Blackfoot Confederacy member Curtis Running Rabbit-Lefthand is the founder and executive artistic director of Indigenous Resilience in Music (IRIM), a collective that supports Indigenous musicians and youth in their learning, performing, recording, and collaborating. The group’s Indigenous-led workshops and events address topics ranging from spiritual values and language reclamation to the basic practicalities of howContinue reading “Curtis Running Rabbit-Lefthand Ignites the Rhythm of the People”
Genre Archives
Women from Space Festival.
Music always comes from somewhere—some particular where. And the most particular place is identity. The name that Bea Labikova and Kayla Milmine chose for their newly founded festival, Women from Space, simultaneously denotes the first place and the furthest: woman, space—the one where we come from, the other where we go. The festival’s four nightsContinue reading “Women from Space Festival.”
Lina Allemano’s Ohrenschmaus. Rats and Mice / Lina Allemano. Glimmer Glammer.
Since 2013, trumpeter Lina Allemano has been dividing her time evenly between two cities, maintaining her eponymous quartet and developing other initiatives in Toronto, while studying extended techniques and expanding her musical impulses across a broad range of improvisatory ensembles in Berlin. While the Berlin experiences clearly mark recent Toronto enterprises like the Titanium RiotContinue reading “Lina Allemano’s Ohrenschmaus. Rats and Mice / Lina Allemano. Glimmer Glammer.”
Rob Clutton with Tony Malaby. Offering.
Bolstering his skills as an improviser and composer, Toronto bassist Rob Clutton reconstitutes some of his previously recorded improvisations as notated kernels for this program with New York saxophonist Tony Malaby. No rote recapitulations here, those themes and others are stretched and pulsate with the same cultivated freedom the duo brings to the completely improvisedContinue reading “Rob Clutton with Tony Malaby. Offering.”
Baroque to the Future
Few musical relationships are as difficult to parse as those between musicians and the instruments they play. It’s a type of interaction that feels like it should be simple—something transactional, between human subject and sounding object—but in practice, objects, especially culturally situated ones, can come with as much baggage as their owners. Often they haveContinue reading “Baroque to the Future”
Tim Olive’s Flexible Aesthetic
It’s a typically humming Saturday night at the Tranzac Club. Different events are in progress in each of the Toronto venue’s three rooms. The Tiki Room (the smallest and most living-room-like of the three) is hosting a special edition of the Audiopollination series, which is usually held elsewhere; its regular events are self-curated affairs, whereContinue reading “Tim Olive’s Flexible Aesthetic”
Kathryn Ladano. Masked.
Kathryn Ladano studied with Montreal free-improv VIP Lori Freedman, is based in Kitchener, Ontario, and focuses her practice on improvisation. She explores the multiple identities of the bass clarinet on her latest album Masked, which is framed by the idea of how an instrument serves as a mask to facilitate deeper expression of the self.Continue reading “Kathryn Ladano. Masked.”
heArt Ensemble. From the Basement
The historical importance of the Quatuor de jazz libre du Québec has been well recognized. Recent book (Eric Filion’s Jazz libre et la revolution québécoise, M Éditeur) and archival CD (Jazz libre du Québec: musique-politique—1971-74, Tour de bras) releases have highlighted the cultural role the group played in Quebec and the continuing vitality of theirContinue reading “heArt Ensemble. From the Basement”
Land of Kush. Sand Enigma.
Sand Enigma is a vision. Not in the sense of a future or even a past, but of a roiling, tempestuous, and contradictory present. Composer and bandleader Sam Shalabi has created a movie—and without trotting out the cinematic tropes, this release has a comprehensive narrative, one that has as much to do with Guillermo deContinue reading “Land of Kush. Sand Enigma.”
Amy Brandon is Capturing Intimate Chaos
The first time I met guitarist-composer Amy Brandon, we talked about the lineage of a particular sound. Her 2019 composition Mimic—written while she participated in the Canadian League of Composers’ Pivot mentorship progam (presented in partnership with the Canadian Music Centre and Continuum Contemporary Music)—contains a percussion technique in which a woodblock set on topContinue reading “Amy Brandon is Capturing Intimate Chaos”