I and Thou
VC2
Leaf Music LM255 (leaf-music.ca)

Toronto cellists Amahl Arulanandam and Bryan Holt have been the busy and well-loved duo V2 since meeting in 2008 while at the University of Toronto; after both completed their master’s degrees at McGill, they reconvened to continue their musical partnership.

Their latest album I And Thou sets out to explore what has become the post-pandemic theme of relationships between humans and the world around us. Including several Canadian commissions, the album opens with composer Jocelyn Morlock’s (2016’s Juno for My Name Is Amanda Todd) Violet Hour, a lush and picturesque sound painting of the time just before sunset, written in three short movements for cello quartet and featuring guests Andrea Stewart and Paul Widner. Vincent Ho’s Heist 2, a moto-perpetuo duet inspired by the duo’s improvisations, was expressly written to highlight the individual characteristics of both cellists and is dynamically accompanied by drummer Ben Reimer. Laura Sgroi’s Discord paints a painful portrait of not belonging in one place, beautifully depicted by blending classical, jazz and pop sensibilities with pianist Stephanie Chua. Chris Paul Harman’s Suite for Two Cellos, with seven powerful movements styled after Bach, is a subtly organic and energetic re-interpretation of traditional early harmonies that solidly anchors the middle section of the album. Followed by Duet for Two Cellos by Youell Domenico, and the final duet I And Thou by Kati Agócs, based on a book by Martin Buber, a fusion of both cellos spun into a single, tightly wound rope.

My favourite track is Kelly-Marie Murphy’s challenging Final Glimpse, a fantastical exploration of the 1937 crash of the Hindenburg. Her experimental addition of recorded materials and sounds flows seamlessly with the duo’s interpretation and personal style, creating one of the strongest pieces on the album.

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Frank Horvat – From Oblivion to Hope
Odin Quartet
I Am Who I Am Records (frankhorvat.com)

Frank Horvat has been successfully exploring states of the human condition in contemporary times; with each new album this exploration takes on a different musical form/genre. This prolific composer keeps surprising us with diversity and an extent of musical expression, language and themes. From Oblivion to Hope, as performed by the Odin Quartet, is a gorgeous collection of Horvat’s string quartet music and his ideas. Here his message is clear: music is an important tool in raising the level of positivity and hope on this planet as well as in our individual lives. Change is possible. 

Horvat’s string quartet music, covering a span of over 20 years, features compelling rhythmical elements and engaging melodies. The album follows a trajectory of personal growth – from oblivion and anxiety through awareness of the preciousness of time and love of nature to the final destination of hope. Each piece tells a story, and none has a traditional form. String Quartet No.2 is a percussive, textural ball of high energy seeking more stable expression. Four Seasons…in High Park, inspired by the seasons in High Park in Toronto and Vivaldi’s iconic Four Seasons, contains many literal quotes but its strength lies in dismantling the original ideas into building blocks of unique compositional language. The album closes with Hope, a peaceful, harmonious rhapsody with bright colours.

Odin Quartet, a strong ensemble with close-knit synergy, is a perfect collaborator. Their sensible interpretation of Horvat’s music highlights the composer’s ingenuity.  

Theory of Becoming
Evgueni Galperine
ECM New Series 2744 (ecmrecords.com)

Minimalist in nature and deeply personal, Theory of Becoming reveals a turn in Evgueni Galperine’s musical direction. Primarily known for his gorgeous film music, Galperine turns inward on this album, shifting from compositions inspired by cinematic images and stories to music that brings in focus shades of the human condition through inner experience. This new world is grandly rich in depth and variety of ideas. Galperine uses both real and virtual instruments to create an architecture of sound, expanding colours, textures and possibilities of acoustic instruments and establishing a mixture of textural, exciting and somewhat oracular elements with electronic and manipulated sounds. This world is so visceral that each composition feels like a minimalist diorama. It is rare to hear such a strong emotional expression in the realms of electronic music and Galperine recognizes the power of that rarity. 

There is a strong imaginative element in all compositions and threads that involve magical settings supported by electronic sounds. In Loplop im Wald, inspired by Max Ernst’s paintings, we meet a magical bird called Loplop that inhabits a mystical forest humans cannot cross. Oumuamua, Space Wanderings is a sonic exploration of travelling through space in search of answers. This Town Will Burn Before Dawn, describes the aftermath of a war, destruction embedded in deep ominous sounds coming from the belly of the beast (war) and hope floating above in the string’s layers. 

While Galperine creates and directs the electronics and sampling, the guest artists, Sergei Nakariakov (trumpet), Sébastien Hurtaud (cello) and Maria Vasyukova (voice), each leave their signature marks. In some aspects, Theory of Becoming is a musical/philosophical treatise on the depth of the human experience.

Susurrus
Anthony Tan
gengseng records GS004 (anthonytan.bandcamp.com/album/susurrus)

How does one listen to music that is not meant to be listened to? This question may seem rhetorical, if not absurd, but it is one that is presented to us when faced with the genre of ambient music. To many, ambient music is equivalent to elevator music, easy listening pop or soft jazz that pads the other ambient sounds of shopping malls, elevators and airports. In fact, the concept of ambient music was first used by Brian Eno in his 1978 album Ambient 1: Music for Airports and has since grown to encompass a range of electroacoustic compositions.

According to Wikipedia, ambient music “is a genre of music that emphasizes tone and atmosphere over traditional musical structure or rhythm.” Anthony Tan’s Susurrus embodies this description very well, augmenting fragmented pianistic passages with real-time electronics. This is atmospheric music at its finest, and is simultaneously foreboding and calm, never resolving, but also never developing the tension that necessarily needs a resolution.

Both pieces on this recording, endlessnessnessness and sublime subliminal sublimate are constant paradoxes, the net result being equal to the effort put in by the listener: focusing on the small scale reveals minute repetitions and rhythmic patterns, while listening to the larger forms provides a rather vague overview of works that forgo conventional structures in favour of constantly shifting acoustic events. 

If this review appears inconclusive, that is because ambient music, much like the minimalist works of Glass, Reich and others, is so highly subjective and the experience of it so dependent on the individual. I encourage everyone to explore Tan and Susurrus, whether one is familiar with this genre or not, and explore how you listen to and experience music that is not meant to be listened to.

I Had a Dream About This Place
No Hay Banda
No Hay Discos NHD 002 (nohaybanda.ca)

Love of language but incapacity in more than two meant I had to look up a translation of this disc title, and guess what? No Hay Banda means “there is no band.” Their two-disc release from No Hay Discos is titled I Had a Dream About This Place. 

No Hay Banda is made up of five instrumentalists and a soprano (apparently they exist as individuals) from Montreal. Their debut recording features four works, and you’re on your own in terms of liner notes. No Hay Discos chose instead to provide poems in French and English respectively, by Françoise Major and Donato Mancini. I suppose they are responses to the music, but I dare not attempt further parsing. Mancini’s text is also featured, often indistinctly in Andrea Young’s A Moment or Two of Panic, which at 32 minutes is more like several moments of ennui and angst. Anthony Tan’s half-hour is curiously titled An Overall Augmented Sense of Well-Being. I only get the augmented part. Also included are the somewhat briefer Rubber Houses by Sabrina Schroeder and Mauricio Pauly’s The Difference is the Buildings Between Us. A large letter “O” goes rogue on the playfully designed CD jacket, displaced from titles and composers’ names. That adds some sorely needed fun, but maybe it’s intended as a serious meditation on the difference between an oval and a circle, as suggested by the granite-shaded cover art. 

There’s an average of 25 somewhat static minutes per cut. Whew. No hay tiempo. As the saying goes, less is sometimes more, but the reverse can also be true. Were we a civilization where meditation was taught from the cradle, perhaps this would be the music we all craved. Or rather preferred, since in that society there’d be no craving? Perhaps we wouldn’t be headed for environmental collapse. Perhaps the length of these pieces would evoke a kind of joy, like what one feels at the prospect of a free summer afternoon or a hot bath on a cold night. I admit to none of these responses. Instead, I become astoundingly furious as I listen to the patient clouds of sound drift out of my stereo. 

I’ve performed music by some of this compositional cadre, not these four but others of a similar school. Some folks like it. It takes great focus to do well, as the players do here.  And even so, there will be those who, like me, would like their two hours back.

Eren Gümrükçüoğlu – Pareidolia
Conrad Tao; JACK Quartet; Mivos Quartet; Ensemble Giallo; Deviant Septet
New Focus Recordings FCR343 (newfocusrecordings.com)

Two suppositions: music is only music to the extent that it elicits recognition and response, and not all music (not all art) is good for one. Consider these as you read why I recommend this disc. Think catharsis. Composer Eren Gümrükçüoğlu makes brilliant use of acoustic and electronic media, with strong collaborators including the excellent JACK Quartet. His ideas, once you settle into the terrain, make sense. There is pitch and sound contoured into melody, and there is rhythm, lots of it. 

The opening track is frankly scary. Pandemonium comes to us via Milton in Paradise Lost. Not a good place, to say the least. A demonic gathering place ain’t peaceful, it’s a harrowing funhouse!

 I found myself beating time to the title track, Pareidolia, even during the intervals where metre and rhythm seem absent; rather they are partially submerged in silences that allow only some of the contours to show. When “time” is introduced explicitly, at various points in the piece (at nearly 24 minutes, by far the longest single track), the material is taut and jazzy, the silences filled, the pulse revealed. Track four, Ordinary Things, pits a small wind band with bass and percussion against fragments from speeches made by Recep Erdoğan, composed as mimicry, a satiric chorus riffing alongside the autocrat’s overblown rhetoric, forming a kind of sonic haze around the vocals. Mesmerizing. 

Those step-dancing squirrels in your attic crawl space have spotted a canary, who calls out from various places as they scutter about chasing the hapless bird. That describes the spatial and rhythmic fun of the final track, Asansör Asìmptotu. 

Kudos to all the performers and especially to the composer.

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Guy Barash – Killdeer
Guy Barash; Nick Flynn
New Focus Recordings FCR355 (newfocusrecordings.com)

The marriage of text and music, like other pairings, can be problematic. This is especially true in the spoken word subgenre, as is featured on Killdeer. The poetry of Nick Flynn haunts its way through “structured improvisation” conceived by Guy Barash, with Kathleen Supové on piano, Frank London on a very threadbare trumpet and Eyal Maoz filling in on guitar. Barash handles the electronic manipulations, and the product winds its way into ever darker places. Flynn, let it be known, has seen the darkness stare back at him, and his text invites you to look into the same mirror. Clearly recited, prosaic, brooding, even angry, the text does not appear in the booklet aside from two brief excerpts. When you hear the thoughts uttered in track seven, Poem to be Whispered by the Bedside of a Sleeping Child, maybe you’ll be glad. I was.

This makes one grateful for the music. London’s insinuating whispers and cries match the mood, a pale shadow of the shadowy poetry, while Supové’s powerful sparks draw our ears away from the poet’s voice towards some kind of brightness.  

Still, this is essentially a textual work, fascinating and disturbing. I will listen again, because I know there’s redemption of a kind proffered by Flynn. The text takes most of my attention, and second listening might change that or might not. The text is why I hesitate, and yet recognize: these are powerful poems. Killdeer meditates on death, and on the demons that would have us wish it on someone else. The matter is dark, the music affecting.

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Felipe Téllez – Evocations
Canadian Studio Symphony
Centrediscs CMCCD 30922 (centrediscs.ca)

Featuring the talents of Ron Cohen Mann on oboe d’amore, violinist Lynn Kuo and the Canadian Studio Symphony, the newly released album Evocations comprises new works by Colombian-Canadian composer, Felipe Téllez. Led by Lorenzo Guggenheim, the Canadian Studio Symphony was founded in 2022 for the sole purpose of performing new and engaging repertoire, making this a perfect pairing.

Originally written in 2014 and revised in 2022, the Suite Concertante for Oboe d’Amore is a five-movement suite of dances in Baroque style. In keeping with the period, Téllez uses harpsichord and oboe d’amore but mixes them with modern ideas like extensive key modulations and orchestral colours with clarinets and more prominent low brass. The technical capabilities and full range of tonal colours of the oboe d’amore are imaginatively explored, showcasing the warm tone and brilliant virtuosity of Cohen Mann. 

Lovers at the Altar and Impromptu are small pieces for string orchestra used to bridge the Baroque style of the first piece with the more Romantic writing of Corita and Romanza. Corita is an orchestration of a guitar piece composed by Téllez’s mentor and counterpoint teacher in Colombia, Manuel Cubides Greiffenstein. 

Romanza for solo violin and orchestra reveals Kuo’s beautiful, expansive phrasing and expressive musicality. With something for every musical taste, Evocations is sure to satisfy.

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Valentin Silvestrov
Boris Berman
Le Palais des Degustateurs PDD030 (lepalaisdesdegustateurs-shop.com/boutique)

In March 2022, just days after Russia’s invasion, Ukraine’s pre-eminent composer, Valentin Silvestrov (b.1937) left his native Kyiv for Berlin. Three months later, Boris Berman, following in-person consultations with Silvestrov, recorded this two-CD set spanning 60 years of Silvestrov’s piano music.

Triade (1962) and Elegy (1967) reflect what the young Silvestrov called “lyrical dodecaphony,” to my ears Webern crossed with Debussy. Sonata 2 (1975) juxtaposes serialism, aleatorism and late-Romantic chromaticism, including extended passages of pensive lyricism. The five-movement Kitsch-Music (1977) contains allusions to Schumann, Chopin and Brahms, all to be played, wrote Silvestrov, “as if from afar.” It’s indeed slightly “kitschy” – precious with prettiness and sentimentality, lovely nonetheless. The three movements of Sonata 3 (1979) are slow, inward-looking and disturbingly beautiful, their unsettled tonality suggesting to me an aimless, solitary stroll through a dark, deserted cityscape.

Three 21st -century works were recorded with the piano lid closed, Silvestrov desiring a soft, distant sonority. Postludium (2005) is a slow, bittersweet processional. Five Pieces, Op.306 (2021) – three Pastorals, Serenade and Waltz – are all gentle and sweetly dreamy. Heartfelt simplicity imbues the Three Pieces (March 2022, Berlin), Silvestrov’s musical response to the invasion. The sorrowful Elegy is followed by Chaconne, described by Silvestrov as “accepting death with dignity.” The final Pastoral ends in a mood of serenity, perhaps even hope.

Doubtlessly, these performances by Berman (b. Moscow 1948), head of Yale University’s piano department, pleased Silvestrov. They certainly pleased me.

Montreux 1988
Eye Music
Independent (markduggan1.bandcamp.com/album/montreux-1988)

Toronto-based band Eye Music’s superb 2023 debut album is an actual throwback: it was recorded live in 1988 at the Montreux Jazz Festival, Switzerland. To my ears this 35-year-old novel take on folk-inflected jazz still sounds compellingly fresh today. 

Eye Music featured the late, great violinist Oliver Schroer, guitarist Don Ross, percussionist Mark Duggan and bassist David Woodhead, all gifted musicians at the brink of substantial careers. Their inspired music on Montreux 1988 is a snapshot of a made-in-Southern Ontario musical moment.

Booked on the strength of their Portastudio cassette demo, they were reportedly the only Canadian act to play Montreux that year. Impressive enough to land a spot sight-unseen at a major European festival, why haven’t we heard of Eye Music? Part of the answer is that the group was active only between 1987 and 1989.

We finally get a chance to hear what the excitement was about on this album, their Montreux concert artfully distilled into seven tracks digitalized from aging original analogue tapes. 

Five titles were composed by Ross – his use of alternate guitar tunings and unique “fingerstyle” was an essential part of the group’s sound – plus one each by Duggan and Schroer. Each tune has its own character and charm, the album filled with spiky rhythms, lush harmonies and a lighthearted feel, further enlivened by imaginative virtuoso solos. The cherry on top is the sensitive ensemble musicianship of all four members.

More good news: Eye Music is reforming with a new violinist and planning live performances for the 2023 summer festival season.

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Kirk Lightsey – Mark Whitfield; Santi Debriano; Victor Lewis
Live at Smalls Jazz Club
Cellar Music CLSMF003 (cellarlive.com)

Legendary pianist, Detroit-native Kirk Lightsey, has been gracing the ears of listeners around the world for nearly 70 years. The same energy that the stellar musician started out with has carried on within this latest release, a special live recording at New York City’s Smalls Jazz Club that highlights the fantastic work of this jazz great. As a little aside, the Smalls LIVE Mastering Series is a great set of recordings, showcasing the best of jazz musicians that are still with us. Joining Lightsey is a stellar backing band featuring renowned musicians such as Mark Whitfield on guitar, Santi Debriano on bass and Victor Lewis on drums. The album is chock-full of great renditions of classic tunes, such as In Your Own Sweet Way by Dave Brubeck and Lament by J.J. Johnson. Scintillating talent is present on this record; it’s an all-encompassing musical journey that draws the listener right in.  

The musicianship and thought put into detail throughout these pieces and renditions is just marvellous. A perfect example of this is Freedom Jazz Dance, featuring rhythmically tight piano riffs, a moving bass line that underpins soaring solos and keeps the energy constantly brewing and an intricate guitar melody that just pulls you in and captivates you with those tiny nuances. In these tunes, magical feeling develops where the music completely envelops you and everything else disappears. For new and seasoned jazz lovers alike, this is one record to check out.

Mi Hogar
Rachel Therrien Latin Jazz Project
Outside In Music OiM2307 (outsideinmusic.com)

Wanting a mini-vacation from these dark and dreary winter days, imagining sunny beaches and a sparkling blue sea? Montreal native, star flugelhornist, trumpeter and bandleader Rachel Therrien’s newest album is for you. Sultry rhythms and mellow melodies instantly transport the listener to a far-away world where the sun shines and the balmy breeze blows. Therrien has gathered top musicians who have been involved with the Latin jazz world over the years, including Michel Medrano Brindis on drums, Miguel de Armas on piano, Roberto Riveron on bass… the list goes on. The record features fresh takes on classic tunes by greats such as Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane and Francisco Tarrega with a few of Therrien’s own compositions thrown into the mix. 

The impressive bandleader has always been inspired by the world of Latin jazz, which led to the eventual recording and release of this album. Therrien describes her travels to Cuba: “The experience changed my life and is probably the reason why I am still a musician today. I always felt good playing Latin-influenced music, it is where I feel I can express myself the most musically.” A couple of pieces that stand out are Moment’s Notice, a rhythmically charged, spicy little ditty that instantly raises the spirits of the listener and Mojo, featuring a fiery piano solo and funky bass line underpinning a soaring horn solo that gets you moving and grooving. A truly worthy addition to any jazz connoisseur’s collection. 

Being Five
Dimitriadis/Dörner/Freedman/Parkins/Williams
Relative Pitch RPR  1181 (relativepitchrecords.com)

Collectively creating an essay in forceful improvisation, the Being Five quintet is as international as its five-part program is intense. Percussionist Yorgos Dimitriadis is Greek; bassist Christopher Williams and accordionist Andrea Parkins, American; clarinetist Lori Freedman is Canadian; and trumpeter Axel Dörner, German. Adding understated but effective electronic trappings throughout, the quintet members achieve a notable balance between the spontaneous and the synthesized. Additionally, intervallic pauses distinguish the astute alternations between luminous solos and the shaded, sometimes menacing, group wave-form expositions.

As the session evolves, Dimitriadis stays in the background with an occasional drum slap or cymbal plink, affirming slippery clarinet peeps, or pressurized bass string slices that can be distinguished in the midst of intermittent crackling voltage that is also strengthened by tremolo accordion pulses. Other times, as on Amusik Bis, Freedman’s pedal point clarinet and Dörner’s portamento squeezes outline a variant of tandem lyricism. But it’s the concluding Freeze that most precisely defines the program. With only the occasional clarion reed bite cutting through the machine-generated buzz and hiss at first, continuous voltage drones become louder, more concentrated, strident and synthesized, so that by the penultimate sequenced sound concatenation seems almost impenetrable. That is until chalumeau clarinet purrs and inflating accordion pumps reassert the session’s acoustic side before a collective finale. 

An exemplary interpretation of electro/acoustic improvising, Being Five also demonstrates that musicians’ geographic origins mean little when creating a vivid group project.

Face à Face
Barre Phillips; György Kurtág Jr.
ECM New Series ECM 2736 (ecmrecords.com)

More of a realized experiment than a full-fledged program, the dozen brief tracks here mark veteran American bassist Barre Phillips’ first accommodation with the electronics produced by Hungarian keyboardist György Kurtág Jr. Using three stand-alone synthesizers and digital percussion, Kurtág burbles, drones and vibrates ever-evolving oscillations with textures ranging from the daunting to the delicate.

All the while the bassist, whose improvisational experience goes back to the early 1960s, crafts parallel constructs that involve every part of his instrument during tracks that are timed from 90 seconds to nearly four and a half minutes. Phillips uses techniques such as col legno string bounces or pressurized sul ponticello bow slices to cut through the often-confined density from the machine-generated programming. Occasionally, as on Sharpen Your Eyes and Ruptured Air, more melodic suggestions are introduced with woody slaps from the bass meeting recorder-like peeps from the synthesizer on the former, and low-pitched string twangs evolving alongside high-pitched synthesized wriggles on the album describing the second title. 

Overall, since Phillips can also finesse textures among other motifs encompassing measured violin-like runs and banjo-like clangs, the expanding programmed pressure never becomes oppressive. Genuinely fascinating, at points the disc also clarifies how acoustic and electronic timbres can unfold face à face with each prominent in its own space.

Opera of the Unspoken: Island of Unrest
Jeanette Lambert
Independent (jeannettelambert.bandcamp.com)

This significant and ambitious project is best described by the composer/creator herself as “an experimental jazz opera that is also a musical investigation into the mysteries of an ancestral tragedy from World War II, as revealed through vocal rituals, ancestral tarot, free jazz and dreaming.” Jeanette Lambert was seeking a way to honour her forbearers, and also tell the horrific story of her multi-racial ancestors who passed through the horrors of the war, and their ultimate survival, achieved through the spiritual strength of her female ancestors. The tragedy originates with Lambert’s German grandfather – a civilian interned (along with his Javanese wife) by the Dutch in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) during the war. In order to manifest this epic, Jeanette called upon her own family as well as vocalists, poets and descendants of those who had also suffered the horrors of war and captivity.  

In the construction of this large-scale piece, Lambert has used the structure of the Tarot to explore the truth of the Van Imhoff tragedy (the violence in Banten), and to ultimately instigate the dream-laden ancestral healing of all. The opera begins with Three of Pentacles – comprised of ancient, dreamy, diatonic a cappella chants that begin the journey. Ace of Wands follows… descriptive and poetic, and punctuated by percussive (Michel Lambert) and guitar (Reg Schwager) motifs. Lambert’s potent vocal instrument begins to relate the story through the infrastructure of the tarot, and with Dreaming of Pomelo a portrait of Indonesia begins to emerge as the tragedies loom. 

On Four of Wands, gamelans and spoken word rail against the immoral incidents while military drum tattoos and vocal distortion plumb the horror. On Sorrow Unleashed, the weeping, wailing and keening of the mothers – reaching back into the mists of time – is underscored by heartrending string and flute lines. Lambert’s potent opera ends with the dream of hope and healing. This is a multi-disciplinary master work, and a journey that is essential for all free-thinking human beings. Brava.