Recording: Roscoe Mitchell and the Montreal-Toronto Art Orchestra

Artist: Roscoe Mitchell and the Montreal-Toronto Art Orchestra

Songs: They Rode For Them + Nonaah + [piece for solo sopranino saxophone]

Recorded at The Music Gallery (X Avant XI – Night 4), October 15, 2016.

Roscoe Mitchell and the Montreal-Toronto Art Orchestra - They Rode For Them

Roscoe Mitchell and the Montreal-Toronto Art Orchestra - Nonaah

Roscoe Mitchell - [solo sopranino saxophone]

The X Avant Festival concluded with this extra-special event, bringing the legendary Roscoe Mitchell to town at the head of a nineteen-piece orchestra made up of top names from the Montréal and Toronto scenes.¹ The pieces that they played were derived from Mitchell's improvisations, primarily from his Conversations I + Conversations II albums — boiling down dense and compact abstractions to their essence and then blowing them up to widescreen size for the large ensemble. After a while, getting attuned to the method you could sometimes "hear" the original gestures behind the sweeping orchestrations. This was complex stuff that pushed the musicians, but it was quite often rather beautiful as well. There were a few places that lead into full-on big band free-honking, but just as striking were the moments that pulled back, including a quartet arrangement of "Nonaah" (performed by Nicolas Caloia, Yves Charuest, Lori Freedman, and Craig Pedersen) as well as a solo segment from Mitchell that opened the second set — an intense piece that spiralled outward from a drone into pure exploration that put a full lifetime's experience and technique on display. After presenting this music live in Montréal and Toronto, the ensemble also headed into the studio on the day after this show, so we can expect some formal documentation of this grand sommet to emerge in time.

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¹ For the record, the members of the orchestra were:

• Roscoe Mitchell – woodwinds, composition, direction
• Marilyn Lerner – piano
• Lori Freedman, Yves Charuest, Kyle Brenders, Jean Derome, Peter Lutek, Jason Sharp – woodwinds
• Nicole Rampersaud, Craig Pedersen – trumpets
• Tom Richards, Scott Thomson – trombones
• Julie Houle – tuba
• Jean René, James Annett – violas
• Rob Clutton, Nicolas Caloia – double-basses
• Isaiah Ceccarelli, Nick Fraser – drums
• Michael Davidson – vibraphone
• Greg Oh - conducting

Recording: Castor & Compagnie

Artist: Castor & Compagnie

Songs: Ah! Les Beaux Jours + Beauté

Recorded at Array Space (Somewhere There presents), June 19, 2016.

Castor & Compagnie - Ah! Les Beaux Jours

Castor & Compagnie - Beauté [part 1]

Castor & Compagnie - Beauté [part 2]

If you are a believer in the "twenty-year" theory that after a couple decades nostalgia is transformed into influence, then Montréal's Castor et Compagnie may be in their perfect moment. Arising from Québec's fertile musique actualle scene, this project saw Joane Hétu bring together several key performers to set lyrics and poems to song-like structures. Given musique actualle's penchant for "rock déstructuré, jazz fragmenté, chansons éclatées, folklore réinventé, ambiances bruitistes, improvisations, nouvelles musiques d’ensemble, métissages des lutheries acoustiques et électroacoustiques", that saw the songs fragmented into all sorts of shapes, and what might start, for example, like a folk song with a refrain passed around from member to member could veer into static-burst stasis and/or a noise freakout.

That made the sonic bricolage sound entirely current, while Hétu's feminist poetics, ranging from the familiarity of a lover's particular odours to an appreciation of beauty as an accretion of imperfections, also remained both au courant yet radical. You could trace some lines and retrospectively see this as a hidden point of departure for a lot of sonic explorers, from groups using improvisation as a tool to deconstruct song-forms to experimental lyricists layering cabaret-style intimacies within noise-bursts. (In terms of the latter, locals Jooj sounded precisely like a lineal decendant of this band's work, to pick out just one example.) Inactive for quite some time since their mid-90's heyday, my understanding is that it was Cem Zafir who got the ball rolling on this mini-tour, imploring the group to head out to Hamilton for his Something Else! festival. It was an honour to get this spin-off show in T.O., but this music resonates deeply beyond just "creative music" circles. Hopefully this will reach out past our musical and cultural solitudes to be seen as a vital and living branch of our musical tree.

Recording: Castor & Compagnie et amis

Artist: Phill Albert + Heather Saumer + Diane Labrosse / Joane Hétu + Pierre Tanguay + Paul Newman + Matt Miller / Pierre-Yves Martel + Jean Derome + Noah Sherman

Songs: [excerpts from group improvisations]

Recorded at Array Space (Somewhere There presents), June 19, 2016.

Phill Albert/Heather Saumer/Diane Labrosse - [excerpt]

Joane Hétu/Pierre Tanguay/Paul Newman/Matt Miller - [excerpt]

Pierre-Yves Martel/Jean Derome/Noah Sherman - [edited excerpt]

To start off this evening of musique actuelle with the reactivated Castor & Co., the group's members were first split up and recombined with some local players for some off-the-cuff improvisations. That lead to some interesting sonic nudges and musical conversations: Diane Labrosse conducting static-bursts with a wave of her hand in the first set to guide the drift of the acoustic elements; Matt Miller returning the electroacoustic favour in the second as Joane Hétu and Paul Newman's gliding saxophones merged in space; and Pierre-Yves Martel's bass-synth rumbulations building a floor for a free-jazz excursion.