Toronto bassist Rob Clutton’s Holstein Dream Pageant claims for itself the stylistic open-endedness that is the hallmark of contemporary small-group jazz, from Frisell to Holland to Douglas to Motian. Yet while Clutton’s clearly learned much from such players, he doesn’t take the shortcut of appropriating their patented styles, though his music at its best conveys like theirs a simultaneous seriousness and playfulness. Holstein Dream Pageant is capacious and inquiring music, not “innovative” or “experimental” but holding to the instinctive hybridity that is now an essential part of contemporary jazz’s identity. Such a musical approach nonetheless goes against the grain of the Toronto jazz scene, which still remains strongly tied to postbop conventions, but Clutton has gathered around him a number of likeminded collaborators: trumpeter Lina Allemano, saxophonist Chiyoko Szlavnics, guitarist Tim Posgate and drummer Anthony Michelli. Producer Eugene Martynec adds electronics and synthesizer to three pieces.

Most of the tracks are quite brief – four to six minutes – but Clutton’s avoidance of head-solos-head structure in favour of narrative drive means that each piece is a pocket epic. Often he seems preoccupied with the possibilities of musical layers, building them up and scraping away at them like a palimpsest. This process is clearest on “Lunch with John,” a yearning, slightly country-inflected theme (the dedicatee is a banjo-player) which emerges from a welter of electronics and finally returns to it. On “Moderato” electronics are integrated more thoroughly into the group’s sound, giving the piece a whirling centrifugal force and leading to the final downshift into what sounds like a ceremonial dance or pounding worksong. The all-acoustic tracks are equally preoccupied with sonic metamorphosis and rhythmic overlays: “Andante,” for instance, is “a kind of rhythmic hamster-wheel,” as Clutton puts it in the liner notes. “Vessels,” the last and longest piece on the disc, is at some stylistic remove from the rest, borrowing from the microscopic sonic investigations of European free improvisation. The results are brief, makeshift assemblages of whatever sounds are to hand, separated by bands of silence, as if one were listening to a series of broken wind-up dolls sputter into action and grind to a halt. It’s a provocative end to one of the strongest recent Canadian jazz releases.

Nate Dorward

Coda, Nov/Dec 2003