French improv bassist Joëlle Léandre has a mighty impressive biography — she’s worked with Pierre Boulez, John Cage, Steve Lacy, Fred Frith, John Zorn — and judging by her appearance at La Sala Rossa last night, she’s a fierce enough lady to live up to it.

She arrived late, hair wild and dress scruffy black, peered callously into the audience and picked up her instrument. Waiting for her on stage were local musique-actuelle fixtures Jean Derome and Danielle Palardy Roger, both impressive and fearless improvisers. Together the three produced an hour of music that, though not for the faint-hearted, passed through moments of surprising beauty.

The process would be familiar to most improvisers: One musician introduces an idea — a short melody or rhythm or sound or gesture, or even, in Léandre’s case, fragments of spoken words — then the others play with and around it. The idea develops and eventually morphs into other ideas. Hopefully, somewhere in the process, the group will have arrived at some interesting sounds.

What distinguished last night’s group was how varied and refined the sounds were. Derome played alto and baritone sax, flute and alto flute, and came equipped with an arsenal of toys: ocarinas, slide whistles, things that scrape and scratch and pop and hoot. His saxophone sound is aggressive, but works fabulously in this context, and I love the way he hints at standard jazz gestures amidst the abstract swells and screeches.

Léandre, meanwhile, commands her bass forcibly, producing uncanny wails and sniffles and, at one point, a smacking walking bass line. She uses her bow a lot, more than most jazz bass players dare, and to great effect. When things got really heated, she’d wave the bow around in the air to make swooshing noises. It’s a visual spectacle (one reason I have trouble listening to this kind of music on record) and Léandre’s fierce personality became integral to the performance.

People have strong feelings about this kind of improvised music (my brother, for example, calls it ‘public wanking’). Some say it’s intimidating because it’s so experimental, but I reckon that it’s because it is just so experimental that anybody can listen to it. You don’t need any background knowledge; the whole point is to experience the sounds as they come. In that sense, it’s very accessible.

Quartetski (Philippe Lauzier, Gordon M Allen, Pierre-Yves Martel, Isaiah Ceccarelli) will be in concert on March 28 and 29, 2008 at Upstairs Jazz Bar & Grill in Montréal.

The Trio Jean Félix Mailloux (Arden Arapyan, Jean Félix MaillouxJ and Jonathan Racine-Ménard) will be in concert on Friday March 28, 2008 at Dièse onze in Montréal.

Montréal’s creative music scene is growing by leaps and bounds these days, and this release is elegant proof of the fact. A piano-less and guitar-less quartet made up of trumpeter Gordon Allen, drummer Isaiah Ceccarelli, reeds player Philippe Lauzier and bassist Pierre-Yves Martel, Quartetski is a meeting of some of the more active minds on the Montréal scene all focused here in their improvisatory efforts on the score of Prokofiev’s 1917 suite of piano miniatures, Visions fugitives. Arranger and musical director Pierre-Yves Martel has reworked eighteen of the twenty Prokofiev pieces and scored them for the quartet, taking liberties with the music to make room for improvisation and interpretation.

With standard Italian indications like Lentamente and Allegretto, and the less common Ridicolosamente and Lento irrealmente the pieces are distilled treats of classical sensibility, and while the quartet respects the spirit of the pre-composed music, they thankfully take it outside the box, as in the trumpet smearing and gentle squeals and wind-patterns of the opening cut or the Don Cherry minimalist and quasi-dixieland playfulness of Commodo.

Using the Russian composer’s themes as “heads,” preceded by intros and followed by tags or codas, the musicians explore the character of each piece. This may seem like riding on the coat-tails of the famous Russian, but Pierre-Yves Martel’s classical background as viola de gambist gives him an edge since he obviously understands the meaning of the music well enough to pull the rabbit out of the hat. And while the personalities of these musicians are distinct, they blend convincingly. Allen’s variety of trumpet timbre, often tending to graceful understatement, Lauzier’s supple reeds, Ceccarelli’s timekeeping and colorist drumming and Martel’s eclectic bass vocabulary that can be as intense as William Parker and as light as a Strauss waltz are definitely complimentary colors. Add to this an excellent use of texture changes, tempo fluctuations and equilibrium between the composed and the improvised and this makes for a disc that is both fun and serious.