Press Clipping

Playing the Links

by Mike Chamberlain in Hour (Québec), November 23, 2006 [3794]

Marianne Trudel joins Mark Dresser and Lori Freedman for a celebration of interconnectivity.

Pianist Marianne Trudel has been quite active on the Montréal creative music scene for the past couple of years. She plays around town regularly with her trio (including bassist Morgan Moore and drummer Robbie Kuster — you can catch them this month at a number of Maisons de la Culture in the city), she teaches at Cégep Saint-Laurent, she helps organize the OFF Festival de Jazz, and she is working on a master’s degree in ethnomusicology, with a dissertation focusing on Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Besides that, she’s studying composition for symphony orchestra.

"To a lot of people it seems really disconnected that I’m doing so many things," she says. "But to me, I see clearly why I do things, how it’s connected — the AACM, the symphony orchestra, the jazz trio — I am interested in creativity and meeting people in a deep way. I’m interested in the links between the music and society and the way people interact."

One of those interactions has been with master bassist Mark Dresser, who came to prominence with Anthony Braxton’s great quartet of the late 1980s and has been a significant artist on the creative music scene since then.

Trudel had a chance to play with Dresser informally at a workshop at the Vancouver Creative Music Institute in June 2005. Since then, they’ve kept in touch, with the idea of performing formally at some point.

Trudel has also been hoping to gig with clarinettist Lori Freedman, quite prominent herself lately with a new album on Ambiances Magnétiques, Lori Freedman’s 3, and a cover story in the current issue of Coda magazine.

Happily, these plans have come to fruition, and this week Trudel, Dresser and Freedman will join forces for what will no doubt be a very exciting program of original music.