Stuart Broomer
Yves Charuest. Out Into. Coleman Hawkins’ solo saxophone improvisation Picasso in 1948 was a unique event; it has since become a genre, expanded in turn by such creative voices as Eric Dolphy, Anthony Braxton, and Evan Parker, and emerging innovators like Sakina Abdou and Don Malfon. Québécois[...] Read more
2024 Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville The extraordinary nature of Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville (FIMAV) came into sharp focus this year. Last year Michel Levasseur announced his retirement as artistic and general director of the festival, which he founded and shepherded through thirty-nine editions[...] Read more
2023 Guelph Jazz Festival. The Guelph Jazz Festival celebrated its thirtieth anniversary this year, a significant milestone for the forward-looking festival. The festival presented free park concerts in far-flung neighborhoods, which they began doing during the COVID-19 years, as well as ticketed concerts in multiple[...] Read more
Rasmussen / Flaherty / Rowden / Corsano. Crying in Space Mette Rasmussen is a Danish alto saxophonist who has worked in diverse and distinguished contexts, including Mats Gustafsson’s Fire! Orchestra and the all-star multinational quartet Hearth. Here she joins Connecticut-based saxophonist Paul Flaherty, a free-jazz warrior whose wily name for[...] Read more
Joëlle Léandre. Zurich Concert During her long career, Joëlle Léandre has been a constant explorer of the possibilities of her string bass and of exploratory musical languages, moving from creative collaborations with composers John Cage and Giacinto Scelsi to a devotion to free improvisation. This June, L[...] Read more
Ingrid Laubrock. The Last Quiet Place In recent decades, tenor and soprano saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock has moved from her native Germany to an extended stay in England to her current American residency. Through the process she has become one of the most inventive members of the international improvising community, a central[...] Read more
Pauline Oliveros, IONE, Christopher Willes, and others. Resonance Gathering Resonance Gathering is a thoughtful package that documents and celebrates a recent two-year project to perform a Pauline Oliveros work from 1970: To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of their Desperation. The title itself suggests mantra, meditation, and healing ceremony,[...] Read more
Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville, 39th edition FIMAV, or Victo, is a unique institution: a festival in farm country 160 kilometres east of Montreal that presents a range of outside musics—avant-jazz and rock, electroacoustic and noise, etc.—from multiple cultures. Having weathered the COVID-19 years to return to its full[...] Read more
Susan Alcorn, José Lencastre, Hernâni Faustino. Manifesto One of the joys of improvised music is its openness to unusual instruments and novel sounds. The pedal steel guitar, largely restricted to country music, has found new life in the creative vision of Susan Alcorn, whose practice extends to the works of Olivier Messiaen and Astor Piazzolla as[...] Read more
Yves Charuest, Michel Ratté, and Peter Kowald. Montréal, 1985 In the past decade, Montreal-based alto saxophonist Yves Charuest has re-emerged as one of Canada’s most significant improvisers. The LP Montréal, 1985 documents a brilliant moment in Canadian jazz when bassist Peter Kowald, a founding figure of the German jazz avant garde,[...] Read more
2022 Guelph Jazz Festival. The 2022 edition of the Guelph Jazz Festival marked a singular recovery from the rigours of the COVID-19 pandemic, with more presentation venues engaged than at any time in its twenty-eight-year history. Following the cancellation of the 2020 season, the festival’s[...] Read more
Nick Storring. Music from Wéi 成为. In 2017, choreographer Yvonne Ng commissioned Nick Storring to compose music for a piece with five dancers to be performed at the Banff Centre, a circumstance requiring Storring to depart from his characteristically dense works with multiple layered instruments. His solution was a tape piece[...] Read more