Living Things
Nicola Miller
Cacophonous Revival Recordings CRR-025 (cacophonousrevivalrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/living-things)
Nicola Miller is an Ontario-born, Nova Scotia-resident alto saxophonist and composer who has taken a circuitous route to her first recording as leader, earning a BA in jazz performance from a Toronto college nearly 20 years ago, teaching fiddle to children in Mohawk territory near Montreal and getting an MA from the Jazz Institüt Berlin. Based on Living Things, it was all worth it. It’s as impressive a debut as one might want to hear – mature, thoughtful, passionate work in the company of masters.
She’s assembled a fine Canadian band (trombonist Doug Tielli, as witty as he is exploratory, drummer Nick Fraser, both precise and energetic, and bassist Nicholas D’Amato, a sensitive bulwark of form), topped off by her German mentor Frank Gratkowski, playing mostly bass clarinet here with just a single turn on his more usual alto saxophone. Loading a debut with stellar sidemen can conceal a neophyte’s virtues, but that doesn’t happen here. Miller‘s conception may be rooted in Ornette Coleman’s mercurial voice, but hers is lighter, a voice that is engaged in its own discoveries.
Her compositions welcome elastic interpretation, but they also have strengths of their own, summoning up the soundscape of Miller’s Maritime home. The opening Barge Is a night-time description of dock, water and whistles, while Seaweed and Seagulls are similar tone poems, but all go beyond programmatic atmosphere to summon a sense of teeming life, a continuum between sonic subject and the quintet’s creative impulses.
