Review
Lori Freedman is ready for the 21st century, but is the 21st century ready for her? An accomplished bass clarinet soloist, chamber and orchestral musician, an imaginative improviser and a composer of considerable savy, she represents the best aspects of our new, multi-faceted century. Her new cd Huskless! is an impressive sampler of compositions and improvisations, all recorded live, that present her in a variety of settings, from solo to duo and ensemble, through to works for clarinet and tape… fantastic sounds full of rich multiphonics, authoritatively and beautifully controlled pitch bends… compositions with a strong sense of counterpoint… improvisations with some of Canada’s finest musicians (Marilyn Lerner, Paul Plimley, Pierre Tanguay and Chris Cauley), with a refined polyphonic sense of interplay within a free sense of form and harmony… The cd is a very creative bit of music programming and it will undoubtedly confuse the maistream media who love to pigeon-hole artists. But Lori’s music, and we the listening public, are the richer for her artistic audacity.