The Martin-Haynes duet album Freedman is the oddest of the bunch. Haynes is on ukulele throughout, and Martin’s kit is simply a suitcase. (Do musicians still play on suitcases in hotel-room jam sessions these days? It’s a sound familiar to anyone who’s got a copy of the old Bird on Tenor session….) The setlist consists of seventeen tunes by Myk Freedman, the lap-steel player who masterminds the St. Dirt Elementary School (local faves at the Tranzac Club). There are no feats of Jake Shimabukuro-style uke virtuosity here, just a gentle ramble through Freedman’s ought-to-be-standards: lazybones serenades, plingy dance music, miniature Chadbournesque string-violence, shuffle-and-thump grooves, ghostly Oriental ditties and faux-bossa. The players are recorded in tight close-up, which makes the uke sound splendid and gives everything an intimacy that’s as affecting as bittersweet melodies like “Love Boat of Love”. Haynes plays with a laidback charm and grace, occasionally letting things drift whimsically off-course, and (as on all these albums) Martin’s ability to get a huge sonic variety out of next to nothing is uncanny. It’s good-humoured music, but they’re not playing it for laughs or kitsch; it might sound like a gimmicky premise for a CD, but give it a try and it’ll pleasantly surprise you.

Sax-drums duets can end up rather desiccated affairs through a lack of colour and the tendency towards shapeless duels, but Piano Music (Martin and alto saxophonist Evan Shaw) nicely evades all the cliches and limitations. Shaw is an interestingly varied player — on Sweeter than a plastic bag, for instance, you can hear him go from cool Osbyish obliquities to bebop in extremis, running through ideas so profligately it suggests either inspiration or desperation; Martin presses him forcefully, often matching his phrasing exactly, and clouds of out-of-tune chords (melodica, perhaps?) add an air of shadowy enchantment. As the punning title suggests, this is music that (without being particularly minimalist) finds a lot of shadings within a minimal palette, and Shaw is especially good at a kind of abraded purity, in which uncertain whispers or murmurs become a kind of melody. On A strong glue is not necessary his playing is so pared-down it’s like a Konitz ballad with four bars of rest between phrases — a space occupied by Martin’s terrific brushwork and a growing array of electronic squiggles and overdubs — until in the final moments Shaw’s playing fragments, then trails off into computery bleeps. A brief spoken-word cut-up listing Chinese delicacies is skippable, but the rest of the CD is consistently excellent, from the stunning long-form improv Rattlebag Jimmy to the cover of (wait for it…) the Shaggs’ Philosophy of the World.

Martin seems to like duets, though the examples of the format on the label are about as different from each other as you could imagine. Little Man on the Boat, his collaboration with saxophonist/guitarist Colin Fisher, is a homemade brew of warped pop, rock, free jazz and ambient textures. The production is elaborate but small-scale, constructing a serenely artificial world out of layered instruments, loops, overdubs, and soft chorales of horns and voices; even a rock guitar solo here is oddly scaled-down, suggesting the comfortably self-enclosed pleasures of a child’s toy. The disc is often best when the materials are reduced to a bare minimum: the title track, for instance, is a gentle whirl of acoustic guitar and consoling horns; A Long Way from Beacon Hill blends hushed ambience, weightless keyboards, trumpet, and a guitar loop that splits apart like light across rippling water. “Cat Song” is especially barebones: hearttugging guitar chords issue at the slowest of drips while Martin’s brushes skim the surface of his cymbals; halfway through, a third element intrudes, hesitant whinnies from what sounds like a sax with a child’s kazoo stuck in its bell. Even the busier tracks avoid clutter: Koyaya, for instance, shows Martin’s deft producer’s touch, as he nibbles away at Fisher’s rubbery jazz-rock guitar solo with typewriter percussion, chilly organ chords, and pert horn sections that drop in erratically for just a note or two. As with a lot of Barnyard releases, it takes a few listens for the disc’s surface playfulness to wear off and the underlying seriousness and musical substance to come through.

Barnyard Drama is the Toronto husband-and-wife duo of singer Christine Duncan and drummer/multi-instrumentalist Jean Martin, though more recently the group has doubled in size with the addition of guitarists Justin Haynes and Bernard Falaise (the latter on loan from Montréal’s musique actuelle scene). The churning guitars and dark, hallucinatory sound of I’m a Navy set it apart from other offerings on Barnyard Records, which generally tend towards quiet, everyday surrealism (as the punning title of one release on the label puts it, “piano music”). Some of the pieces are too arch, especially the overripe The Blues and Duncan’s faux-naive ballad about “that butt’ry burning feeling”, sung in a butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth British schoolgirl accent. But the air of wicked mischief is generally quite engaging, the musicians conjuring up a black magic rite out of grungy blues, snarling electronica, and the guitar-driven meltdown at the end of The Big Gundown. Duncan’s voices range from gorgon to sexpot to blithering idiot to chanteuse, but isn’t mere grotesquerie (which tends to wear thin very quickly, as witness countless free-improv vocal albums); she takes the trouble to really occupy these different personae, until the music becomes a dizzying meditation on female innocence and experience. Great choice of cover tune, too: the lyrics of Noel Coward’s Little Girl Blue may express bemused pity for the girl, but the music’s already leaving the human scale behind, floating off into the zero-gravity dark, the stars twinkling all around in detached bemusement.

Ensemble SuperMusique presents its Grand Annual Concert with Y’a du bruit dans ma cabane. Musicians Jean Derome, Joane Hétu, Diane Labrosse, Pierre-Yves Martel, Danielle Palardy Roger, Pierre Tanguay and Martin Tétreault, as well as video artist David Emmanuel Fafard and sound engineer Colin Gagné, will stand where no-one stops, and create a customized universe of the rooms of a house. The concerts will take place at the SAT, in Montréal, on December 17 and 18, 2008.

On December 13, 2008, Kim Myhr and his group The Silencers (Nils Ostendorf, Toma Gouband and Benoit Delbecq) will be featured on Radio France show À l’improviste, hosted by Anne Montaron. The concert, which is open to the public, will be broadcasted on January 24, 2009, and will be available on Radio France Website.