Saxophonist-composer Kyle Brenders has assembled a sextet from among Toronto’s community of improvising musicians to perform an extended composition called Ways. Five segments of the work are heard here (Sections 2, 4, 5, 6, and 8) so the recording explicitly resists the notion of definitive performance, as does the music itself. While each segment, according to Brenders’ liner note, “uses a principal motivic element as the basis of all subsequent parts,” the players work independently. The resultant music focuses intently on processes of listening, for the performing ensemble as well as the listener. At every turn, there’s a sense that each member of the group—trumpeter Nicole Rampersaud, synthesist Jonathan Adjemian, cellist Tilman Lewis, bassist Aaron Lumley, and percussionist Brandon Valdivia—is performing at full capacity, interpreting and extrapolating from the notated material, as well as responding to the evolving parts around them. It’s this relational complexity that the listener inhabits, at any point choosing from a number of positions, including the play of texture or the evolution of fragments and phrases as they’re transmuted by the individual musicians. Sometimes playful (Adjemian using his analogue Korg MS-20 to emulate a theremin), sometimes profoundly involving (as in the long Section 6), Ways presents an uncannily composed surface achieved by unusual means.
