If there is a miracle in Canadian improvised music, it would have to be Le GGRIL, an orchestra that has flourished whether it’s touring Europe or performing with international guest artists in its hometown of Rimouski, Quebec. Their guests on the work-length Diffraction are DDK, the distinguished, longstanding European trio of pianist Jacques Demierre, trumpeter Axel Dörner, and accordionist Jonas Kocher, each of whom contributes compositional materials to a work that includes and builds on the content generated by the orchestra.
DDK created the score, which includes seating arrangements for each musician with the piano at the centre and provides distinctive parts for each musician. Each part describes an individual musician’s actions during specific time periods, e.g., “Musician 1 will blend into the overall sound but more [quietly] from 03’57 to 04’17 but not referring to what is happening from 23’25 to 23’38.” While Musician 5 shares those directions, he or she will be complementing the figure from 00’33 to 00’43 while Musician 1 remains silent. Individual contributions are very brief, creating an ever-shifting palette of great complexity that is at once continuous, intensely detailed, and highly organized. The score, which is provided to the musicians two weeks before the performance, rigorously controls time and expression, while pitch choices and rhythmic detail are always open, creating a work that is precisely organized in some elements, but wholly open in terms of certain specifics.
The level of realization is extraordinary: it’s an orchestral composition in which every note, however improvised, seems perfectly placed.
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.