Jazz and Improvised

Can You Hear Me?
Nick Maclean
Browntasaurus Records NCC-1701M (nicholasmaclean.com)

The prodigiously gifted pianist Nick Maclean asks a simple – apparently rhetorical – question with the title of his double-disc: Can You Hear Me? Listeners of this fine recording will get to reply in the affirmative, with loud, enthusiastic whoops for joy – the kind that audiences make wherever fine music – especially jazz – is created. 

Maclean is to be roundly applauded because he literally soars in splendid isolation, although he did admittedly get help from the celebrated producer Brownman Ali. Enough help, it turns out, to turn in a brilliant recording, where both standards and original compositions come alive with percussive growls, and daintily eloquent phrases. Some of these are curvy and elegantly sculpted, others are long inventions punched, poked and – eventually – shaped into bravura melodies and harmonies with thumping left-hand triads and chords. The left and right hand conversations are dynamic and full of surprises. You don’t even have to wait long for the energy to begin flowing. This happens right out of the gate – with Herbie Hancock’s Dolphin Dance.

The most outstanding songs of the set are Frank Churchill’s Someday My Prince Will Come, and interestingly, Jimmy Van Heusen’s It Could Happen to You. On the latter (presumably) producer Brownman Ali is heard suggesting an alternate opening which turns the interpretation into a wondrous re-invention. Maclean’s original compositions such as Why the Caged Bird Sings (an interpretation of Maya Angelou’s poem relocated to the pianist’s musical landscape) are exquisitely provocative and radically progressive.

Disappearing Curiosities
Tania Gill Quartet
Independent TJG001 (taniagill.ca)

It’s been 12 years since the release of the Tania Gill Quartet’s debut Bolger Station, an invocation of Northern Ontario, and that’s far too long between recordings for a composer, pianist and bandleader with Gill’s special talents. Each of her compositions here is a fresh expedition, a different possibility in both style and mood. The latest edition of the quartet retains trumpeter Lina Allemano, an ideal foil as the co-lead voice, with support coming from newcomers to the group, bassist Rob Clutton and drummer Nico Dann, each adding illuminating nuance and animation.     

Gill’s compositions have a rare breadth, from the formal clarity of her unaccompanied theme statement on the opening Marsh Music to the chromatic tangle of lines that she and Allemano create on Climate Striker. Some of the pieces are built of contrasting segments, sometimes adding new thematic content between improvised variations, creating particularly complex patterns of development on the later pieces in the program, like Apology, marked by Clutton’s arco solo which approaches a cello-like timbre. Up-tempo pieces, like Jaunty (featuring Gill on a vintage Realistic MG-1 synthesizer that she deploys here with a marked subtlety) and Knocked Over, can take on a wild playfulness, multiplying the complexity.   

Along with eight of Gil’s compositions, the group also performs People Gonna Rise Like the Water, imbuing the climate activist anthem with a hymn-like nobility.

Impermanence
Violeta García; Émilie Girard-Charest
Tour de Bras (tourdebras.bandcamp.com)

Impermanence is a recording of duo improvisations by two cellists, the Brazilian Violeta García, primarily active in improvised music, and Quebecoise Émilie Girard-Charest, who has been primarily active in contemporary composed music, but whose adeptness as an improviser has been abundantly clear in recent duet performances with saxophonist Yves Charuest.   

The five improvisations are titled merely I to V, with no effort made to add a programmatic dimension through verbal association. Similarly, there’s no detailed account of secondary materials, no hints whether the final track is created by amplified cellos played with bows covered with iron filings in an echo chamber shared with turbines. Perhaps it’s just a miracle of technique, possibly aided by close recording. The music is, in short, astonishing, whether it’s a dance of skittering harmonics, a ping-pong match of guttural, low register glissandi, soaring anarchic runs, microsecond timbral shifts, wondrous rhythmic counterpoint, bow scrapings or sustained microtonal cries. 

What is most beautiful about this recording may be the resonance of and its fidelity to, that title: Impermanence. The music is an insistent present, a presence, a mercurial shared consciousness. It lives in the instant of cognition, insisting on the listener’s attentiveness to that instant, rather than dragging along the past as part of an ongoing, imagined formal construct. A sudden burst of Messiaen-ic birds in the midst of III is just that, something for which to be grateful as one moves on.

Meadow of Dreams
Brodie West Quintet
Ansible Editions AE-003 (ansibleeditions.com)

This is the third release by Toronto-based alto saxophonist Brodie West’s quintet, retaining the same stellar personnel: pianist Tania Gill; bassist Josh Cole; drummer Nick Fraser; and multi-instrumentalist Evan Cartwright, here contributing drums, vibraphone and guitar to significantly expand the group’s palette. West’s background includes extended work with the eclectic Dutch school of improvisers, including drummer Han Bennink and The Ex, musicians whose work extends from free jazz to syntheses of anarcho-punk and African dance music. The result is that West’s creativity ranges freely amidst existing genres, creating sudden juxtapositions of rhythm and timbre, from the glacier-slow, almost ceremonial Fortress to the piping life of Haunt and the wistful dissonance of the title track. 

Grotto may begin as a slightly murky, film noir ballad, but West’s thin, upper-register tone and quarter-tone pitch bends press it far afield, to a kind of science-fiction melancholy. His compositions can continuously shift ground. Inhabit III begins as a slow exchange of single notes by Gill and Cole before adding Fraser’s drums and Cartwright’s guitar; then West joins the complex rhythmic weave with a simple melody, only to shift suddenly to a rapid, pointillist sequence with Fraser and Gill. 

If the music first fascinates with a deliberated disjointedness, it’s the compound mystery and intensity that will keep a listener engaged. West is among the most creative figures in Canadian music, reconstituting long-running conventions into musical puzzles as engaging as they are disruptive.