Tralala splat! It's avant-June again

This is weird-music season in TO and the Hammer. Why don't more locals know it?

Meant to get this out sooner, but the recent chance encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine a glass of water and my laptop has delayed all kinds of productivity chez Carl. Also: This is a more Ontario-specific post, with apologies to subscribers elsewhere, especially new ones (welcome! thank you!). But much of what I’ll discuss has exact parallels in many other places.

Toronto and Hamilton-area neighbours, are you tuned in to the major experimental jazz series being staged here the next few weeks? Do you know they’ve taken place around this time for years on end? Herein, I’ll hip you to the Tone and Something Else! festivals, but first let’s talk about why you might not have known.

We can work to build institutions and structures—a sad moment of silence here for the gorgeous church and occasional new-music venue, St. Ann’s, destroyed by fire last weekend. But so often cultural vitality comes down to the passions of a few individuals. For decades around Toronto, for instance, the late impresario Ron Gaskin could be relied on to bring us a certain stamp of avant-garde and yet somehow populist performers, from Chicago, Scandinavia, or Saturn. After Ron became too ill to continue, there was a prolonged dip in visits from international jazz/improv artists.

Of course the Music Gallery has been doing some of that work ever since its 1976 founding, but its mandate covers a much wider range of new musics. Local improv musicians have long made a home at the Tranzac,  the onetime Australia and New Zealand expat club that’s sprung open into something grander; don’t miss its fundraising event this Friday with U.S. Girls and Eucalyptus. But that cluster of creators only rarely has the means to bring in their international counterparts. So for awhile it seemed you’d have to go a couple of hours to Guelph every fall to get your dose, or to the Casa in Montreal, or all the way to Victoriaville.

Who will tell the people?

Then there’s the problem of information. Avant-jazz-type musicians and organizers tend to be, frankly, lousy at publicity. That was part of how Ron Gaskin stood out—when I worked at The Globe and Mail, so often my desk phone would buzz to inform me Ron was down in the lobby, making his rounds on his bike to hand over press materials for his latest show in person, so there was no way you could overlook them. (I sorely miss those visits, and you, Ron.) From others, I’d be lucky to get an email, or to find a website anyone had updated in weeks or months. I was amused on my recent trip to New Orleans to find that jazz musicians and venues there have many of the same issues.

There are reasons for it. Almost nobody making this kind of music can afford to hire a publicist, and however strong the DIY spirit, there’s only so much people can do between day jobs, assembling and rehearsing shifting ensembles, booking spaces, and so on. And maybe planning and outreach are understandable weaknesses in circles whose aesthetics centre on creating in the moment. But there also can be a feeling in those realms that doing promotion is distastefully egotistical or commercial. Let audiences come or not, so be it. This isn’t intentionally elitist, perhaps, but it can make a music that’s already perceived as difficult and cliquish even less accessible.

Beyond that, as I’ve written about at length recently, all kinds of cultural activity is having a harder time making itself known with the decline of traditional media. The sharpest loss for non-mainstream work in particular might be the vanishing of the alt-weeklies with their comprehensive listings and recommendations. Sure, the info is usually online somewhere, whether a Facebook event, an Instagram page, or one of the patchy listings sites that come and go. But without those central hubs, few know where to find it, or even think to look.

I should mention here two people who’ve been striving to remedy that: For all kinds of creative/experimental/whatchacallit music, Joe Strutt’s Mechanical Forest Sound blog has been for eons the place to look for listings and concert announcements, along with his own recordings of sonic highlights after the fact. More recently, music journalist Michael Barclay has taken on the task of listing shows that fit his wide (but not all-encompassing) interests in his substack, That Night in Toronto. It’s laborious work and I urge you to lend them your support, and reap the reward of being better informed.

Stirrings in the 2010s

In the few years before the pandemic, I was going through some burnout on live local music after a steady decade-and-a-half or so of constant showgoing. So I can’t just blame poor publicity and the media environment for the fact that I wasn’t fully aware of Tone and Something Else! in their early years.

I missed it when Tone 2017-18, then centred at the now-defunct Jam Factory on the east end, brought in the likes of Ken Vandermark, Joe Morris, Hamid Drake, Anthony Coleman and Oren Ambarchi. I finally caught on in 2019, when its lineup included one of my favourite bands in the world, the Ex. After the lockdowns, Tone put on some of the best shows I’ve seen here in years, such as Mary Halvorson’s Code Girl in 2022; Zoe Amba with Chris Corsano in 2023, with remarkable Belgian bassist Farida Amadou opening (all at the Tranzac); and in their “off season” last month, a breathtaking set by Nate Wooley’s Columbia Icefield at the relatively new Standard Time space on Geary Ave.

Tone curators Tad Mikalchak (who also promotes under the banner of Burn Down the Capital) and Karen Ng (a sax player and part of the Tranzac core) have reconnected Toronto to the wider circuit of that music in ways I haven’t seen since Gaskin’s heyday.

Meanwhile, Something Else! has apparently been going since 2014. It’s more forgivable that I was unaware what was happening in Hamilton until I had more connections there (i.e., people fleeing the Toronto housing market). But even after I did, I could hardly believe that in 2022, for example, we were all utterly ignorant that Wayne Horvitz, Dave Douglas, Robin Holcomb, and others were playing until the week after it all happened.

See above on that kind of missing-information syndrome: The organization behind Something Else!, Hamilton’s Zula Music and Arts collective, directed by Vancouver transplant Cem Zafir, seems to be extremely good at raising funds and enticing artists, but again, weaker at getting the word out.

Setting the Tone

Both Tone and Something Else! are a touch more modest in scale this year than some past ones, and overlap more in programming. No doubt a reflection of the expense crunch across the live-music biz. But there’s still much to hear.

Tone begins this week in coordination with the Labyrinth Western and World Symposium, which actually starts today and includes a lot of free presentations, academic and musical. But the highlight of both events is unfortunately sold out already: the appearance Thursday night at the Music Gallery of poet and cultural theorist Fred Moten, one of the must-read thinkers of the past couple decades in Black and performance studies, doing one of his hybrid reading performances with bassist Brandon Lopez. For those who won’t be able to go, catch the flavour via this video of the two performing in 2022 in their trio with drummer Gerald Cleaver.

The festival continues Sunday with a double release show for solo albums by two locals, percussionist Brandon Valdivia (as Mas Aya) and guitarist/saxophonist Colin Fisher, who for many years have performed together as Not the Wind, Not the Flag. (Tickets here.)

But it’s the following Sunday, June 23, at Standard Time I’m particularly excited about, with the return of the New York duo of saxophonist Caroline Davis and guitar/electronix player Wendy Eisenberg (also of the “avant butt rock” band Editrix). Together they’re an intense pairing, alternately playful and painful, making music that encroaches and withdraws, encircles and cinches. I love the quote from Eisenberg that Tone includes in their bio: “I need to be in a punk band at the same time as I need to be playing free improv at the same time as I need to be playing songs. All at the same time—otherwise none of the practices will work for me.”

Opening for them is France’s Sakina Abdou, a sax and flute player who’s new to me, but based on this brief video clip (and some others I looked at), I’m hoping might be the kind of revelation Amadou was last year. (Tickets here, including a pay-what-you-can level.)

The final show in the series is Wed. June 26, with a cross-genre and cross-generational encounter between Michigan noise-rock band Wolf Eyes and avant-jazz composer, MacArthur fellow, etc., etc., and general titan Anthony Braxton, who turns 80 next year. This isn’t their first meeting: I got to witness that in Victoriaville in 2005, where the conglomeration recorded their live LP, Black Vomit. But since then, I think the only time they’ve recovened was for a couple of shows in Los Angeles last year. And consider that Wolf Eyes was only a nine-year-old band in 2005, but is a 28-years-running project now. Who’s to say what more they’ll all bring to it? All I can say for certain is, bring ear protection.

Opening that night is Toronto’s own superb trumpeter and composer Lina Allemano, who now divides her time between here and the Berlin music scene. (Tickets here.)

Else!where and Else!wise

Meanwhile, this year’s Something Else! fest runs the weekend of June 20-23—though they don’t have any programming on the Sunday evening, so it doesn’t conflict with the Davis/Eisenberg show in Toronto. (Tickets and passes here; note that some afternoon events are free.) The days and nights are crammed with packed shows, often shuffling some of the same artists into new configurations, but here are some names you should catch in one setting or another:

• Sweden’s Matt Gustafsson (sax) and Sofia Jernberg (Ethiopian-born vocalist), pillars of the out-music scene in Oslo, closing Thursday night as a duo, and then Friday night appearing as part of the quintet The End;

• Davis and Eisenberg again, as part of the free library show Saturday afternoon;

• At that same show, Sakina Abdou again, this time performing with saxophonist Dave Rempis, one of the festival’s MVPs this year and a stalwart of the Chicago improv scene;

• Rempis also duets on Saturday night with the extraordinary Bhutan-born, North Carolina based guitarist Tashi Dorji, a Drag City artist who also plays solo at the paid show later Friday afternoon (4 pm at St. Cuthbert’s church)—check out this video for a sample:

• Finally, I must mention the ensemble Beingfive from Berlin on Friday night, led by Montreal-based saxophonist Lori Freedman with a murderer’s row of improvisors: German trumpeter Axel Dörner; Andrea Parkins (U.S.) on electronics and “amplified objects”; Christopher Williams (U.S.) on bass; and percussionist Yorgos Dimitriadis (guess where he’s originally from).

But there are also some names I don’t know, and also some strong projects from familiar Toronto-region artists, so every bill seems worth your while if you can swing it. (Depending, that is, on your appetite for our undying novelty sax ensemble the Shuffle Demons, closing proceedings with a free Sunday afternoon outdoor thingamajig.)

The sweet hereafter

So if you didn’t know, now you know, albeit a bit belatedly. In future newsletters I’ll try to give local readers more frequent heads-ups on worthy shows that you might miss—not with a Strutt- or Barclay-level herculean lift, but with periodic peeks at my own upcoming can’t-miss calendar, perhaps monthly, or six-weekly, whatever you would call that—tri-fortnightly?

Meanwhile, we’ll return to less geo-pinned programming.