show: Friday 21 February, 8pm

Following his talk, David Lee will perform on double bass with a group that foregrounds the work of alto saxophonist Eric Stach. Since the 1960s, Stach has been pursuing an unrelenting vision of "free jazz" from his home bass in London, Ontario. Artists such as Dennis Brown, Kim Lundberg, Doug Innis, and Peter Kowald are just a few of the many players who have participated in Stach's Free Music Unit. A central influence on several generations of Canadian players, Stach is appearing in Toronto for the first time in many years, along with his London compatriot Terry Fraser on drums.

Similarly, guitarist Stuart Broomer has been active in music since the 1960s, when he was a pioneering double bassist in the nascent Toronto improvising scene. After studying piano at the Royal Conservatory, he made his first record, "Conversation Pieces" with Bill Smith in 1976, and maintained a longtime duo with drummer John Mars before deciding to devote most of his energies to writing. As well as writing for Musicworks and Point of Departure, he is the editor of Secret Carnival Workers: The Paul Haines Reader (Coach House 2007) and the author of Time and Anthony Braxton (Mercury 2009).

Guitarist Arthur Bull has been active sporadically on the Canadian free improvisation scene since the '70s. His music career starts in Toronto, where he was living when American free jazz and European Free Improvisation began to stir interest in Canadian musicians. He took an active part in the communities of artists active in the '70s and '80s, playing with the CCMC --Toronto's longest-running free improv group--Michael Snow, the Bill Smith Ensemble, the Paul Cram Ensemble, David Prentice, John Oswald, and Paul Dutton. He occasionally accompanied the spoken word/sound poetry quartet the Four Horsemen (Dutton, Rafael Barreto-Rivera, Steve McCaffery, and BP Nichol) and shared the stage with such luminaries as Derek Bailey and Roscoe Mitchell when they were in town. In 1990 he moved to Sandy Cove, a small village of fishermen in Nova Scotia. Momentarily disheartened with music, he focused on his writing, publishing Hawthorn and Key to the Highway. In 1996 he hooked up with Daniel Heïkalo, another experimental guitarist--this one from Montreal--who had moved to the Maritime province a decade earlier and lived nearby. The duo has been playing regularly since 1999. The release of the CD Dérapages à Cordes on the label Ambiances Magnétiques in 2000 marked Bull's "comeback" to public music. A solo disc, Guitar Solo, followed in 2001 on his friend's imprint Heïkalo Sound Productions. In May of that year, the group appeared at the Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville. In 2002 they performed at the Guelph Jazz Festival and Guitarévolution (Montréal).

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