Montreal-based singer-dancer Susanna Hood first became involved with the music of soprano saxophonist and composer Steve Lacy in 2008 as a member of The Rent, a Toronto quintet devoted to Lacy’s music. Her current trio with pianist Tanya Gill and soprano saxophonist Kayla Milmine is similarly Lacy-centric, here devoted to his settings of Living Theatre founder Judith Malina’s poems, originally recorded in 1996 as Packet with singer Irene Aebi and pianist Frederic Rzewski. The resulting songs embrace a broad but intense emotional range, inspiring the compelling inventiveness with which this trio develops its own visions. The very real stylistic distinctions between Hood’s trio and Lacy’s are keys to the impact and interest of this work, even without the live component of Hood’s dancing. Her vocals blend musicality, precise diction, and expressive commitment; Gill’s inventions are comparatively spare but possessed of a special lyrical intensity, while Milmine has a broader, warmer sound than Lacy cultivated.
An emotional focus is immediately apparent, from the opening words of I Heard the Indian Sage Say, which offers Malina’s affirmation of life’s pain and struggle versus a philosophical negation of time. First and Last Pains has an overdubbed vocal duet and a riveting solo by Milmine, whose voice on saxophone is crucial here, intensely emotive and matched to Hood’s sense of engagement.
unPacked goes beyond this trio’s original mission, as they craft their own approach to another Malina poem. Hood and Gill’s duet setting of Remembering Dreams is particularly forceful, an artful combination of sung speech and pointillist piano.
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.