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Sunday 14 June 2015
Array Space (155 Walnut Avenue, Toronto)
8pm
$10/pwyc
8pm
Temporary Ensembles
9pm
Renegade COBRA
Chris Adriaanse (bass) Ken Aldcroft (guitar) Anthony Argatoff (alto saxophone) Ali Berkok (piano) Emily Denison (trumpet) Robert Diack (drums) Jay Hay (tenor, baritone saxophones) Matt Miller (laptop) Paul Newman (soprano saxophone) Karen Ng (alto saxophone) Craig Pedersen (trumpet) Rob Piilonen (flute) Heather Segger (trombone) Joe Sorbara (drums, COBRA prompter) Scott Thomson (trombone) + others TBA
Temporary Ensembles are born, live short and potentially magical musical lives, and then sublimate into thin air. Their births involve a balanced merging of black arts as strange dice are selected and rolled and initiates are invited to make random selections with life-altering consequences. Their lives are intense, contingent, dripping with joyous risk and ugly beauty. They conclude with a sudden intake of breath that always already tastes of the moment after an end that already is. And then there is another.
Perhaps the most famous of John Zorn’s gamepieces, the mind-bending rules of COBRA are shared around the world amoung adventurous musicians but never written down. There are hand signals and cue cards and headbands and, most importantly, astounding musical discoveries. Joe Sorbara has been studying COBRA for roughly fifteen years and has compiled its rules with the help of Dylan van der Schyff, Reuben Radding, and John Oswald; in community with friends and colleagues; and from the bits and pieces of information that can be found in books and online if you look hard enough.
Since Zorn himself will not be prompting this evening, it will be a renegade performance of COBRA.
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