actuellecd

Tim Brady

Review

Tim Brady, Musicworks, no. 77, June 1, 2000

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.