Saxophonist Jean Derome, violinist Malcolm Goldstein, and guitarist Rainer Wiens are pillars of Montreal’s improvised music community who retain their sense of whimsy and their willingness to test the limits. Frequent associates in varied contexts, they meet for the first time as a trio on 6 improvisations, where one finds a genuine playfulness.

The unpredictability is evident from the opening track, Saturnien, with Derome offering sustained saxophone blasts that may test the limits of aggression. By the end of the ten-minute piece, his sound is as warm and sweet as any sentimentalist might desire, as if in the course of the group dialogue Derome has inserted a history of alto saxophone sonority from Ellington sideman Johnny Hodges to French provocateur Jean-Luc Guionnet (a recent associate) — but he has done so in reverse.

That style of juxtaposition and unlikely evolution takes different forms here. Goldstein is a master of a kind of multiple musical speak, throwing off masses of bowed, plucked, and strummed notes with such rapidity that the shifting method of articulation seems like a continuous gesture. He and Wiens enjoy such a developed camaraderie that at times they seem to speak a single compound voice. The almost programmatic L’idée de nature floats on Wiens’ kalimba figure and Derome’s bird-like flute calls, while the sequence of six improvisations seems to move towards ever-greater empathy, climaxing with the memorably sustained, pensive dialogue of Glissements-souffle.

“I know it may sound crazy, but I am interested in making beautiful music — music that sounds good. I’m not saying this just to be different, and it might not be in line with a lot of the reasons that people make music today, but I am actually not very involved with, or worrying so much about, a process — about how I write the music, or any kind of system. I just want the work to be inherently musical and for musicality to be the main concern.”

In the fields of modern composition and free improvisation, it is surprising to hear a musician privilege beauty over process and technique, but it certainly makes sense coming from percussionist and composer — and early-music singer! — Isaiah Ceccarelli, whose beautiful work is born out of a rich, seemingly contradictory set of experiences and influences. He straddles many lines—such as the ones between rigorous training and autodidactism, and those between improvisational open-endedness and clearly articulated structures. He is thoroughly invested in both ancient and modern musical practices. Because of all this, his voice is radically individual and yet firmly anchored in various traditions.

Over the past decade, Ceccarelli has built a reputation as one of Montreal’s most gifted and innovative improvisers — equally comfortable exploring extensions of jazz on a kit and probing the various overtones of a single cymbal. Eclecticism may be increasingly common among younger musicians, yet Ceccarelli’s wide spectrum is cohesive and driven by precise intention, where others might veer into pastiche or aesthetic anonymity. Even when he’s assertively delineating pulse or conjuring a loud burst of convoluted resonances, you’ll find an underlying lyricism and an acute sense of harmony.

Recently, there has been growing interest in Ceccarelli as a composer — and rightly so. He’s discovered his own particular intersection, managing to relay in his compositions the tactile sensitivity of his own playing and to employ musical material economically, all the while producing deceptively bold colours and phrasing. His music offers many entry points — transparent, ostensibly simple textures, loose-knit moirés of microtones, attractive melodic contours, extended peals of pure timbre, even idiom-based gestures, plus frequent use of voice. This permeability in his composed works has attracted a wide variety of opportunities, ranging from large ensembles made up of improvisers to intimate chamber works played by leading contemporary music interpreters.

Born in Chetwynd, B.C., Ceccarelli grew up in San Bernardino, Calif., where his interest in playing music was ignited quite early by hearing a friend’s dad, who played drums in a gospel band. Private study began at age twelve, when he took up lessons with a local orchestral percussionist — a connection that endured until he went off to college in Boston, and one that remains evident today in the dynamic shapes of his playing. His instructor’s pedagogical foundation consisted of snare drum excerpts, timpani, and other orchestral percussion. Ceccarelli excelled, and he joined a larger regional youth symphony as principal timpanist. As his complementary interests in drum kit and jazz music grew, however, the young drummer began studying under jazz stalwart Ed Shaughnessy, known for his tenure on the The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and as a sideman to Charles Mingus, Horace Silver, and Teo Macero. Shaughnessy’s jazz pedigree and no-nonsense angle resonated with the young drummer.

“I’ve never been good with following directions. I don’t take orders well, either,” Ceccarelli chuckles. “I’m a very independent person. But there was something in the tradition of it all that stuck with me — learning from a real jazz drummer who was around back in the day. I did all the stuff that is absolutely indispensable to me now.” Under Shaughnessy’s tutelage he was fed a constant stream of exercises and big-band music to be sight-read — all intended to give him every resource necessary to become a full-time musician. The elder drummer’s refrain to the young musician was that he should absorb completely the fundamentals of playing before doing anything else. “I’m a little bit conservative in this sense,” Ceccarelli notes, with wry acknowledgement of the irony of that statement. “I teach my students this as well. I really believe in that kind of working musician’s approach. Everything I ever studied was about making a living. You learn to do the basics well, and you can do anything you want. Your creativity comes after you can really play your instrument.” While that is by no means a revolutionary concept in music training, both Shaughnessy and Ceccarelli understood it as pragmatism, not dogmatism — more a case of being versatile, competent, and expressive in order to cover all your bases, rather than merely blindly following rules. “Even now, as I get closer to the music I want to do, it’s kind of a no-nonsense approach too.” His mentor’s role was not just relegated to teaching traditional grip and the various shadings of brush-playing — he also imparted a wealth of insight into the gigging musician’s lifestyle, including the importance of business savvy and humour.

After his four years under Shaughnessy, Ceccarelli did not feel the least bit inclined to audition for orchestral posts and, instead, set his sights on Berklee College of Music in Boston, where his interest in more improvisatory and exploratory forms began to take shape, spurred on by peers who had a more introverted, European-jazz sensibility in their playing. He recalls John Hazilla, one of his Berklee teachers, offering another liberating piece of wisdom: “You can work all you want to sound like somebody and you can never sound like them — you’ll always sound like yourself.” After his short time at Berklee, Ceccarelli spent a year gigging steadily and practising before becoming the first North American student at the Paris Conservatoire’s jazz performance program. But he was unable to spend much time there, as he was neither able to work in France nor able to forestall the debt he accrued at Berklee. “I’m a dropout from two places,” he jokes.

His journey led him to Montreal in 2003. Accustomed to the competitive energy of the two aforementioned music institutions, Ceccarelli was initially taken aback by the city’s warmth and nonchalance. After catching avant-garde saxophonist and flautist Jean Derome and percussionist Pierre Tanguay playing on TV, he sought out a lesson from the latter, who politely declined and, instead, extended an invitation to play together at his studio. “I was getting ready to pay this guy $100 for a lesson, but that kind of student or post-student attitude doesn’t fly in Montreal. I showed up in Montreal with business cards and shit. I was not prepared,” he says, with a laugh at his own naivety. After forty-five minutes of playing with Tanguay, they went for an hour-long walk in November (to get used to the cold, of course) and then ate lunch. Ceccarelli credits Tanguay with helping make initial contact within the scene, introducing him to fellow improvisers and even calling him in as a sub for shows. Ceccarelli soon began organizing concerts at the now-defunct Zeke’s Gallery, where he became acquainted with players such as Joane Hétu, Lori Freedman, and Derome. He also used the venue to showcase his own ensembles.

One such ensemble is documented on Lieux-dits (2006, Ambiances Magnétiques), which is his first album under his own name, and marks his first serious foray into composing. The music — composed for Frank Lozano and Derome (both of them on sax and other winds), Clinton Ryder (bass), and Steve Raegele (guitar) — is ostensibly jazz-based, but is meticulously written out, drawing on rhythmic and harmonic concepts from none other than Messiaen, as Ceccarelli points out.

On Bréviaire d’epuisments (2010) he formulates a more cohesive image. Never having been formally trained as a composer, Ceccarelli exhibits in these works a reverent disregard for both the purity of the diverse musical elements at play, and the conventions around the idea of fusion. Refreshingly devoid of conspicuous citations and other such trappings, the thirteen pieces seamlessly and respectfully integrate various aspects of his interest and practice. He interesperses solo pieces and ensemble settings of the poetry of Marie Deschênes, and the spare intertwining vocal melodies and the spacious, hovering instrumental sonorities mark a distinct shift from his previous work. Also notable is the absence of anything resembling jazz drumming. The melodic inflections are indicative of his strong connection (as a singer himself) to the Renaissance vocal repertoire, yet the music’s gentle equanimity and harmonic language is undeniably a product of today. Performed by Pierre-Yves Martel on viola da gamba, both Lori Freedman and Philippe Lauzier on bass clarinets, and singers Emilie Laforest and Josée Lalonde, the majority of the ensemble pieces are decidedly slender and melodic, while the solo pieces are intensely focused on metallic percussion drones whose symphonic complexity betrays their singular sound source.

Ceccarelli’s participation in 2012 in the Quatuor Bozzini’s annual Composers Kitchen — a veritable hotbed of emerging voices in new composition — was his crucial initiation into the new music community. It also was one of his first opportunities to identify himself as a composer, without necessarily being associated only with the improv scene. That year, the workshop was a copresentation in England with the celebrated Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, and his work Magnuns was played on both sides of the Atlantic by the quartet. He has since performed with the quartet as a percussionist — when they showcased the work of the Wandelweiser collective in 2013 — and he has also received an ambitious commission for the quartet’s next concert season, which engages musique actuelle supergroup Ensemble SuperMusique in a formation that adds a pair of saxophones and a pair of percussionists to the quartet.

During the time of Bréviaire and the Composers Kitchen, Ceccarelli found himself shifting away from improvisational settings, gravitating instead toward writing and improvising within more deliberate confines — be they through formal structures or in group settings where mutual trust and parallel intentions maximize ensemble potential. “I don’t feel constrained when I play music with a form,” he concedes, noting the great emphasis put on the concept “freedom” within improvisational circles. “My desire to compose has to do with — and I’m not afraid to say this — my desire to control more of the elements that are being played in the music.”

Although his activity as an improviser has become more focused, his practice remains inclusive to numerous improvisation-driven bands, all of which have a very pronounced and distinctive aesthetic sensibility. His trio Subtle Lip Can is primary among these, and tours extensively, ceaselessly cultivating its sound — which is extraordinarily difficult to pin down, yet instantly recognizable. Often exuding a peculiar gruffness, the trio’s brazen exterior belies both mystery and patience, with sound seldom heard outside of more reductionist contexts. Bypassing the more familiar conversational mode of improvisational interplay, textures wriggle, bristle, and undulate over and between each other — yet there’s always a certain poise to the spontaneous alignment of the sounds. No matter how entangled, coarse, or kinetic it gets, clarity prevails, affording ample breathing room to each gesture. Ceccarelli is at his most abstract in this setting, variously reimagining the drum kit as a chorus of deep, forlorn yawns, fleets of corroded trumpets, some sort of industrial menagerie, and many things that are even less tangible. Without any visual cues, it’s often difficult to ascertain who’s producing which sound. Violinist Joshua Zubot unleashes untamed creaks, strident ululations, and sharp scurries across the fingerboard, while Bernard Falaise cajoles his guitar into divulging all manner of secret unearthly utterances. Miraculously, amidst the deceptively tidy cacophony there’s still some well-concealed (either intentionally or not) tie to melody. For the listener, it’s like excavating a hidden tune, only to find yourself enraptured by everything else that makes its way to your ears.

Ceccarelli is also a member of Pierre-Yves Martel’s Quartetski, a band devoted to wayward interpretations, both improvisatory and celebratory, of classics, notably The Rite of Spring, Pictures at an Exhibition, Cage’s String Quartet in Four Parts, and works by Duke Ellington, Erik Satie, and Tobias Hume. Though playful and a touch irreverent, the group wisely resists lampooning their source material; their process is more about extemporizing upon the untrodden paths within these masterworks, while maintaining the fundamental character of the respective works.

There’s also the Linden Project, Ceccarelli’s duo with Kaitlyn Clark (of the early and new-music chamber ensemble Les Amusement de la Chambre), which again evinces, albeit indirectly, his interest in vocal music. Instead of furnishing pulse to Clark’s soft organetto playing, he draws out long phonated resonances that shadow the delicate wafts of tone. Tilting, a band led by Nicolas Caloia (of Ratchet Orchestra infamy), engages Ceccarelli in a more straightforward jazz capacity, while still affording plenty of improvisation and interpretational leeway.

Ceccarelli’s interest in early vocal music has also flourished in the last few years. “I’m known in these three different circles. There’s a whole section of people who think that I [just] sing in this Gregorian Chant choir and that I’m some sort of mediaeval scholar — they have no idea of anything else that goes on. In these other scenes, nobody knows I’ve sung Sunday masses once a month for months and months.”

His ambitious 2013 work Toute clarté m’est obscure is a deeply personal statement, particularly in the way that it reconciles his tripartite artistic existence. Enlisting what amounts to a chamber orchestra of sixteen improvising musicians, as well as a soprano singer, it was presented in SuperMusique’s season that year, within the suitably ecclesiastical grandeur of Montreal’s Church of St. John the Evangelist. The meditative ninety-minute work unfolds through soft majestic billows of pure tone and microsonic textural motion, swelling and receding to varying degrees of opacity. From these harmonic clouds, various motives surface, including foregrounded vocal melodies, as well as significant amounts of spontaneous input and interaction from the performers. The sung texts are Ceccarelli’s own, drawing on his deep connection to various facets of early-music traditions. Even apart from uniting his interests in modern composition, improv, and early musics, the work is emblematic of Ceccarelli’s sensibility on numerous levels. “This is a very personal journey, but listening to different kinds of recent music, I often find myself listening to it and feeling like I have to appreciate something else in order to appreciate the musical experience. I think part of what I’m interested in now as a composer, musically, is trying to simplify that, so that it becomes less important how it’s made. My great passion, so to speak, is Renaissance harmony and baroque music, like Monteverdi and Couperin. I’ve kind of discovered this music in the last ten years, in the same way that I discovered jazz and other things, where I’ve really felt this is ‘my music’ — and of course, those are musics from the past, but I live now, and we are condemned to make music in the present.”

While his affinity for ancient musics reflects his desire to bypass the staunch conceptualism of many recent musical forms, it goes deeper than simple aesthetic questions, moving into the difficult realm of music’s connection to the spiritual — a topic that he approaches, like many musicians, with a degree of hesitation. He’s not one to actively allow his biographical information to be conflated with his musical expression, so specific questions pertaining to faith are not of concern to him. It’s a more general sentiment about what he says as music’s most comfortable place.

“The role that music has played throughout history, up until a very recent point in time, was as sustenance for some kind of ritual, religious, or mystical experience. Within the last hundred years or so it’s been kind of out on its own — which is fine of course: things change — but music didn’t last that long just being based on how it’s been made. We’re already out of that; we’re back to ‘How does it sound?’ That’s what I’m interested in. Music, though, had a long run in service of something else, and I am not necessarily at ease with that and where to go with it.”

As Ceccarelli grapples with balancing tricky relationships between seemingly polar aspects — calculation and spontaneity, tradition and innovation, the befuddling and the alluring, and even the mundane and mysterious — we as audience members are witnesses to music-making which transparently displays its humanity, and somehow implicates the listener in these very questions of balance.

“People living in big cities tend to believe that doing art in smaller places is just orbiting the center. In French, we tend to say that Rimouski is ‘en région,’ countryside. It’s so common in Québec to think that everything done outside of Montréal is a ‘regional by-product,’ something that should be treated as some kind of ‘terroir,’ or special soil, and it’s a courageous, but naive initiative. But for me, Montréal is an outside region. It’s got its typical dynamics that are recognizable as terroir as well, and it’s not the center of our cultural universe, and we are not orbiting around it, at least not in my own perception. I heard someone say that FIMAV should be in Montréal because it’s where the artists are anyways. I believe this is the kind of mentality that needs to be readjusted.” — Raphaël Arsenault, GGRIL

There’s a certain tradition of populist radicalism that runs through Québécois culture. It manifests itself in the special quality of FIMAV, the Festival International Musique Actuelle held annually in the small city of Victoriaville. It’s not a jazz festival per se, not even a largely free jazz festival like Guelph’s. It celebrates musical differences, whether it’s electronica or noise, free improvisation or death metal. It’s the kind of festival where Anthony Braxton and Wolf Eyes might cross paths and even make music together (as they did in 2005), and it presents people like John Zorn and Evan Parker in a hockey arena. This year FIMAV, celebrating its 30th incarnation, presented a band that demonstrates just how deep the impulse to radical music runs in rural Québec. GGRIL (Grand Groupe Régional d’Improvisation Libérée) is a 14-member improvising orchestra that resides in Rimouski. You can get an idea of how far off the usual cultural map Rimouski is by the way a bartender in Victoriaville exclaims, “Did you meet the band from Rimouski?” with the kind of surprise that might suggest Victoriaville is sort of Manhattan or Paris (France, that is, not Ontario), but Rimouski?

It’s about 330 miles northeast of Montréal following the St. Lawrence River. The current population is 46,000, not many for a place founded in 1696. Rimouski has an annual jazz festival that should embarrass a place like Toronto — Ari Hoenig, Steve Kuhn and Lee Konitz are featured at this August’s Festi International de Jazz, while Chaka Khan, Melissa Etheridge and David Clayton-Thomas headline Toronto. Apart from having some idea about what “jazz” means, the little-populated towns of Québec have a streak of distinct radicalism. It might date back to the Québec movement called Les Automatistes. Spearheaded by painters, it also included poets, filmmakers, choreographers and other artists and insisted on the social dimensions of artistic freedom.

It looked like Abstract Expressionism but was much closer to the political roots of Surrealism, including socialism as well as chance procedures and spontaneous unconscious activity. If Québec independence and the sense of community come with the hard, cold soil, the art of chance and spontaneity comes from Automatism. Those roots reappear strongly in GGRIL’s commitment to free improvisation and even to its particular adaptation of conduction. It’s a convenient and flexible tool that gives a group immediate focus; in GGRIL’s hands, it can also verge on theatre of the absurd.

GGRIL started in 2007 and currently rehearses one day a month from 9:00 to 4:00. it already has a discography — starting with a free download on the Swiss Insubordinations label with collaborations with Montréal saxophonist Jean Derome and Les Poules. They followed that up in 2012 with Vivaces, documenting a tour with Evan Parker and Toronto trombonist Scott Thomson. In 2013 they released Combines, a red vinyl LP in a clear vinyl sleeve. It’s the kind of thing you notice, but you’d notice GGRIL anyway.

When I asked Evan Parker about his experience with GGRIL, he thought the group’s location made perfect sense: “They have an art centre in Rimouski where they can work and play while musicians in London are pushed aside by speculation in hyper-inflated property. Now I don’t think it’s practical for musicians to rush off and settle in places like Rimouski, but there’s much to learn from the GGRIL experience and the special qualities that define its practice and music. Among the musicians who make up GGRIL, there are very different kinds of musical experience. That’s what happens when you have a small community: you can’t just play with your twins. The result is fresh exchange and new collective forms.”

One place the community roots show is in the instrumentation. Along with trumpet, three reeds and percussion, there’s a substantial emphasis on guitars and strings: the fourteen-piece band that played at FIMAV included two guitars, baritone guitars and electric bass; two violins, cello and acoustic bass; and accordionist Robin Servant is one of the more prominent solo voices. The group uses the guitars as part of dense orchestral textures that give the group a character of its own.

In the performance at FIMAV, it was apparent how thoroughly GGRIL has entered the elite of Québec’s musical avant-garde. Composer Robert Marcel Lepage appeared as guest conductor, leading the band in both his own Alice — tableau 1 et 2 and Jean Derome’s La courbe du moment, complex works that blurred lines between score, conduction and collective improvisation. GGRIL also played two pieces from their recent LP Combines, bassist and founder Éric Normand’s Jeu de Cartes, based on the random distribution of improvising instructions to the band and also Situation à deux chefs, in which the dual conduction by Normand and violinist Raphaël Arsenault becomes aggressively competitive to the point of warfare.

Normand has been developing his own improvising practice for years, as well as the label Tour de Bras which has issued a host of improvising projects, frequently documenting Québec musicians in their interactions with European improvisers, including Malcolm Goldstein with Thomas Lehn and Jean Derome and Le Quan Ninh. Normand traces GGRIL’s beginnings to 2007: “It came together really slowly. I’d made posters saying ‘Improvisation Ensemble Looking for Members’ and some people came. At that time, I was already playing with a few people in Rimouski: Robin Servant, Patrick Desjardins and my wife, Catherine S. Massicotte. We rehearsed once a month, all day long. Some people were coming, never the same, we were five or six every month, just playing and trying to create compositions.

“At this time, I started to organize workshops or master classes with musicians invited for concerts — René Lussier, Jean Derome, Evan Parker — and the core of the band kind of grew from those workshops. More and more players here were interested in exploring the potential of group composition for improvising musicians. Then we were 9… then 12… then 15, all coming from different musical backgrounds, and we created a band that has a unique sound. Maybe we’re less influenced by what’s going around. If you start an improv band in the city, the people who come in will be people already doing improv stuff. That was not the case with many of the people in GGRIL.

“We started exploring different compositional strategies — graphic scores, collaborations — and did this first web album with Jean Derome. At once, we realized that what we love to do the most is face the unknown. We wanted to create compositions that have no fixed time line, we wanted improvisers’ decisions influencing the structure of the piece. That’s why we have worked more and more, on one hand, with games, and on the other, with conductions. Anyway, that’s what we’re doing now, and it sounds good to me.

“I’ve wanted to do a local improvising ensemble since I’ve been doing improvised music. It’s two completely different things to do improvised solo, duo or quartet music and to create collective compositions in a large ensemble. And I’ve always wanted to do both, because I’m as interested in composition as I’m interested in instrumental playing or in invented instruments and sounds.

“I’ve always been interested in composition but not really in musical notation, so I was feeling that new ideas need new languages. I have in mind this quote from Einstein: ‘madness is always doing the same thing and thinking things will change.’ And I was really into literature at that time: Calvino, Queneau, Perec… You know OULIPO? Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle… the combination of art, mathematics and playfulness. That was a big inspiration at the very beginning. And then we realized these kinds of games create great musical situations, moving like a living composition, with the main elements never occurring at the same time, but bringing forms and making sense anyway.

“And now, as we’re a real band, we also have thoughts about our ‘roles,’ and it’s becoming part of our compositional process. We love conductions because we don’t know at the beginning what is going to happen. So we’ve explored them for a long time now, adding and removing things. We do pieces with 2 conductors, with changing conductors, or with players proposing material to the conductor. It’s live composition. We have to communicate clearly and also to let players play, that’s the balance to find.

Conversations with a few members of GGRIL quickly reveal just how different their paths to large-group improvisation have been, but also the richness of the rewards. The following narratives are adapted from e-mail interviews.

Raphaël Arsenault:

Violinist and frequent conductor Raphaël Arsenault was an early collaborator, starting to play with Normand in 2005:

“I had just gotten out of the Conservatoire de Musique in Rimouski. I had to stop my studies because of illness, and I only defined myself as a musician back then, so I tried many different things during that period. Coming out of the classical music environment, improvising was pretty much the unknown, and I was very frustrated with the overabundance of technique from the classical school.

“At first I was mostly curious, and I guess my participation in GGRIL was a reaction to the classical universe. But as time passed we became connected, and I realized there was a lot more to it than I expected at first. I am glad Éric was so stubborn and dedicated. GGRIL actually died a couple of times, but he always gave it another life, in a very natural and stubborn way. As we played, and as we met with people from around the world playing this kind of music, my reactionariness (I know it’s not a word) faded, and there was suddenly a lot of room for the human behind the musician.

“I guess we all discovered that, in some way, at approximately the same time. We had a workshop with Joelle Léandre, and I remember that it changed most of us, that we realized how much deeper we could get. This is when I made peace with my classical background and incorporated it in the improv, without shame or second thoughts. That helped a lot, for me and for the band, because now we are all different shades and colors combining in motion, but honest ones, and it became very natural and close to our humanity. At first it was very black and white, with some shades of gray. Now it’s a full color spectrum, with gold and silver and darkness and light purples and all.

“I now play more in combination with the others, my own technique is less an issue. I believe technique is always a good tool, it makes you freer, but in a 15-piece band, you can trust the others to complement what you can offer. In that sense, I love GGRIL for its openness. Our recipes, our structures, make it possible to incorporate people of any musical baggage. I feel we live in a world where everyone wants to be able to do everything, but I prefer to be together with people who can do what I cannot, and work in close complicity with them. They also receive a lot from my own strengths. It’s an experience of reciprocity.

“It’s very important for me not to take things seriously. I love the colors in music, they’re my personal goal. If our performance was colorful, playful and honest in the process, and I didn’t feel the urge to please anyone, then it’s a success. We talk a lot after shows. We are very critical about how we can be more playful and cohesive. It’s sometimes hard to hear every musical idea that was thrown during a show, since there are so many of us swimming in the sound at the same time. So we try to find new ways to give a rightful place to everyone and to balance our sound.”

Robin Servant:

Accordionist Robin Servant is a founding member of GGRIL, present since 2007: ”Over the years, there were several lineups, but I’ve always played with the ensemble.

“I’m self taught, playing mostly diatonic accordion and guitar, and I sing as well. I’ve experimented with homemade electronics and no input mixer as well. I’ve always been fascinated with improvised music since I first heard of it as a teenager. A vast continent had opened up for the grungy suburban guitarist I was! I started playing the accordion to play traditional music, which still takes a big place in my musical life, but I soon incorporated it in my improvising practice. For some reason it always felt more natural to improvise on the accordion than the guitar.

“My listening skills have really developed over the years as a member of GGRIL, that’s for sure. In a large band like GGRIL, what and when you choose not to play is often more important than what and when you actually play. I’ve also developed some extended range techniques to push the boundaries of my instrument. All the electric instruments have such a vast spectrum of sonic possibilities with their effects, and I was always stuck with my ‘accordion tone.’ So I found some ways to make my instrument sound like nothing else, developing extended techniques on the accordion that allow me to bend notes and strike harmonics.

“Recently the main change that has occurred in my playing is the addition of a ‘semi-no-input mixer’ along with my accordion playing: I have a no- input mixing console, but one of the entries is actually a microphone from my accordion. That allows me to filter the sound of the mic through different feedbacks and rhythms created by the console. I use that setup in Brugir, a duo with Marie-Neige Besner (who also sings in GGRIL).

“Everything changes from one performance to another depending on the venue, the public, the road we had to drive, etc. I guess the only thing that doesn’t change is my little warm-up routine, which gets me focused and ready to play. Playing with GGRIL is always very ludic and very challenging at the same time. From one performance to the other, there’s always something new, in the way we played together or in the way one musician found something new.

”At first GGRIL was just an opportunity to play with many people. Now I consider the music we make a reflection of the sum of the individuals we are as musicians. It’s mostly a matter of how your individual voice is carried through the global voice that the band is. In that sense, I feel that improvising in a large ensemble is a very rich political experience.”

Rémy Bélanger de Beauport:

Cellist Rémy Bélanger de Beauport has a strong academic background in music, with a bachelor’s degree in composition and master’s degree in music theory from McGill in Montréal. He’s had formal training on piano and double bass, but is a self-taught cellist: “I started free improv when I was 16-17 years old, messing around with amplified acoustic guitar and bass, feedback, inserted objects, noise … I didn’t know other people were working on that kind of stuff too. I was into Nirvana as much as Karlheinz Stockhausen — I still am. To me, messing around with sound was — is — just a natural thing to do.

“I was born in Québec City and moved to Montréal to go to university. Montréal is where I really got to discover and enjoy my first encounters with improv, as an audience member who soon got very active as an improviser myself.

“It’s hard to tell what kind of influence my studies have actually had on my playing. I’m very interested in form and musical structure, from small scale ‘motives,’ to medium scale ‘chunks of music,’ to large scale, the chunks of music coming together, juxtaposed, referencing one another or not. Once again, it’s hard to tell how much of this has an influence on my playing. It sure informs some musical choices, as do my musical tastes in general, but most of it just comes from the body, hearing the sounds, reacting, proposing, being conscious of my breathing, holding the bow, creating the music as it unfolds. To me, development as a musician happens whether you’re playing or not, it’s influenced by all aspects of life, of which playing in GGRIL is just one part among many others. I like to think that when I play, I play ‘myself.’ I don’t play Bach or Feldman, I play what I am at that moment.

“Almost every time I play, I find something new. Playing with GGRIL is one of those moments, I’ll react to what we are doing differently than if I’m solo or with other people. Different people, different instrumentation, different ideas. I like playing in smaller ensembles: solo, solo with dance, duo and trio are the contexts I prefer to work in for free improv. Playing in a large ensemble is a different thing altogether, and joining GGRIL has allowed me to learn to like the larger ensemble experience. The ensemble members are all dedicated musicians who’ll dive into it no matter what, sometimes softly, sometimes forcefully, sometimes strangely, sometimes in the most beautiful way … and sometimes awfully, but that’s a good sign: improvising is all about taking risks, trying stuff out, no self-censorship or trying too hard to do the ‘right thing,’ and messing up has to be part of it, at the rehearsal space as much as in live performance.

“GGRIL’s music is a shared responsibility. When making improvised music, in any situation, you have to trust your band mates, trust that they’ll be inspired and inspiring, trust that they’ll support your ideas or shut you up if you’re making a fool of yourself. We all care about each other in GGRIL, on the musical but also personal level. Before a performance, I think we all make sure, informally, that our friends are in a good mood for playing.

“I take a certain sense of pride from a performance. Most free improv happens in large cities but Tour de bras here in small-town Rimouski has been a catalyst, and GGRIL is one of its offshoots. The ensemble transforms itself with experience and a constant flow of members joining, leaving, coming back (that’s what you get with a large ensemble), and it really has a sound of its own. So after a performance I’m always proud to have shared what GGRIL sounded like that day. There were times where we sucked, times where we were fantastic, but I think every time we perform we all come back with new ideas, new things to work on individually and as a group.”

Olivier D’Amours:

Guitarist Olivier D’Amours joined the ensemble in 2009, “not very long after I first moved to Rimouski. Surprisingly, I didn’t know any musicians from around town. I came from Gaspé, a much smaller town, and I was mostly used to work in solo. Éric Normand heard one of my records and invited me to be part of a workshop given by [percussionist] Lê Quan Ninh. That was my first musical training ever! It was a very nice experience indeed and right after that I was invited to become a part of GGRIL.

“I started playing music about 10 years before I joined GGRIL. I was then in various folk/rock bands. As time went by, I became more and more interested in improvisation, in music as an abstract art form, a bit like abstract painting or spontaneous writing could be. I started working on soundscapes on which I pasted some of my own poetry. I always played music ‘by ear’ and never wanted to follow any kind of musical training. It was probably pretty idealistic, but I wanted my ideas to be free from any kind of dogmas or preconceptions about what music should be. During the first two years I played guitar, I didn’t even want to tune my instrument, because I didn’t want to interfere with what I called ‘its natural sound.’

“At first, it was such a relief to see that other people, like me, could perceive music outside of its usual square! We could just take a black and white drawing with ice hockey players and pine trees on it and call it a musical score. For a lot of people it would have been disturbing, but it was all very comforting (and natural) for me.

“Once you learn that there is no such thing as a mistake in music (at least in improvised music), you start to feel it as a flow that is just 100% organic. Of course, some people in the band have more structure and technique than others, but every type of player has his or her place. It’s great, as a band, to be able to build something amazing harmonically, but the blunders and the little accidents are necessary to make our performances special. It’s also great to build something and feel free to destroy it at any time. There really shouldn’t be anything like a comfort zone in art.

“The more players we are, the more we have to think about ways to restrain ourselves from playing all the time! I think we really got to understand this during the past few years. More and more, we follow simple games (card games, sign languages, etc.) when we play. It mostly keeps us from acting all at the same time, which brings even more dynamics and surprises to our performances.

“Of course, when we play 100% free, we are now able to listen more closely to what’s going on, and to play only when we feel like it is needed. But I think we couldn’t have reached this if we wouldn’t have played all these games before. With time, the group has become a Being of its own, and every piece that we play is like a gigantic, organic breath. (Anyways, that’s how I like to see it).

“My playing has changed in the process. As a solo improviser, I think that I became a lot more patient and humble. I mean, it’s great to be able to capture an audience with an infinite amount of incredible guitar moves, but it’s a lot better to just take the time to deeply feel the moment. When you feel like you have to start doing something, you do it. Then you explore it. When you feel like you have to stop, you stop. I believe that most of the time, it is the musical piece that is guiding us and not the opposite.

“As one of the few ‘electrics’ in the GGRIL, after some years of playing I slowly started to understand my role in the band. I think that we are often the noise behind the voices. Most of the time we play without a PA, so we are that tamed growl that can go untamed to break everything. I often change my pedal board. I make drastic choices and keep only a few effects for every gig, sometimes it is not all tested. I like that kind of unpredictability. I also settle on a tuning to start with on my guitar. I stretch my fingers a little bit. That’s about it as far as the technical side goes.

“Then of course — and it might sound a little bit esoteric — but you want to be in touch with yourself if you want to be in touch with the music. So I always try not only to remain centered, but also to have a good time with the other members of the band before the performance.

“Afterwards I appreciate the ‘magical’ moments (surprisingly good transitions, inimitable textures, etc.) and the feedback from the audience. It’s sometimes hard to get the big picture of a performance when you’re free improvising with a large ensemble. So for me, the audience is often the perfect reflection of that big picture, even if they cannot put their feeling in words.”

Hearing GGRIL:

GGRIL’s music is immediately accessible through free downloads and streaming video. The band’s first recording appeared on the Swiss net label Insubordinations. It included pieces directed by Jean Derome and the trio Les Poules with Joane Hétu, Diane Labrosse, and Danielle Palardy Roger (http://insub.org/insub20/). The group’s wordpress page has performances of conductions with Derome and Michael Fischer of the Vienna Improvisers Orchestra (http://ggril.wordpress.com/). The CD Vivaces with Evan Parker and trombonist Scott Thomson from 2012 and the LP Combines from 2013 can be purchased on-line (http://tourdebras.com). GGRIL is currently recording scores by a wide variety of composers for their next album, Collection, a 3 CD set that includes the pieces by Robert Marcel Lepage and Jean Derome performed at FIMAV.

C’est à une musique d’atmosphère que nous convient Carl Ludwig Hübsch, Pierre-Yves Martel et Philip Zoubek. L’avantage, d’aller rapidement à Martel, dont la viole de gambe, ses obsessions et ses crissements, rehausse un exercice allant de baroque en minimalisme coi et entraîne bientôt piano et tuba à sa suite: la fin du disque en devient même passionnante.

Judge of the Tribunal of Hip Reviewers: “Aren’t you ashamed, Mr. Ricci, of writing now about an album released in 2009?”

Consider me unrepentant, Your Honor. Instead I should feel mortified in admitting that this is the very first chance for Chan’s music to shape up my ears, all the more so in consideration of her coaction with gentlemen whose business was inspected quite a few times here and elsewhere (step forward, Damon Smith and Weasel Walter). However, the wondrously titled Somewhere the Sea and Salt is so good that it deserves deeper immersions, a top-grade effort by a light-sensitive performer.

From the get-go one envisions a conspicuous withdrawal from anything that might have been predictable. The modus operandi animating these recordings is rather nonadjacent in regard to your average solo piano outing. Chan is truly inspired by the expressive properties of the instrument’s reverberation, acting as a medium between the unceasing invisible motility that comprises the core of our individuality and the wood/string interrelation turning her gestures into magnificent crystals — either finished or relatively unsmooth — of acoustic matter. She does not use preparations, still applying disparate means to summon forth vibrational radiance: mallets, eBows, Tibetan bowls, mbiras. The tracks — including the clangorous ones — are all gifted with a spectral perfume, presenting the listener with the refreshing sensation of witnessing events occurring within a higher domain of aliveness. When the Canadian decides to play according to “conventional” know-how (that is to say, employing the mere keyboard) there’s no way to remain disgruntled by even the slightest hint of humdrum tactic. Let’s just say that Chan seems to be aware of what is needed to let a sonic conflict be accepted as natural phenomenon (namely, what it indeed is: the cosmos evolves by contrast, yet the masses keep hopelessly looking for painless resolutions, thick-witted rhymes and abecedarian harmonies to quiesce brains in dire need of a critical fine-tuning).

Chiming intelligence to spare, and what an anti-feminist critic would call “feminine grace” spell out 44 minutes of luminous transport. Episodes like Five-Hundred Echoes and the gorgeously rumbling Eleusinian Mysteries could be utilized as a therapy against the phony worshipping of nondescript masters of nullity. I’d be willing to sleep for days inside this cathedral.