It’s an enigmatic name: “Other Voices.” Over coffee at a restaurant on Toronto ’s Queen Street, Montreal drummer Thom Gossage laughed when I asked about his quintet’s name, then explained a bit. The immediate inspiration, it turns out, was Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms: “Me and my girlfriend Isabelle went on a trip to South Carolina, and we were reading a lot of Southern writing – Carson McCullers, Capote, the whole thing.” But Gossage expanded on the idea: “The name comes from the idea that each member of the band has a voice, but also I’m throwing a lot of other voices at the audience during a night. Sometimes it’s not that easy, because if you go for something very free and then try and play a more structured jazz tune it’s very hard to do, because you’re asking a lot from your musicians. Sometimes the free tunes get better and the music that’s more controlled gets worse as the tour goes along . . . ! But that goes with the idea of the group. I personally, as an audience-member, like to hear a lot of things when I go to hear a band. I like it when they mix it up; if it’s ‘out’ all night you’re just turned off. There are guys who play ‘out’ all night and it’s fantastic, but sometimes it’s not a hell of a lot different from old bebop you’ve heard a million times.”

As those words suggest, Gossage’s ear is attuned to all kinds of jazz, from mainstream to avant-garde, as well as a huge range of musics outside jazz; but these catholic tastes go hand in hand with a strong, even polemical, vision of what’s most exciting in contemporary jazz. “I think the beauty about what’s happening today – Dave Douglas is a great example of this – is that you can do whatever you want and it’s valid. The whole dogma of it is gone, at least in certain circles. There’s so much behind us now. We have that last century – we have Coltrane, we have Bird, we have Stravinsky, we have the whole thing – and it’s not the same as it was in the 1950s and the 1960s, it’s not where jazz was a very specific thing. You can do what you want – in a good way! To me the improvising is the part that keeps it jazz. With Other Voices, we all play jazz, we all know about the history of jazz, we all have played the music. Maybe if there’s an Other Voices show that doesn’t necessarily have swing in it, there’s still improv and each member is well schooled in that language, so it comes from that place. But I think that’s what’s happening with all those New York guys and all the exciting music that’s coming out. Those guys know how to play jazz, even though they’re not necessarily going out and playing ‘Satin Doll’!

“I really think the audience is underestimated a lot of times. I know that the music’s ‘weird’ and all that but . . . when you actually get an audience that doesn’t have any kind of dogma or preconceived ideas about it they’re really responsive. Like 20th century music it deals with a lot of basic primal things, like rhythm, texture, volume, dynamics. Those are all things that can hit you immediately. It’s not as intellectual in a way as bebop is.”

That evening’s concert at the Rex was an object lesson in Gossage’s ability to combine the challenging and the accessible. The players seemed perfectly at ease in the music’s intense, odd-metre grooves – an empathy born of years of touring. Individual parts interlocked without necessarily being “together”: sometimes Gossage, bassist Miles Perkin and guitarist Gary Schwartz would articulate two or three rhythmic layers at once, while the twinned saxophones of Frank Lozano and Rémi Bolduc added scorching-hot improvisations on top. As with players like Vijay Iyer and Greg Osby, the complexities can be intensely funky: the band ended their first set, for instance, with a classic one-chord blues jam, built around an off-balance riff that began as a slow grind then started whirring around faster and faster. John Scofield would have been proud. Yet at other times, the music was surprisingly songlike: the climax of “Traditional,” for instance, turned out to be a powerful African-inflected chant.

Gossage emerged late as a leader, with Other Voices (Effendi, 2001), an unusually confident and stylistically fully-formed debut. Over coffee that afternoon Gossage sketched in the musical and personal history that led up to the formation of Other Voices. He was born in 1962, in Beaurepaire (“the suburbs, basically, of Montreal ”), into a musical family: his grandmother on his mother’s side was a fiddler, his grandfather a square-dance caller. Gossage and his three brothers were all intensely involved in music from an early age. “I started off as a singer, when I was 10. I switched to drums once my voice changed. There was always a drum set around. I was playing drums from 11 or something, just crapping around, but I really decided to be a drummer around 14 and got my first set of drums. And with my brothers I progressed through different styles of music. We were real rockers when we were young. Then in high school we all got into jazz together. Then funk and R’n’B in the 1980s. I think the first time I really got into jazz was Bird Symbols, a Charlie Parker record. It had ‘Moose the Mooche’ and ‘Night in Tunisia ’ and everything on it. It just blew my mind, I just loved it. And then I slowly got into Coltrane.”

Gossage entered the music program at Montreal ’s Vanier College , studying classical percussion and jazz from 1982 to 1985; he also studied at Drummer’s Collective in 1989. Though he continued to play jazz – in the 1980s, for instance, he was a member of the Montreal group the Jazz Beards – he also accumulated a diverse professional c.v. as a sideman: studio sessions, Celtic and folk bands, a stint with Les Miserables, a small part on the Cirque du Soleil’s CD Alegria (“You know, ‘Alegri-a,’ when the snare drum comes in, TA-TA-TA. That’s me!”). His mainstay, however, was work as a dance accompanist, which began in 1982. It turned out to be a regular gig – he continues to play for dancers to this day – as well as an important source of inspiration: when Gossage talks about music dance is a constant reference-point, and he expresses a deep admiration for modern dance and its practitioners: “These young dancers – certainly they don’t think they’re going to make money at it, they’re not that delusional. They go and they’re hurling themselves in space – all the injuries . . . – and for no other reason than just that they feel they have something creative to give.” It was also his work for dancers that started him off as a composer. “The first thing that I wrote was for modern dance. I think it was ’86. The pieces slowly became more and more written: my first things were more atmospheric, more soundscapes. But the last dance piece I wrote was completely written – ‘À l’Échelle Humaine.’ It was sort of an evolution that way. I like to draw from all the things – improv and written – but for me as a composer it was important to work on that side of it too, where it’s really written music.”

Other Voices, Gossage’s first jazz project as a leader rather than a sideman, began in 1997. “It started with Kelly Jefferson on tenor, George Mitchell on bass, Gary Schwartz on guitar. Basically it started out when I got a gig at Concordia University – ‘Bop and Beyond’ was the name of the series – and I had to come together with the group and no more talking: ‘You have the music ready? Play a show!’ I was nervous. . . .” The creation of the band was a turning point for Gossage, confirming him in his increasing desire to focus specifically on jazz and on developing his identity as a leader and composer. “I hit 35 or so and I said ‘What am I doing with my life? Is this all there is?’ Luckily I’m with someone who really understands art too, because she’s a modern dance choreographer. And I just said I’m not going to take certain gigs, and she was very supportive. It was a bit of a sacrifice because you just don’t make the bread. You don’t take certain gigs – it’s harmful to your spirit. Right around that time [1999] I got the grant to study and then I got the grant to make a first record. And I really believe it was because I made that decision – that I’m not going to just talk about playing this music, just go out and play it. You follow your bliss, like Joseph Campbell said.”

Gossage was already listening closely to the kinds of stylistically eclectic small-group jazz coming out of the New York scene, especially the work of Dave Douglas and Bill Frisell. Another key influence was Paul Motian, especially the Motian/Frisell/Lovano trio: “I love his writing. It’s very melodic-based, Ornettish. Simple melodies with a lot in between.” A Canada Council grant gave Gossage the opportunity to head to New York for an extended stay in 1999, where he came in contact with a younger generation of musicians: players like Tony Malaby, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Ben Perowsky, Tom Rainey and Kenny Wollesen. “The energy that was there, everybody just working at their stuff – I found it very inspirational. I studied formally with Ben Perowsky and Kenny Wollesen, but it was also about just seeing a lot of shows – five shows a week for six weeks, all the greats. It was more about learning that way, visually, which is really hard to do in Canada compared to the States.”

Other Voices was released in 2001; Schwartz and Mitchell remained from the band’s first incarnation, but by now it had expanded to a quintet, with the twin saxes of Frank Lozano and Rémi Bolduc replacing Jefferson . On the debut album Gossage’s writing ranges from the freebop firecracker of “Sunday in Arnhem” to twisty, quasi-narrative pieces like “Red Hook”; the textures are rich and polyphonic, the five voices crisscrossing in dancing moiré patterns: on “Leuven Country,” for instance, Schwartz’s guitar riff is in 4 while Gossage and Mitchell are playing in 9. As Gossage puts it: “I like movies where the music is telling its own story. Like writing for dance: the music tells its own story, the dance tells its own, sometimes they meet . . . I use that idea compositionally, where not everything meets up all the time, it doesn’t always have to be clean. It’s sort of an Ornette idea I guess. I went to an Ornette show and he said, ‘Well, you can listen to us together, or you can listen to us separately.’ That was his introduction to the show. It made the concert for me! Because all of a sudden I understood it in a different way. Lots of what we do in Other Voices is that half of the band plays in one thing and the other half of the band plays in another thing. It’s different rhythms but it’s not so mathematical. They don’t have to meet up. I like to have somebody playing with somebody else in the band. Dividing it up: it is five people, we have a lot of room to do that.”

The band’s second release, The Now Beyond (Effendi, 2003), is if anything more diverse and ambitious. There’s an increasing restlessness: even the brightest moments, like the breezy freebop waltz “Nomad” or the quirky rock’n’roll of “Swamp Suite,” seem fractured, dreamlike, a little ominous; it’s no surprise when Gossage reveals that the title is his oblique way of referring to 9/11 and its continuing aftermath. Several tracks gain an unearthly sheen from the inclusion of wordless vocals by guest singer Joshua Lebofsky and bassist/vocalist Miles Perkin (successor to Mitchell). Perhaps the most striking pieces are the dense, polyrhythmic tracks like “Ring Around the Rainer” and “The Now Beyond,” which push the first album’s experiments with rhythmic layerings even further. Gossage credits Montreal guitarist Rainer Wiens with pushing him in this direction: “We did a lot of rhythm studies together with our kalimba playing. I think in a way with the first record, because I’m a drummer I just wanted to get away from that. Like a lot of drummers do: a lot of drummers’ records are more dealing with sound and melody than rhythm, initially anyway. I think the second record we were trying to experiment more with rhythm. Even more so now. It’s fun: you’re going in a different direction, you’re trying to evolve musically, and sometimes just doing something different is part of that evolution. Different challenges for the musicians.”

Gossage has become a ubiquitous presence in the Montreal jazz scene, both as a leader and as a sideman performing with an array of musicians who, like him, are creating a hybrid jazz at once experimental and accessible: he’s a member of Joel Miller’s Mandala, Tom Walsh’s NOMA and Phat Hed, Philippe Lauzier and Alexandre Grogg’s Ensemble en Pièces, Miles Perkin’s Common Thread, the Erik Hove Quartet, Catherine Potter’s Dunya Project, and Rainer Wiens’ Follow-Follow. But the drummer’s main project remains Other Voices, which is currently at work on Les chemins de traverse , a collaboration with the Van Grimde Corps Secrets dancers, and is preparing to go into the studio this fall to record a third album. At the end of our interview, Gossage was reflective about the band and about that night’s gig: “I’m happy with the band and I’m happy that it’s still together. It’s true: a telepathy happens. It doesn’t always happen. But some nights it’s just ‘Wow! How did we get there?’ It’s what you live for in this music, those moments where there’s nowhere you’d rather be than on that stage at that moment. I’m not saying it’s always like that. It’s hard when you’re the leader and the composer because you’re trying to get out of that space: you had a vision of this tune, it’s not necessarily going the way you had hoped it would. You have to be a musician at that time, you’re just responding to what’s around you, you’re letting it all go. And I’m getting better at it but I remember at the beginning I just couldn’t put myself into the role of actually playing the piece because there’s so much going on, you’re dealing with the business, you’re dealing with your chart, people are asking ‘Well what’s the form of it?’ right before you go on. I’m more used to it now. I try and put myself in the mindset: well what would I do if someone had just given me that music, and I didn’t write it? It’s hard at the beginning. But it’s really worth it, because when those moments happen and you’re onstage . . . I think it’s a really positive thing to be doing. You go into the Rex today, there’s nothing happening, the stage is empty, no-one’s playing or anything. And come back tonight and there’s going to be five people up there creating something out of nothing. It’s just part of being human.”

 

 

Selected discography

 

As leader:

Other Voices (Effendi, 2001)

The Now Beyon d (Effendi, 2003)

 

As sideman: 

Sky Beneath My Feet, Sky Beneath My Feet (Effendi, 2003)

Ensemble en pièces (Alexandre Grogg, Phillipe Lauzier), Jardin d’exil (Ambiances Magnétiques, 2004)

Joel Miller, Mandala (Effendi, 2004)

NOMA (Tom Walsh), Diversion  (Ambiances Magnétiques, 2004)

Phat Hed ( Tom Walsh, Steve Swell), Phat Hed (Ombú, 2004)

 

Nate Dorward

Coda, May/June 2005