The collaboration of composer Allison Cameron and trombonist Scott Thomson dates from the late 2000s, when Thomson presided over Somewhere There, a Toronto loft space used by creative, improvising musicians. Their new recording is dedicated to the late Nobua Kubota, multimedia artist and member of long-running Toronto improvising groups the Artists Jazz Band and CCMC. Cameron inherited his crackle-box synthesizer. Those relationships between place, personalities, and instruments define the special ground of Platanus (the genus of plane trees or sycamores), three extended instrumental dialogues between Cameron on synthesizer, keyboards, and tapes and Thomson on trombone. Taproot, Bark, and Limbing represent three substantial chunks of wildly exploratory improvisation, running from fifteen to twenty-four minutes. The recording process admits repetition and simultaneous extractions and intrusions, which leads to music that is more temporally complex and polyvocal than one might initially imagine from a duo, stretching and connecting playful highs and subterranean lows into miracles of technology and technique. The final track, Limbing, initially matches the myriad glassy sonic events of the synthesizer with a quiet, barely articulated mumble from the trombone that might suggest small woodland creatures. These are sounds that will eventually expand their identities, as the keyboards’ layered bleeps and whirrs and the trombone’s more vocalic muted mutterings, all in some sense still lightly lyrical, assume their most abstract ultimate identities.
Stuart Broomer has written extensively on music, mostly improvised, for both general and specialist publications, and his liner essays have appeared on CDs by musicians from some 20 countries. The author of Time and Anthony Braxton (Mercury, 2009), he is currently writing a fantasia on the life of Memphis disc jockey Dewey Phillips. He has been intermittently active as an improvising musician since 1965; his composition Found Theme for the Age of Reason appeared in Musicworks 112. He lives in Toronto.