ZuCaMan

Lori Freedman clarinets
Nicolas Caloia double bass
Josh Zubot violin

Steeped in the multi-generational Montreal and Vancouver improvising community, Zucaman is moving away from the decades-old genres of European improvised chamber music and American free jazz. They have found a new form. Unpredictable, untempered, organic, and irregular, the music has, none-the-less, cadence, consonance, transparency and silence. The music has no gratuitous virtuosity - it is dynamic and conversational in structure.

Because the members are extremely active as interpreters of other composers’ music, as well as being improvisers and composers themselves, Zucaman's music has a sensitive, thoughtful quality rife with polyphonic and gestural play. While it can be spontaneously explosive or discretely poised, underlying these extremes there is an unforced and uncanny cohesiveness. Individual expressive impulse and vocabulary take peculiar routes to surprising yet logical conclusions. Independent, improvised lines weave textural changes, producing natural cadences that seem to have been silently planned.

This trio music is uncommon. Whether they are pushing the thresholds of their instruments’ capacities, playing in modes of frenetic angularity, or working in “extended” sound worlds and excruciating stillness this trio is at all times exploring the norms and expectations of musical form.