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Jazz Articles about Tania Gill
Ilios Steryannis: Babylonia Suite
by Dan McClenaghan
Canadian drummer Ilios Steryannis traces his family roots back 2,500 years to ancient Babylonia. With his Babylonia Suite, he explores the family tree and his maternal grandparents' diasporic journey from Baghdad to Mumbai to Manchester and finally to Canada with a world music selection of sunshine bright music, with eleven life-affirming compositions. The instruments include piano, bansuri flute, violin, tabla, oud and saxophone. The result is a sort of Middle Eastern, Indo-jazz fusion that shifts into the direction of “Blue ...
read moreTania Gill Quartet: Disappearing Curiosities
by Troy Dostert
Pianist Tania Gill has been making inspired music in the ever-thriving Toronto jazz scene since the early 2000s, although her output has become especially visible since her debut release Bolger Station (Barnyard Records, 2010). An artist equally attentive to melody and songcraft, Gill refuses to be pigeonholed, contributing to a range of projects which defy easy labeling; she appeared on vocalist Rebecca Hennessey's All the Little Things You Do (self-released, 2020), an album both jazz-inflected and pop-friendly, and on saxophonist ...
read moreThe Brodie West Quintet: Meadow Of Dreams
by Chris May
It may or may not be because of a recent series of programmes about Impressionist art on British television, combined with a passing knowledge of intoxicants, but for some reason the album title Meadow Of Dreams suggests one of Claude Monet's paintings of a field of poppies. As it happens, Monet's poppy paintings are a good fit for Toronto-based alto saxophonist Brodie West's sophomore album with his acoustic quintet. The music is beautiful, sunny, uncorrupted—and a million ...
read moreMark Segger: Lift Off
by Glenn Astarita
This Canadian band throws almost everything imaginable at the studio walls in synchronous fashion. And while the album may be classified as an EP, due to its 29-minute length, quality is the underlying factor throughout. Based out of Edmonton, Segger started this band via its first album, The Beginning (18th Note Records, 2011). Nine-years later, the sextet extends its resume with this high-impact and compelling release, brimming with gobs of counterpoint, sizzling free-form detours and complex modal narratives.
read moreMark Segger Sextet: Lift Off
by Dan Bilawsky
Fracas and focus are not mutually exclusive concepts. In purely linguistic terms, invoking the label “avant-garde" when addressing sound often calls to mind a melee-as-music scenario. The audible truth, however, is something else entirely. An artist's work can lean far to the left without falling off the comprehensibility scale, and drummer Mark Segger makes that argument with brevity and brio. With twelve years of existence binding concepts and compadres, Segger's sextet operates like a well-oiled, though highly irregular ...
read moreTania Gill: Bolger Station
by Mark Corroto
a recording that sounds uncomplicated and effortless might actually be a more difficult task than presenting an impenetrable maze of writing and arrangements. Pianist/composer Tania Gill does just that with Bolger Station, an unadorned minor classic that gets stuck in the heart, while tugging at the soul. Gill's music has an uncluttered yet sometimes quirky style, one that can echo Thelonious Monk, as heard on “Magpie," a fitful angular romp that she shares with the expressive trumpeter Lina ...
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