Un solide concert d’improvisation libre enregistré en avril 2010 à Toronto. Très belle complicité entre la trompette de Rampersaud et le saxophone d’Evan Shaw (on pourrait aisément croire que certaines lignes ont été écrites). Le travail du percussionniste Tomasz Krakowiak demeure mystérieux — ce Polonais produit des textures très subtiles qui s’entremêlent au reste. Une musique sérieuse mais pas studieuse, exigeante mais jamais forcée.

Formé à l’origine à l’ccasion d’une visite d’Anthony Braxton à Toronto, l’AIMToronto Orchestra (Association of Improvising Musicians — Toronto) a poursuivi sa course et publie maintenant son premier album studio. L’orchestre compte 17 membres jouant presque exclusivement des instruments acoustiques. Au menu, sept compositions provenant de ses membres Justin Haynes, Kyle Brenders, Joe Sorbara et Germaine Liu. Les trois pièces de Brenders sont longues, méthodiques et souvent minimalistes — des explorations réussies des possibilités de l’orchestre. Les deux pièces de Haynes, plus courtes, sont tordues et facétieuses, rappelant l’écriture de René Lussier. Un disque solide, autant dans la composition que l’interprétation. Recommandé.

Evan Parker excelle dans les rencontres ad hoc entre improvisateurs. At Somewhere There le présente dans un concert torontois en compagnie du bassiste Wes Neal et du percussionniste Joe Sorbara. Une session de 40 minutes habitée par une belle intensité et quelques surprises, dont l’apparition d’un daxophone si je ne m’abuse.

Un bel enregistrement au studio 270, avec le poète Fortner Anderson qui récite et habite ses textes (présentés comme des extraits d’un journal intime), accompagné des improvisateurs Michel F Côté, Alexandre St-Onge et Sam Shalabi, soit presque Klaxon Gueule. Des textes sombres, des musiques qui grincent.

Christine Duncan has been working her Element Choir up in Toronto for a few years now, taking a large group of professional and amateur singers and rehearsing them in spontaneous composition. Allusion to Butch Morris’s conducted improvisations would not be off the mark, but she of course has own aesthetic and style. Beyond procedural similarities, however, both Duncan and Morris are drawn toward sounds which might be labeled “classical” or even “sacred” more than the jazz tradition which if nothing else arises in each of their choices in personnel. This is made plain in Duncan’s case on her most recent recording with bassist William Parker, who appears as a sort of featured soloist alongside her usual accompanists (trumpeter Jim Lewis, bassist Andrew Downing and drummer Jean Martin), all part of the Toronto jazz scene.

Taken together the musicians and singers (some 70 names are listed on the liner notes to At Christ Church Deer Park) could be parsed in a variety of ways. At times they could be heard as a setting of sacred against secular — the cover photo depicting an angelic chalk drawing on a city street affirming that depiction — with organist Eric Robinson joining the chorus in a showdown against the profane jazz band. They could be heard — as they seemed during their appearance at the 2011 Guelph Jazz Festival in Ontario — as a grand quintet with Duncan’s control over her singers being so tight they could be counted as a single member. Perhaps that count was the result of bearing personal witness, or due to the particularities of the performance or the embellishments of memory but in the one, 42-minute track on Deer Park they are willfully far too amorphous to count as a quintet or slice into any number of even pieces. There are certainly moments of jazz band and church choir, there are passages for soloists and there are surprising sections that come off as crowd scenes (chaotic, choreographed or Berio-esque). There are moments of splendor just as there are moments of searching for that splendor. At their heights, Duncan, choir and instrumentalists find a unique beauty.