick Fraser as a second percussionist, there lots of space to explore a series of quietly off-kilter rhythms (such as "Scraping, Boiling", which opened with a lengthy, slightly-hesitant drum-groove) and a boosted front line with West's sax joined by David French's bass clarinet and Ryan Driver's flute. And as always the case, Alex Lukashevsky's sly guitar work found its own spaces in between everything else.

[Track Could Bend returns to Dundas Video on Tuesday, April 5th for its First Anniversary Spectacular, which will feature an all-star assortment of players from the series' first year both in some new recombinations as well in instant "bands-from-a-hat" improvised sets.]

Recording: Ways

Artist: Ways

Songs: [two excerpts]

Recorded at The Tranzac's Main Hall (Somewhere There Creative Music Festival – Show 4), February 28, 2016.

Ways - [bowls + sax]

Ways - [excerpt]

Apparantly since I last saw Brodie West and Evan Cartwright performing as Ways, they'd been working on finding more restrained modes of expression. The fact that they'd stripped things back so far that Cartwright was at one point playing percussion with the tiniest taps of a pair of butter knives (!) helped make sense of their opening, where the pair played a percussion duet with mallets on glass kitchen bowls, sharing gently-ringing chimes back-and-forth before West started to add his saxophone.

Recording: Ways

Artist: Ways

Song: [excerpt]^*

Recorded at Ratio, August 6, 2015.

Ways - [excerpt]

This new duo project from Brodie West (sax) and Evan Cartwright (percussion) has been playing a few gigs, but this was their first in Toronto. After a spell where West had been spotted in either solo sets or the larger-format Eucalyptus, he seems to have found a midpoint in recent duos like this and his work with Fleshtone Aura. Cartwright's percussion gave a framework for West to play over — often a sort of broken-step marching band clatter. In this extract, Cartwright keeps up a steady tattoo to provide West with some companionship of a somewhat-melancholy stroll.

^* I spotted West and Cartwright going over arrangements from lead sheets before they played, so I'm assuming at least some parts are titled compositions. Please leave a comment if you know the title to this one!