As a part of their 'Jazz Avant Series' in September 2013, Paul Dutton and I played a set of duo improvisations at the Music Gallery in Toronto on a bill with saxophonist Larry Ochs and drummer Don Robinson. This is an excerpt from our performance that evening.

[ copyright by paul dutton & joe sorbara 2013, SOCAN ]

Jay Hay, Karen Ng, and I finished off the night that was Audiopollination #6 with this trio improvisation. It was documented by Michael Lynn for sharing in the extensive Audiopollination archive. I've played with the mix a little to share it here. I think we got up to something special...

[ copyright by jay hay, karen ng & joe sorbara 2013, SOCAN ]

Abakos is a modular composition conceived as a sort of obstacle course for creative improvising musicians. It consists, at present, of nine distinct compositions (or obstacles). Any number of these are arranged in any order by an ensemble of musicians according to their creative needs, their current interests, their strengths and weaknesses as performers, their sense of adventure as individuals and as an ensemble. This is a series of excerpts from the first performance of the piece in Mmay 2013. Using various magicks, Peter Lutek has combined them together into a ten minute version of the piece. Much more to come...

[ copyright by joe sorbara 2013, SOCAN ]

Ferriswheels... is a large-scale graphic score that I developed while working with the university of guelph CME during the fall semester of 2008. This premiere performance of the piece by the fall 2008 members of the CME took place at the MacDonald Stewart Art Centre in Guelph. It clocks in at almost 40 minutes. The score and more info can be found in the 'Hearing Visions Sonores' archive at improv community [dot] ca.

[ copyright by joe sorbara 2008, SOCAN ]

Jeremy and I made this music as a part of a company improv night at the Leftover Daylight Series in December 2006. Mr. Strachan was visiting us 'down south' while living and studying in St. John's Newfoundland, so his usual arsenal of reed instruments was stripped down to a lone alto saxophone.

[ copyright by joe sorbara & jeremy strachan 2006, SOCAN ]

This piece opens Remnants, the record that Ken Aldcroft, Evan Shaw, and I recorded in 2003 and finally released in 2006. There are a few stories to tell about this one. The piece was written in 2001 when I was at the Banff Centre for the Arts for the first time. It remained untitled until we recorded it in 2003 on my second trip to Banff, this time with Ken and Evan. When it came time to give it a title, I named it after a memory from the first Banff trip when Michael Bates and I were attacked by a mother Elk who had been marked on the ear with a blue tag that meant something akin to: "particularly aggressive". We had inadvertently walked between the mother and her calf. I don't think either of us will make that mistake again. The second story is hopefully a correction of sorts. The font I chose to use for the design of the Remnants CD package didn't, for some reason, have a dash in it. The album, therefore, pretends to begin with a track called "Man Eating Elk with Blue Earring"; an entirely different image than the one I was going for. I carry no hard feelings for that elk, nor do I have any interest in consuming her flesh in retribution for her understandable attack. Okay. Record straight.

[ copyright by joe sorbara 2003, SOCAN ]

This recording was made on a gig we played opening for the Dave Rempis Percussion Quartet (with Tim Daisey, Frank Rosaly and Anton Hatwich) at the Leftover Daylight Series. Also visiting from Chicago that night was the wonderful flautist, Nicole Mitchell, who joined us in a long improvised piece right after we played "Left Right Lleft" to begin the night.

[ copyright by joe sorbara 2005, SOCAN ]

This is Ken's solo guitar interpretation of my large ensemble piece, To and From. Written for the Pickle Juice Orchestra in 2005, the piece begins with tonal improvisation, almost through a set of "changes": from the full chromatic scale through the c major scale, a c major 7 chord, a c triad and finally to the pitch "c" alone. There is then a list of instructions to follow before playing back through the intro in reverse from the lone pitch "c" back to the full chromatic scale where the ensemble finds an ending.

[ copyright by joe sorbara 2005, SOCAN ]

This is an old composition of mine that we recorded during the session for Ken Aldcroft's "From Our Time" record. Jason Cline made this wonderfully odd cartoon for it some time later for his now defunct website. Feel free to ask, but I'm afraid I have absolutely no idea...

[ copyright by joe sorbara 2002, SOCAN ]