Recording: Somewhere There Festival Trombone Quartet

Artist: Somewhere There Festival Trombone Quartet

Songs: Mobile [composer: Susanna Hood] + Fork [edit] [composer: Logan Mills] + 4 for 8 [version 2] [composer: Scott Thomson] + Untitled [composer: Doug Tielli]

Recorded at The Tranzac's Main Hall (Somewhere There Creative Music Festival – Show 4), February 25, 2018.

Somewhere There Festival Trombone Quartet - Mobile

Somewhere There Festival Trombone Quartet - Fork [edit]

Somewhere There Festival Trombone Quartet - 4 for 8 [version 2]

Somewhere There Festival Trombone Quartet - Untitled

Building on the tradition established with last year's saxophone quartet, the Somewhere There Festival once more showed its commitment to new music with a call for compositions — this time for trombone quartet. And once more the ensemble — consisting of Tom Richards, Heather Saumer, Doug Tielli and Nebyu Yohannes — preceded a concert of the commissioned works with an open rehearsal, giving non-players a window into the process of how a group and composer navigate the mutual discovery of how a new piece "works".

Of the three pieces chosen, Logan Mills' "Fork" was the most conventionally scored, although there was a lot of mathematically-intricate trickiness in a piece based on harmonic interrelationships he had been musing upon while working as a piano tuner. Susanna Hood's "Mobile", on the other hand, offered a procedurally-intricate text-based score that had the players spacialized (and spinning around) like the parts of a wind-tossed mobile. Scott Thomson's "4 for 8" was even more open ended with two sets of variables on a numbered line leading to a "rehearsal" that was as more of a negotiation over how to interpret the piece than a musical struggle. (Thomson, who was present, saw no need to impose any authorial wisdom on the players, who ultimately decided to play the piece following two separate rule-sets, leading to two rather different results.) The concert was closed out by this untitled miniature from Doug Tielli, which sounded not unlike street-corner Salavation Army band lullaby.

Recording: Temporary Ensembles

Artist: Temporary Ensembles, composed of Chris Adriaanse, Rob Diack, Cory Latkovich, Jonathan Luke, Paul Newman, Daniel Pencer, Joe Sorbara, Laura Swankey, and Logan Mills.

Songs: [excerpts form various improvisations]

Recorded at Array Space (Somewhere There presents), March 13, 2016.

Jonathan Luke + Laura Swankey - [temporary ensemble #1]

Rob Diack + Paul Newman - [temporary ensemble #2]

Daniel Pencer + Chris Adriaanse - [temporary ensemble #4]

Logan Mills + Daniel Pencer + Chris Adriaanse + Joe Sorbara - [temporary ensemble #5]

Logan Mills + Jonathan Luke + Joe Sorbara - [temporary ensemble #8] [excerpt]

Laura Swankey + Chris Adriaanse + Rob Diack + Daniel Pencer - [temporary ensemble #9]

Cory Latkovich + Paul Newman - [temporary ensemble #10]

"Temporary Ensembles are born, live short and potentially magical musical lives, and then sublimate into thin air." As a prelude to a session learning the signals and cues for John Zorn's "game piece" Cobra, this night began with an exercise in pure improvisation with the assembled musicians literally throwing their hats in the ring for audience members to randomly select playing combos while convener Joe Sorbara rolled dice to see how many people would play together at a time. Extremely informal, the night felt more like a workshop than a gig, but those who wanted to just listen were welcome along for the ride.

Recording: BOBAN GrieviNg

Artist: BOBAN GrieviNg + the BOBAN GrieviNg Supergroup

Songs: [excerpt from first piece] + Boban is Just a Word

Recorded at The Tranzac (Southern Cross Lounge), January 27, 2016.

BOBAN GrieviNg - [excerpt from first piece]

BOBAN GrieviNg Supergroup - Boban is Just a Word

Some things look quite straightforward on paper. This Wednesday evening show from Somewhere There was billed as a night with two duos — Logan Mills (piano) with Montréal's Raphael Foisy-Couture (bass) as BOBAN and Karen Ng (sax) with Robert Grieve (guitar) as GrieviNg — but things ended up being much less straightforward. Indeed, the night began with all four playing together in a sort of scuffling/banging skritchscratch clangcrunch before adding Paige Stewart for some recited wordtextures.

But then, after a break, all hell broke loose. Mills' skill-set includes an ability to draft collaborators as conspirators in anarchic free-form play and that might explain how suddenly there were nine performers on stage, including Laura Swankey (vox) and Emily Denison (trumpet) plus duelling percussionists Robert Diack and Andrew Miller facing off against each other. In the end a t-shirt was destroyed, dice were rolled, hats were exchanged, and an impromptu fire drill was narrowly avoided as a gleeful frenzy erupted — all while various members of the ensemble shouted inquiries about the true nature of Boban.