It’s an interesting question, how to re-enter a correspondence that’s gone by the wayside. ‘Cause that’s what this website is: letters to pen-pals unknown. Hey there, you! It’s hard to know what to say! I see that the last time I wrote, I was getting excited for the Rex Hotel residency performances of the Lanka Suite in February 2014. More than two years ago. Heh heh… turns out I’ve been keeping things from you…

But the catch-up can be quick, because since then, only three really big things have happened:

THING NUMBER ONE:  60×60 Dance 2014 at the Harbourfront Theatre

What is that, you wonder? Funny you should ask, there’s a tiny interview right here that explains everything in a couple of minutes flat.

And Look! Here they are! Super-fast! All the dancers! All the dances! Kind of.

THING NUMBER TWO: The Lanka Suite 2015 at The Music Gallery with GREX and Jane Bunnett

It was a week of rehearsal with an amazing 15-piece ensemble, crowned, in performance, with the video art of Nilan Perera;

the kind of amazing all-music-all-the-time week that passes at such an intensity and with so much incredulous gratitude that it does, predictably enough, seem like a dream. But never fear: we do have material evidence.

Seems minimal, and it is, but that’s because the ALBUM is still in the works. The ALBUM, which despite the fact that a year has passed since the raw material was recorded in the Studio at Canterbury Music Co., is still in all-caps in my head because it is still very much an ongoing project. So, ALBUM it shall remain, until it either contracts into an album, or expands, into the LANKA SUITE ALBUM, and becomes a real object in the world, which I can share with you, cher pen-pal-de-mes-rêves.

But if, in the meantime, you’d like to know a bit more about it, here’s an interview by Lise Hosein with me about it on Jazz FM 91, that I really like.

THING NUMBER THREE: The Tova Kardonne Quartet

Ali Berkok and Nick Fraser and Luan Phung and I are playing old and new compositions of mine all over the place this Spring. Raw and wriggling, juicy and delicious, stripped down and naked, compared to the many clothes of all the large-ensemble music I have written before, I’m delectably excited to have these giants for collaborators. Here come all of the limping-dancing feelings. One performance snuck up and happened on April 5 at the Tranzac, but more are coming! May 31! June 19! check the performance calendar!

And there have been many adventures: backing up Tanya Tagaq at the 2014 Polaris Music Prize gala, in the Element Choir… improvising underpinnings and harmonies with Andrea Kuzmich’s Brou-la-la for the Day of Delight in Dufferin Grove… singing in Juliet Palmer’s composition Burble, which gives voice to the Wonscotonach/Don River…. playing with Adam Rudolph at the Music Gallery/AIMToronto inaugural January 2016 Toronto incarnation of the GO:Organic Orchestra… creating performance art with 17 musicians and dancers in an all-night takeover of the Tranzac in Colin Anthony’s immersive creation Bleeding True coexisTense #3 in April…

UPCOMING

I’ll be participating in the Toronto Creative Music Lab, so, if the gods of composition favour me (wouldn’t want to assume… tricky li’l creatures) I’ll have a composition for instruments as-yet-unknown performed on Friday June 24… more on that, anon…

Here’s to staying in touch, oh-pally-oh-penny-pals.