Applications
Susanna Hood & Scott Thomson, Applications, Rat-drifting 2024
Susanna Hood, voice
Scott Thomson, trombone
• “Applications” (Scott Thomson/Robert Hass) (26:17)
• “Traces” (Steve Lacy/Ryōkan) (6:22)
• “Small Song” (Scott Thomson/Jan Zwicky) (6:20)
Liner Notes:
In 2013, my dear friend and key colleague, the late Ken Aldcroft, proposed that I compose a program’s worth of music for his Convergence Ensemble, a group of which I was a founding member in 2005 and to which I had contributed ever since. During that period, Ken, a prolific composer and singular guitarist, sought to expand the range of the group’s book of material beyond his own multifaceted writing, and it made sense that he’d ask members of his group first. We had ample experience with his system of aural and visual cues that allowed Convergence to segue into and out of different species of composed and improvised music, the group’s hallmark. My composition would thus be modular in nature, with different segments serving as what Anthony Braxton, with whom Ken and I worked in 2007, might call pieces of an erector set, a metaphor he has used to describe his own music.
My first idea was the genesis of what has become Applications, a suite of nine songs (or one nine-part song) that sets the poem, “Applications of the Doctrine,” by Californian poet, Robert Hass. Susanna Hood, Canada’s eminent artist synthesising vocal and dance improvisation and interpretation, would be a guest performer with Convergence. The proposal cannot have surprised Ken, who was fully aware of my intensive work with Susanna going back to 2008, first on the copious repertory of songs by American composer Steve Lacy, performed and recorded by my Toronto quintet, The Rent, and then on The Muted Note, a suite of eleven songs of mine, setting poems by P.K. Page and developed as a duo as well as with a range of Montreal collaborators. Ken’s invitation and subsequent approval of my proposal was no doubt risky for him; including guests with Convergence was not a core instinct of his, but he trusted me, admired the hell out of Susanna, and knew that the project held the potential to be hugely generative for his band.
Ever industrious and focussed on the development of his projects, Ken persevered in obtaining commissioning funding for me in 2016, buying me some time to focus, finally, on the project, which myriad others (some but not all with Susanna) had forced me to postpone. One of these, ironically, was my intensifying work with Ken as an improvising duo, manifesting in a record (Red and Blue, Trio Records 2015) and two European tours, the second a delightful three-week jaunt in April 2016. Those weeks together were precious; Ken died of a heart attack in September of that year.
Wracked with grief, I found it difficult to finish what I’d started on Applications. We had tried to forge on with Convergence after Ken’s death, especially in the fulfillment of a November 2016 Canadian tour that he had already booked and coordinated, but the music (none of it mine) was too hard to play both musically and emotionally, was missing something and someone essential. For a while, the Applications material lay fallow and, in my new 2017 appointment as Artistic Director of the Guelph Jazz Festival, I had other, justifiable priorities during the period.
In moments of reflection, though, the material kept calling to me: an abiding sense of potential in the text, a desire for new songs for Susanna to sing, and a determination to fulfill Ken’s ironclad vision. It was through discussions with Norman Adams of suddenlyListen in Halifax around my November 2017 residency that a pall lifted and I could conceive of completing the work, eventually workshopping it with Halifax musicians Andrew Jackson, Lukas Pearse, plus a ringer from Montreal, Emily Denison, the Convergence Ensemble’s remarkable young trumpet player on the 2016 tour. Following that uplifting experience, and with the suite now written, Emily, Susanna, and I started rehearsing in Montreal in advance of the memorable premiere of Applications at the 2018 Somewhere There Festival in Toronto. The trio couldn’t have been called anything other than “Divergence.”
In art as in life, divergences, like convergences, are part of a perpetual dance; after the 2018 performance, life happened, so to speak, and Applications once again lay fallow for years. As of October 2023, following my appointment as Artistic and General Director of the Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville, I foresaw my consistent presence in Montreal virtually every weekend. Within this frame, Susanna and I reaffirmed our desire to develop the music, meeting most weeks to continue doing so, working on linking the composed song sections with different kinds of improvisation. As with The Muted Note, it is composed for different sizes and configurations of ensemble, but is ‘complete’ in a version by a duo of voice and trombone, as I hear it. While I now aspire to perform and record it with different ensembles, I think you’ll agree based on this record.
(Hear our duo recording of the The Muted Note, a provocation by &records producer Michel F. Côté, here.)
The tenor of Applications is like that of the poem itself, I hope. During the 2017 workshop at the legendary Halifax studio, 1313 Hollis, Lukas Pearse asked me if the song(s) is (are) ironic. You can be the judge. The material is –– to quote the title of the Val Wilmer book but also to twist its meaning playfully –– as serious as your life. Applications is dedicated to another departed friend and colleague, Montreal painter and drummer, John Heward, whose image graces the cover of this release. (Thank you to Sylvia Safdie for permission to include the image.)
Complementing the suite here are two more songs that are complementary in themselves. “Traces” is a Steve Lacy song for Irene Aebi’s voice that sets a poem by the Zen monk, Ryōkan. I discovered the song on Lacy’s last recorded collaboration with Roswell Rudd, with whom I studied, briefly and memorably, in 2009, an encounter of a quality that the song lyrics aptly echo. The Rent played “Traces” when the group was active 2007-10, but never recorded it. I composed “Small Song” in 2011, I think; it sets a poignant poem by Jan Zwicky and, appropriately enough, the song is dedicated to Irene Aebi.
My abundant thanks to Robert Hass and to Jan Zwicky for their generous permission to release the songs that set their poems. (I have asked Ryōkan. No response yet.) Including them, this text and the credits below name twenty-one people to whom I am grateful for having helped me directly with or inspired me from afar in this work. Add to this august list a twenty-second, Eric Chenaux of Rat-drifting, for his care and support in releasing this and so much other, great music.
Scott Thomson
Montreal, October 2024
Credits:
Recorded 20 September, 2024, by Ludovic Bonnier at Studio du Chemin 4, Notre-Dame-des-Prairies, Québec; mixed and mastered by Jean Martin at The Farm, Toronto; cover image by John Heward; illustration of Susanna Hood and Scott Thomson by Roslyn Schwartz; produced by Susanna Hood and Scott Thomson; “Applications” and “Small Song” © SOCAN 2024
Robert Hass, “Applications of the Doctrine,” in The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems, New York: HarperCollins, 2010
Jan Zwicky, “Small Song (“It’s the first lesson…”),” in Thirty-seven Small Songs & Thirteen Silences, Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2005