Music from Brodie West; Florian Hoefner; James Hurley; and Benton Roark

Reviewed by Luke Quinton

 

“Won’t nighttime reawaken and won’t it be familiar?”
— Karen Solie, from “Affirmations”

I’ll come clean. I don’t really want to write arts criticism anymore — since the pandemic I seem to have lost my taste for it. Apparently my mind is elsewhere and shows no signs of stirring up to talk about an artist’s intentions … derivations. I remember how, in the wake of hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans newspaper’s restaurant critic said they would stop doing their job, because every restaurant was suffering. That seemed right to me. What will your words do, but drive them further into the dirt (or the muck of the Gulf)?

For years the arts have been tied up by the sluggish and mucky return of audiences. What were people doing instead of going out? Scroll, scroll, scrolling the 5 inch glass screen, I think. But finally, this year, five years later, with healthier numbers, and fewer friends dropping out at the last minute having caught Covid, we seemed (yes, the much mocked slogan of these years) back to normal. This late summer and fall, after a long stretch of having clicked ‘maybe’ on dozens of online invites and making it to very few of them, I somehow saw four very different music performances in quick succession, straddling and blending genres and together the experience of seeing them seemed worth writing about.

 

The best thing I saw at Sound Symposium’s “What is Jazz?” off-year festival (such a great title), which ran from July 16-19, 2025, was a punky solo saxophone set by Toronto’s Brodie West. His program just said this: “Reflections upon Seagulls, Superstition, Weather Diaries, and Failure in improvisation.” West breathed, stuttered, and squawked his way into a space where my mind was unable to wander, too busy trying to hear West paint the summer screeches of gulls over downtown, too busy following his cul-de-sacs of failed attempts. Absolutely beautiful. 

On October 2, pianist and bandleader Florian Hoefner brought very new compositions to the university’s D.F. Cook hall. “Tectonics,” a piece inspired by water and climate change, had propulsive drums by Jay Sawyer (NYC), and Hoefner’s right hand danced with these complex riffs and uplifting melodies, running against the colours of big and often surprising chords on his left hand. The whole night was charged with energy and surprising textures. One song, “Bluebells,” was inspired by nature writer Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris’ book “The Lost Words,” exploring words that had been tossed from a children’s dictionary due to lack of use, “bluebells,” was one of them, after the apparently forgotten flower. Macfarlane wrote: “We find it hard to love what we cannot give a name to.”

On October 1, Pianist James Hurley, who lives most of the year in Germany, casts a moody, atmospheric presence on the piano, a Keith Jarrett devotee who can command a room on his own (as he often has with intimate, low-lit shows at the Anglican Cathedral). In this case he collaborated with saxophonist Greg Bruce, Irish tenor Dean Power, and artist/animator Duncan Major, who made live digital drawings and animations projected on a screen at The Rooms. 

The show switched between Dean’s tenor (singing a selection of Michael Crummey poems that Hurley had set to music) and instrumental works that featured Bruce’s sax. Dean is a beautiful singer, and charismatic. The source material, poems about Newfoundlanders on the Brooklyn docks, or harassing gulls with rocks, was compelling, if slightly away from the current moment. Power’s voice is beautiful, though I confess this style of parlour song is not really my thing. Call me simple, but eventually I crave some sort of chorus. But Hurley’s long, sparkly piano patterns, and their tousling with Bruce’s sax, were captivating. And then there are Major’s live animations. A song about gulls begins as a scratchy rock appears on the screen, then disappears, and then arrives again in a slightly different location. Soon we realise Major has drawn the rock as it flies through the air at a flock of gulls. His muted inky blots on a black background which opened the show were mesmerising. This was satisfying stuff.

 

Are you listening to different music than you were five years ago? It’s a weird world we’re in, and I’m not sure what I want to hear anymore. I’m drawn above all to experimental music; new classical, jazz, and the new generation of singer-songwriters. I seem to need something to connect to on a human, almost spiritual level, and what that is, is increasingly hard to pin down. 

Recently, the cafe where I often write started playing a Spotify-curated-circa 1997-zombie OZ FM, with that song about old people driving off a cliff, and it makes me feel so ill I could walk into the harbour.

Instead, in late September I found myself walking the trails of the Botanical Garden for Sound Symposium’s “Echo Village: Stillwaters,” a dreamy experience led by Musical Director Benton Roark. Sometimes it got a little weird, like watching nymphs from a Shakespearean comedy frolicking and playing instruments in the woods. You had to feel for the dancers for enduring non-stop for an hour, acting as our guides, as we listened to harps, horns, strings, and synthesizers play John Cage, Moreton Feldman, Pauline Oliveros, alongside a bunch of newer work, which isn’t promoted and isn’t identified. 

The whole performance slowly guided the crowd down towards a finale at Oxen Pond. I definitely took the only directions offered (“follow your ears”) literally, and probably missed some sections, so I felt a tinge of FOMO. Better, probably, to revel in the freedom of finding your ideal location for listening, catching a certain visual — trees/ponds/clouds in the background while long chords or horn motifs soundtrack your serene nature experience. 

I caught a video of Berlin’s Christof Ellinghaus (City Slang Records) where he says, “Recorded music is kaput.” And isn’t this an essential truth of our era? Despite the amount of time we spend streaming music on our phones, if you think deeply about it, you know it can’t last — artists can’t be paid a buck thirty for a million streams.

You just can’t do this at home, any of this. You can’t stay home and see a performer’s eyes and fingers make “the magic” happen. Where so much pop music now has a way of feeling more brittle and more shallow, these experiences felt more durable and deep. At Oxen Pond, Roark directed musicians across the water by waving a huge flag. A trombonist stepped into a kayak. This large creamy orange cloud hovered incredibly slowly over our heads at the pond as dancers moved gracefully on the shore behind spruce trees, and the boat and horns echoed across the water and for the first time this year we felt the cold of fall.