Reed sections have been part of jazz’s performing vernacular since its earliest days. But only with the freedom that arose with modern improvised music in the 1960s were the woodwinds able to stand on their own. In the right hands, with the right ideas, a group consisting only of saxophones and/or clarinets can produce satisfying sounds that don’t need the intervention of a rhythm section or even brass for additional colors. All of the fine discs here demonstrate that. […]

The difference may result from geography or personality, but in sharp contrast to the concentration on solemn experimentation which characterize the Double Trio and Keefe Jackson CDs, Montreal clarinetist Robert Marcel Lepage’s Canard branchu in the main promotes unselfconscious merriment. With his reputation for creating soundtracks, Lepage sets his compositions here in a fanciful swamp populated by the insects, birds and amphibians. Moreover while many tracks on the other CDs appear to be evolving improvisations, Lepage’s are self-contained, songs. Nonetheless while the sounds may be decorous and controlled, they’re not formal and mix good fun alongside technically clever improvisations. The band make up is different as well. The core band is Jean-Sébastien Leblanc and Pierre Emmanuel Poizat on clarinets, Guillaume Bourque, bass clarinet, André Moisan on basset-horn plus bassist Fraser Hollins, and drummer Pierre Tanguay, with Nicolas Borycki adding electric organ on three tracks. Bass clarinetist Lori Freedman joins the band on one track and plays another unaccompanied; while the composer plays solo and duets with Moisan on two different cuts. With steady rhythm section work, the others are freed for supple, contrapuntal work, resembling the score for a kids’ show on one hand and Duke Ellington’s arrangements for clarinet trio on the other. Characteristic is Le Pelleteur de nuages, whose church-like harmonies courtesy of Borycki underlie a theme that touches on Can’t Help Falling in Love plus Creole Love Call. Bourque shines on Maringouins en escadron as tremolo horn parts sound as if they come from an accordion; whereas Fondation: qui sommes-nous is a pseudo-tango that contrasts the basset horn’s serene chalumeau with slick drum patterns. Chalumeau is also in use on Mi-figue, mi-bémol, Lepage’s solo feature, that improvises succinctly on the melody line, whereas on her own feature, Freedman’s variants on Le Grand héron et la demoiselle use hectoring cries, irregular vibrations, split tones and spetrofluctuation to deconstruct the theme into individual atoms, then reconstructs in a pointillist fashion. […]

In trio or larger formations, each of these CDs confirms the long-term viability of woodwind groups creating exhilarating sounds.

Quatuor Bozzini is poetry, sweat, talent, idealism, determination, love, survival, fate, and a wonderful wild dance with the spirits. For fifteen years, the Montreal ensemble has steadfastly explored the notion of what contemporary music means today. The players are irrepressible creators and innovators, whether working in the far lands of experimental sound art, the close weave of musical miniatures, or the collaborative dynamic of multi-arts projects.

Sitting around a large dining table with cellist Isabelle Bozzini, violist Stéphanie Bozzini, and violinist Clemens Merkel — the family and founding core — one immediately senses the shared pulse and fine-tuning of this intimate creative unit. Violinist Mira Benjamin, who joined in 2011, is filing scores downstairs in the combination archive-office-rehearsal-space of this ever-expanding, contemporary-music cottage industry. Sunlight slashes through a kitchen window, and the table is crowded with notes, scores, portable computers, and glasses of water. We take a breath, wait for the beat, and begin our conversational stroll.

“Do something you have never done before and never dared to do.” This is a key directive the quartet gives undergraduate composers attending the annual Bozzini Lab at Simon Fraser University, which is organized in collaboration with Owen Underhill and Christopher Butterfield. It could just as easily be the mantra the players recite in the mirror each morning. It also reveals their dedication to cultivating new sources of creative stimulation in a blossoming network of collaborators. Provocation and industry fit together nicely for these new-music explorers. In the lab, Isabelle Bozzini notes, “You have ten people trying different things in a variety of directions.” Crazy exercises and experiments become studies and departure points for future pieces the quartet might play in its annual Composer’s Kitchen, created in 2005 to facilitate a hands-on approach to furthering the development of new string-quartet compositions. The Kitchen is the opposite of the master class, where established values and forms are the models; it is a space where, as British composer and 2013 Kitchen participant Seán Clancy observed, in an email to the quartet, “There is no such thing as a silly idea.”

A determination to work outside the box and pursue a radical agenda is only part of what powers the players. Merkel is adamant about the inseparability of music and daily life. “Our radicalness is our position in a social context,” he says. “I am trying to shape the milieu and society around us by questioning all aspects of my music, not just accepting that things are a certain way and you just have to sell your concert and play. Playing music for me is about shaping my society.” This attitude expresses the very essence of how the music Merkel plays sounds to the listener. In an article discussing the history of the string quartet and its parallels with social evolution, published in the University of Montreal journal Circuit, Merkel notes that after 250 years little has changed in string quartets, unlike other musical formations and society in general. Collectively, the players focus on influencing the traditional model.

Radical or not, this level of engagement permeates everything the quartet does, and is another cog in the mechanics of its success. The members share rehearsal leadership roles and work collectively on programs and on developing ideas. Aesthetics and musical interpretation are discussed freely. They support, critique, and explore together, and this creates the quartet’s unique sound. “We have invested a lot in a certain sound and approach,” Isabelle Bozzini explains. “We are looking for a direct, raw quality affecting the music’s flow and intentions.” Some of this sensibility comes from the influence of Bozzini’s work in early music — for example, basso continuo playing.

Stéphanie Bozzini calls the quartet’s aesthetic “an uncompromising approach to sound — a hit-or-miss situation.” The focus is always on the music, on making sound, and never on the romantic notion of the virtuoso musician. No one bows to the first violinist in this quartet. For Merkel, letting go of this custom has conscious social implications, and is one example of how daily life and music fuse.

“We can’t fit everywhere… only in very particular places,” explains Isabelle Bozzini. “There is no flexibility in our engagement with the flow of the music.” This is evident the moment you see the quartet on stage.

Dim blue sidelights fade up and four string players appear in ghost-like disguises: powdered faces, barefoot, rumpled clothes, dishevelled hair, and skin marked with cuts, bruises, and dirt. The centres of their hollow eyes are glassy white, as if their eyeballs had flipped backwards to see within. This was the scene that opened the theatrical version of George Crumb’s 2011 work Black Angels, just one of the quartet’s plunges into the kind of cross-genre experimentation so prevalent in Montreal’s contemporary arts scene. Une idée sinon vraie, which had its world première in 2012, was created by dancer-choreographer Marc Boivin in collaboration with composer Ana Sokolović and the quartet. In various scenes from these two hybrid creations, the violist is carried across stage by a dancer, violins are played upside down, and the cellist is carted around on a mobile platform. The music remains intense, precise, evocative, and imperatively immediate.

The quartet has also been exploring sound and image through several video — music projects. In Les petites portes (2011), a series of short films exploring the interaction between music and video projection, twenty-four tiny doors open like an Advent calendar to reveal playful sound and visual worlds. In 2014, the ensemble plans to create a “tri-alogue” in collaboration with video artist Nathalie Bujold and Canadian composer and Kitchen participant Taylor Wood, deriving sound from images and vice versa.

Make yourself available as a human being. Idealism paired with a do-it-yourself approach make Quatuor Bozzini both contemporary and traditional. The players ask, “What do we need now?” and then search for answers. The array of seasonal, recurring workshop projects for which they are recognized bears witness to this process: the Composer’s Kitchen, the Bozzini Lab, and the new Performer’s Kitchen (launched December 2013).

Ever since it began, the Composer’s Kitchen has attracted international attention, and it recently spawned a three-year collaboration with the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. Mentors Michael Oesterle from Montreal and Laurence Crane from London are coleading the 2013-14 Kitchen. In Crane’s humorous daily “menus,” contemporary composers were introduced as chefs: Philip Glass prepares melon sorbet served with fluted hazelnut Twizzles; Sir Harrison Birtwistle, a boiled egg. But what happens in the kitchen day-to-day is even bolder. “There is no head-chef-sous-chef relationship. We are all explorers working towards the same end result, to create the best possible music we can create,” Séan Clancy asserts. “As composers we can continually ask, ‘Can I borrow a shirt?’ and the quartet will always reply, ‘Yes.’ ”

“We don’t know what will happen or how it will work, but we are inviting musicians into our world,” Merkel says of the ensemble’s newest Kitchen, which shifts the focus to performance, shaking up the string quartet formation and encouraging young musicians to take risks. Montreal guitarist Marc Olivier Lamontagne participated in the first edition, which involved two weeks of exploratory workshops that included improvisation and sound exploration beyond scored notation, followed by a series of performances at La Sala Rossa.

Whether you call the quartet’s development model “sustainable,” “organic,” or “cottage industry,” it holds few mysteries. Philosophical musings on how to keep a contemporary string quartet vital are coupled with conscious planning and incessant labour. Everything ticks, thanks to rigorous discipline, dedication, endurance, flexibility, vision, and talent. Now entering its fifteenth anniversary year, the quartet exhibits the maturity of a singular identity.

Montreal composer Nicole Lizée, winner of the 2014 Jules Léger prize, is composing a new work for the quartet. She told me the ensemble “brings a commitment to depth and transcendence that goes beyond the ‘notes on the page.’ To work with them is to engage with a cohesive, passionate, and adventurous entity that is greater than the sum of its considerable parts.”

All rooms connect in the Bozzini musical home. Music simmers in the kitchen and lab. The 2013-14 season of their annual curated Montreal concert series, Salon, included new work by some of Quebec’s most talented young composers: for starters, Simon Martin’s homage to painter Jean-Paul Riopelle Icebergs et soleil de minuit — quatuor en blanc, and the première of a new quartet by Maxime McKinley.

Critical commentary and recognition for the ensemble accumulates, but this is secondary to the day’s rehearsal, renovating new office and rehearsal space on the second floor of their building, or waiting for confirmation of a tour of Japan and Korea in the autumn of 2014. Still, the modernist caveat of “make it new” continually inspires their efforts. A conservative tradition in performance doesn’t question things, Merkel says; it’s as if “the truth comes from higher up.” Perhaps for Quatuor Bozzini the truth comes from inside the circle rather than elsewhere. Merkel’s intention is for the music to flourish creatively, by taking the liberty and responsibility of consciously opposing some common- sense notions. “In some ways it is old-fashioned… the power and audacity to take decisions on your own, instead of just repeating what other people have told you.” It seems ironic and noteworthy that inspiration for renewal is so often found in the past.

Our conversation is suspended but not finished. They must break and rehearse for the Huddersfield Festival soon. Someone is sanding a wall downstairs, and the sound of renovation hastens the end of our conversation. This discussion of their work triggers waves of musical references, names, texts, and images, plus a flood of forwarded documents, links, recordings, and videos. The November sunlight has softened and shifted through the house. Everyone bustles off to tasks that must be done before rehearsal: phone calls, emails, scores to verify. The intricate human machine clicks forward. Soon, in the downstairs practice space, Quatuor Bozzini will tune, discuss the day’s practice, open scores, and shape, explore, and play.

The songs on The Muted Note are an outgrowth of work made by trombonist Scott Thomson and singer-dancer Susanna Hood as part of The Rent, a Toronto quintet that was initially dedicated to performing the music of the late saxophonist and composer Steve Lacy — including his extensive setting of texts ranging from Lao Tzu to Gregory Corso. That experience led Thomson to compose this suite of song settings of poems by P. K. Page, a project that started in 2010, following Page’s death at age ninety-three. The suite was written in Montreal under the supervision of Jean Derome, with whom Thomson was studying at the time. Thomson has arranged the suite in quintet form for The Rent and in this intimate duet form for voice and trombone heard on The Muted Note. A version with choreography by Hood will debut in Toronto in September 2014.

The title of the suite comes from The Understatement, the penultimate poem in Page’s Cosmologies:

I speak not in hyperbole,
I speak in true words muted to their undertone,
choosing a pebble where you would choose a stone,
projecting pebbles to immensity.

For where love is no word can be compounded
extravagant enough to frame the kiss
and so I use the under-emphasis,
the muted note, the less than purely rounded.

Thomson’s work follows from Page’s sense of the undertone. What emerges is a kind of dance between voice and trombone, between word and sound — a subtle counterpoint between conjoined melodies and ideas of voice, always in close connection to the gestural power of Page’s phrases. If there is a tone of reserve, a kind of deliberate precision in the setting of Page’s phrases, it may exist to establish a kind of reverence for the poems, a desire to present as well as represent. But as the suite evolves, the music and words sail further, both together and apart. This Heavy Craft extends to a stirring Hood improvisation with multiphonic throat singing, a vocal technique that’s reflected later in Thomson’s sustained multiphonics on The Mole. Blue takes the title literally, exploring the range of jazz vocalizing from liberated exuberance to clearly ironic cliché.

The Muted Note is a striking accomplishment — an almost naked work, in which unaccompanied trombone and voice are frequent (it ends, for example, with a recapitulation of the opening As Ten, As Twenty, now for voice alone). One does not hear these episodes as the work of individuals but as part of a complex ensemble of poet, composer, and interpreters. The Muted Note ultimately resonates like Page’s galvanized language itself.

The Grand groupe régional d’improvisation libérée (GGRIL) is one of Canada’s few large improvising ensembles, a feat made more improbable by their location in relatively isolated Rimouski. From a population of 46,000, bassist Éric Normand has managed to assemble a group of up to fourteen people that has begun to cultivate its own identity, evidently using chance strategies and gaming procedures as well as free improvisation. The version of the Grand groupe heard here has ten members, with instrumentation emphasizing strings (including electric and acoustic basses, electric guitars, violin and cello) and percussion, complemented by the distinctive, often melodic input of accordionist Robin Servant and trumpeter Alexandre Robichaud.

The group’s music is as distinctive as the format of this release, a startling red vinyl LP in a clear vinyl sleeve. The use of chance methods creates unpredictable textures that continually surprise, including the mysteriously isolated, abstracted passages that arise in Normand’s two-part Jeu de cartes, and the moody depths that characterize Oui, cela pourrait commencer ainsi…, a piece literally titled with a description of its spatial evolution. The sudden overlaps and spiky intrusions of Situation à deux chefs are an inevitable outcome of its method. Dedicated to Butch Morris, the founder of conduction, who died in January 2013, the piece takes conducted improvisation one step further with both Normand and guitarist Robert Bastien acting as conductors.

Folk music is the well, pure and simple. Why musicians are drawn to a particular well can be complex; but, almost always, folk music represents the most essential means for personal statements, a starting point that grounds and gives context, regardless of how far afield a musician roams from the conventions of a given folk music tradition. In recent decades, folk music has been a beacon especially for Europeans, partially in response to American hegemony, shifting national borders, and the lingering legacy of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and political and cultural repression. Bottom line: Whatever good there may be in a particular people — and the recent passing of Pete Seeger is emblematic of this — it can be traced from their folk music. And, perhaps ironically, folk music is one of the better means of waking one from the nightmare that is history, if only because folk music has the aura of prehistory.

That aura shines, albeit refracted by well-developed post-modern sensibilities, on both on Eviyan Live, which documents the 2013 Victoriaville festival performance by the trio of Czech singer/violinist Iva Bittová, guitarist Gyan Riley and clarinetist Evan Ziporyn […] Both albums have ample charm, primarily located in the voices — Bittová’s has an incomparable gliding lightness in its upper register, and smokier tones in her lowest notes, while Torto’s leavens its operatic capacity with sensuous, occasionally sultry color.

Still, both albums are collective efforts […] Ziporyn’s fluid work frequently dovetails Bittová’s vocalese with supple ease, while providing contrast to her often scampering violin in terms of timbre and, when he switches to bass clarinet, pitch. Playing an acoustic guitar, Riley reveals a familiarity with flamenco, gypsy and other European guitar traditions, as well as the boldness to interject an incisive run or strummed flurry reminiscent of Ralph Towner’s startling early work. […]

The main difference between the two albums is one of tone, traceable in part to regional differences […] There’s a peasant whirl to stretches of Eviyan Live […]. Despite their differences, Eviyan Live and Heureux comme avec une femme finely complement each other, as they tap if not the same well, then the same aquifer.