Amba/Corsano + Amadou + Ways at the Tone Festival

A portion of the international future of Creative Music and a confirmation of its staying power was presented at Toronto’s Tranzac Club’s lager room as part of the ongoing TONE festival in late June. Featured younger visitors were Belgian electric bassist Farida Amadou and Americans saxophonist Zoh Amba and drummer Chris Corsano, with locals Ways taking care of the first set.

Creating an individual approach to the electric bass not unlike what Keith Rowe and others introduced to electric guitar improvisation, playing solo a seated Amadou concentrated on horizontal table-top invention as often as she held the instrument conventionally. Bringing out the instrument’s zither-like and percussion affinities, she ratcheted and smacked the strings with a small mallet and rubbed a hard plastic strip among them. Simultaneously a buzzing ostinato created a steady beat. With the bass held upright, the voltage continuum remained, as she twanged another distinct theme, amplified with echoes, and occasionally leaned into the amp for roaring feedback. Returning to the tabletop she used fingers and palms to create a maze of tough shuffles and vibrations. She completed the set exploring rhythmic frails and fuzztone variation that at one point resembled the middle-section of “Wipe Out”.

Amba and Corsano’s set was a different manner. An experienced associate, the drummer used variations of sticks, mallets and brushes to produce sympathetic rhythms either recessed or almost as loud as Amba’s saxophone screams. Sometimes he concentrated on walloping different parts of his kit, at one point rubbed a stick vertically across a drum top and later hammered an unattached cymbal on top of the snare. Subtlety he showed his percussion command by rotating and catching one stick as he played. Moving between over-the-top nephritic outpourings to extended altissimo screams on tenor saxophone, Amba’s agitated reed outpourings took in tongue slapping, split tones and sour bent notes. Her shakes and smears were cannily connected by Corsano with beats of his own. On piano, Amba’s playing was even less formal. Mostly using elbows, forearms and fists, her playing was dynamic and rhythmic, but with its repeated pounding needed clanks from the drum kits to put it in greater focus. Nadir of the set came when she mumbled a short ditty to her own acoustic guitar accompaniment. Out of character it would have been more appropriately performed in the smaller Tranzac room which mostly hosts folkies.

As understated as Amba was bombastic, Ways, consisting of Brodie West on clarinet and alto saxophone and Evan Cartwright on drums, created a sonic lesson in hushed improvisation. With the drummer frequently vibrating a single snare drum with fingers and rim shot taps, West on clarinet concentrated on expanded breaths, sighs and unaccented air. When Cartwright switched to playing the full kit with equivalent finesse, but more power, West on alto saxophone outlined a full response. Expressing himself through short reed bites and longer squeaks, he eventually reached a dual formulization of clarion then altissimo extensions until Cartwright returned to the single idiophone for near-Africanized bell-like echoes.

Proof that Jazz and improvised music are still evolving in multiple directions, and that local players are as innovative as international ones, this and other parts of the TONE festival lived up to its promise to present notable sounds in the city.

–Ken Waxman