February 22-24, 2013

TRANZAC Main Hall
292 Brunswick Ave, Toronto
directions

advance tickets available online @ eventbrite dot ca

show: Saturday 23 February, 3pm

Succeeding generations keep discovering anew the venturesome excitement of CCMC's free improvisational music. The band has been reinventing itself, with shifting constellations and consistent questing spirit, through four decades. As one of the pioneering free improvisation bands of the 1970s, CCMC toured Europe, Japan, and North America, playing at such major festivals as Musica Nova (Bremen), The Holland Festival (Amsterdam), New Music America (Montreal), and the du Maurier Jazz Festival (Toronto and Vancouver). Guest artists with the band have included such stellar international musicians as Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Misha Mengelberg, Barre Phillips, Malcolm Goldstein, Eugene Chadbourne, Phil Minton, and Christian Marclay. For twenty-five years (1976-2000) CCMC performed regularly at Toronto's Music Gallery, which was founded by the band's original members (Peter Anson, Larry Dubin, Nobuo Kubota, Al Mattes, Bill Smith, Michael Snow, and Casey Sokol).

Today, CCMC is a quartet made up of Michael Snow (piano and synthesizer), John Oswald (alto sax), Paul Dutton (soundsinging and harmonica), and John Kamevaar (percussion and sampler), who carry on the iconoclastic practice of the original CCMC. The music of Snow, Oswald, Kamevaar, and Dutton features individual virtuosity and collective creativity in the spontaneous invention of shifting tapestries of texture and timbre, with process taking precedence and form evolving organically. A CD of the CCMC's concert performances, Accomplices, came out in 2000. This was followed in 2002 by a double CD of concerts with turntablist Christian Marclay. The DVD Reverberlin was issued in 2006, and 2011 saw the release of CCMC Play Double Double on CD and audiocassette. The trio has toured through eastern Canada, the US, and western Europe, in addition to playing often in Toronto, where they are based.

The initials CCMC, by the way, have no fixed meaning, fittingly enough for a continually concocting musical crew.
-Carl Wilson


John Oswald (alto saxophone). World-famous composer and plunderphonic maestro, Oswald has also maintained a career-long improvisatory focus for over thirty years, both as a saxophonist and a contact dancer. He has performed on four continents and can be heard on dozens of recordings, notably his solo recording, Alto Sax (mLab 1980); as a featured guest soloist with the third-stream big band Hemispheres (Artifact1994); and on a 3-CD document of a concert in the year 2000 with pianists Marilyn Crispell, Paul Plimley, and Cecil Taylor, (Victo, 2001). His other notable recording dates are Bloor (the Dominic Duval Trio with David Prentice, violin) on CIMP, and Dearness (on Spool), with guitarist Fred Frith and cellist Anne Bourne.

Paul Dutton (soundsinging, harmonica). Ranked among the world's leading exponents of oral sound art, Dutton has toured extensively across the Americas and Europe, and has released five solo sound recordings. He was for eighteen years a member of The Four Horsemen, a literary voice-improvisation group that achieved an international reputation. His literary works include books of poetry and fiction. His voicework with musicians and composers spans the genres of folk, jazz, free improvisation, and music theatre, and he has collaborated with such artists as Phil Minton, Bob Ostertag, Lee Ranaldo, Jaap Blonk, R. Murray Schafer, and Trevor Wishart. He joined CCMC in 1989.

John Kamevaar (percussion, electronics). Sound artist, visual artist, and musician, Kamevaar first played in CCMC in the '80s and early '90s, joining the band on numerous international tours and playing on the 1994 CD Decisive Moments. In addition to his activities with CCMC, Kamevaar kept up his visual-arts practice with three exhibits during the '80s, formed the industrial-ambient-noise project Kaiser Nietzshce with Thomas Handy and David Scurr, issuing six recordings and giving live performances between 1987 and 1991, and produced soundtracks for the feature-length art films of Carl Brown. He continues his sonic arts practice today in solo and collaborative contexts, and in 2012 rejoined CCMC.

Michael Snow (piano, synthesizer). A founding member of CCMC, Snow's musical career began in the '40s when he played with such jazz greats as Pee Wee Russell, Jimmy Rushing, and Cootie Williams. In the late '50s and '60s, he led his own groups in early experiments in extended improvisation, and his 1964 film, New York Eye and Ear Control, has a soundtrack by Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, Roswell Rudd, Gary Peacock, and Sunny Murray. Snow has performed solo piano in the U.S., Canada, and Europe, and has issued many recordings, including the infamous The Last LP CD and the acclaimed Snow Solo Piano Solo Snow, a three-CD set documenting his playing from 1948 to 1997.

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