Recording: NO HAY BANDA

Artist: NO HAY BANDA

Song: Three Unisons for Four Voices [excerpt] [composer: Sarah Davachi]

Recorded at The Music Gallery, June 5, 2025.

NO HAY BANDA - Three Unisons for Four Voices [excerpt]

On a day with a smoke cloud settling over the city, menacing campfire smell in the air, the Music Gallery closed out their season with a couple groups bringing some amorphous and wafting sonic plumes. This Montréal chamber ensemble brought along Sarah Davachi's "canon of variable durations", presenting a constrained set of relatively simple material, stretched out and shared between shifting subsets of the larger group (violin and cello for strings, bass clarinet and trombone for winds, percussion and a rare ondes martenot sighting), slowly accreting into a fairly monumental swell. The piece's most daring formal element was then to climb back down from the peak with as much patience as it deployed in the buildup — elegant if slightly anticlimactic, but at its best this was an exercise in durational listening where the audience could really settle into and zone out.

Recording: Queen Mab

Artist: Queen Mab

Song: [1st set, 1st piece, excerpt]

Recorded at The Tranzac' Southern Cross Lounge (Marilyn Lerner Special Appearances Residency), December 19, 2023.

Queen Mab - [1st set, 1st piece, excerpt]

What is the sound of a quarter-century of collaboration? What is the sound of a quarter-century of friendship? Closing out her "special appearances" residency series, Marilyn Lerner, alongside longtime collaborator (and friend) Lori Freedman, investigated these queries. Attuned to each's other's pulses from the get-go, the pair offered two sets of deep interactions and lively conversations — eyes sparkling, as if to say, O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.

This was a too-rare appearance from this duo, so for posterity's sake, the whole evening's music is over on youtube:

Recording: Stadhouders/Freedman/Cameron

Artist: Jasper Stadhouders/Lori Freedman/Allison Cameron

Songs: [1st piece, two excerpts]

Recorded at Wenona Lodge (Track Could Bend #77), March 7, 2023.

Jasper Stadhouders/Lori Freedman/Allison Cameron - [1st piece, excerpt 1]

Jasper Stadhouders/Lori Freedman/Allison Cameron - [1st piece, excerpt 2]

With Jasper Stadhouders in town to play the Women From Space Festival, I asked if he'd like to put together something else while he was around — and he came through with this incredible trio, adding his guitar work to Lori Freedman's clarinet/bass clarinet and Allison Cameron's no-input mixer. With crunches, scrapes, flutters and mutters all around, this was a totally fabulous time.

You can watch this full set over at TCB's youtube playlist:

[Track Could Bend returns tonight (April 4th) with sets from Density Creep, Flip Side [Allison Cameron/Fahmid Nibesh], and James Bailey & %%30%30]

Recording: Lori Freedman & Scott Thomson

Artist: Lori Freedman & Scott Thomson

Song: [excerpt from first piece]

Recorded at The Tranzac's Main Hall (Women From Space Festival 2022 – Night 2), April 29, 2022.

Lori Freedman & Scott Thomson - [excerpt from first piece]

For the past three years, the Women From Space Festival has been an excellent encapsulation of its moment. Coming on the cusp of the First Big Lockdown, the 2020 Festival is remembered by many as the last event of the beforetimes, while last year's "hologram edition" was an elegant solution to the flatness of livestreams. And now, this year's Festival had to bear all the relief and angst of "returning to live" at this uncertain mid-point of the pandemic. Presented with joy and community spirit over four nights, the Festival was a chance to run into seldom-seen familiar faces and to hear a dizzying variety of sounds.

One of the signs of a spirited collaboration is when musicians can continue to surprise each other, even after many years of playing together. Lori Freedman & Scott Thomson have been playing together since 2007's recording of their Plumb album, but were spontaneous and playful in this set, kinetically reacting to their respective whoops and veers on clainet/bass clarinet and trombone.

Recording: NAIL

Artist: NAIL

Songs: [two selections]

Recorded at The Tranzac's Southern Cross Lounge (Josh Cole Presents), September 18, 2019.

NAIL - [excerpt from first piece]

NAIL - [fourth piece]

This project is a cross-Atlantic union between a pair of pre-exisiting pairings, with Canada's Duo Mercury (Nicolas Caloia and Lori Freedman) joining the Dutch Duo Baars Henneman (Ab Baars and Ig Henneman). Winds from Baars (shakuhachi, clarinet) and Freedman (clarinet, bass clarinet) were grounded by Caloia's double bass and Henneman's viola in a shifting series of encounters, moving from squawk-squeal yelpbursts to low-end mutters.

Recording: Mercury

Artist: Mercury

Song: unknown [composer: Rainer Wiens]^*

Recorded at The Music Gallery @ 918 Bathurst, April 29, 2018.

Mercury - unknown

This union of two great Montréal musicians (Lori Freedman, clarinet, and Nicolas Caloia, double bass) has pushed past improvisation into finding a space to explore a series of compositions from friends and collaborators who are attuned to their working methods. The pieces (such as one from Martin Arnold, which consisted solely of a series of numbers) have a lot of "open" elements, giving constraints to the bullfrog rumbles, skronks, string sawing, pitch pipes and so on.

^* Does anyone know the title to this one? Please leave a comment!

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: Lori Freedman

Artist: Lori Freedman

Song: Décombres [edited excerpt] [composer: Raphaël Cendo]

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

Lori Freedman - Décombres [edited 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. The festival's first night concluded with a visit from Montréal-based clarinet wizard Freedman, who was bringing a new performance entitled The Virtuosity of Excess, "a 55-minute 'spectacle' of solo compositions for contrabass clarinet and bass clarinet". Embracing the sometimes ungainly physicality of her instruments, the performance felt at times as much like a dance, with one piece finding Freedman slowly gliding along a long row of her score, spread out across a half-dozen music stands. "Excess" was celebrated in several ways, from shout-singing to stretches of silence to the glitched-out signal-processing heard here, sending shards of noise and static across the quadraphonic spectrum.