Dunbar to downtown: Allison Au, Jodi Proznick & Mili Hong

Play in the studio uptown all day, go downtown for a session to swing away the night: this lifestyle, once common, drew my attention recently with Jocelyn Gould‘s Sonic Bouquet session. It’s also where two members of the Ostara Project found themselves on Wednesday night; Toronto saxophonist Allison Au and our own bassist Jodi Proznick, after clocking out of day two of a three-part studio session, played chordless trio with Vancouver expat drummer Mili Hong, who's now based in Montreal.

Allison, Jodi, and Mili’s two-set show at Tyrant Studios was a reunion: they had created the trio for a concert at Dunbar Heights Baptist Church last year on April 1, 2023. That show was a co-presentation by Infidels Jazz — who also co-presented this one with Tyrant — and the classical music non-profit Muzewest Concerts. I was there and can recall, from the podcast episode that Muzewest and I made about it, Jodi‘s delight in introducing Mili and Allison to each other as collaborators...

That concert was a live recording. Infidels Jazz founder Tim Reinert, in his introduction to Wednesday’s show, talked about plans to release the recording under the title Dunbar Heights, after the church venue. But he cited “artwork issues“ as the reason why the release hadn’t happened yet. He pointed towards a May or June release.

The trio’s sparse performance of Mili’s original composition “Maybe I Won't Go“ is my clearest memory from the Dunbar church. Many local musicians consider Tyrant the best-sounding room out of all the small clubs in town, and this audience was respectful enough that you could hear a pin drop between tunes. You could on one hand enjoy the full ring of every ending note, including on that ballad “Maybe I Won’t Go”, and on the other enjoy the full force of the more rocking moments, like an A-minor vamp ending on “Samba do Avião” by Antonio Carlos Jobim.

Allison spanned the full range of the alto saxophone, stating a melody in the low register and then flying higher in her solo. She played soprano saxophone too, including on a version of “Footprints” and on the night-opening tune called “On the Trail” that Joe Henderson recorded in the late sixties.

Jodi's bass soloing was bare and fascinating, Jodi playing only with Mili for solos unless Allison decided to accompany with guide tones. Jodi didn’t seem to have the red piece of gear that she sets down atop most amplifiers on club gigs, and yet when she plugged into my old Traynor SB that is now the Tyrant house amp, she still had that extra juice from every note as she scaled the instrument. She leaned into her distinctive vocabulary, spurred by having played for a majority of the last two days' waking hours with more on the way. “We're warmed up,” she told me straightforwardly but with a grateful smile.

Jodi brought her composition “Adanac” and put a spotlight on some of the new material Ostara were working on, including a composition she wrote as a commission for SFU, which she described as having “lots of space” — perfect for a sax-bass-drums trio.

Allison is no stranger to chordless trios: in her home city of Toronto she has played with Mark Godfrey and Nick Fraser, Daniel Fortin and Ernesto Cervini, and probably more. I first heard Allison when she brought her quartet to the Tangent Café on November 6, 2014 to support her first album, The Sky Was Pale Blue, Then Grey, from which this trio played her composition “The Orchid”. Back then, the fact that a young band could tour jazz music to another city blew me away. It's one example of Allison’s devotion to crafting a career, a commitment that sets the standard for her generation of Canadian jazz players across four albums and repeated Juno nominations.

While Jodi is Ostara’s co-leader along with Amanda Tosoff, Allison is one of two other members — trumpeter Rachel Therrien is the second — who stayed through a band schism that took place between the recording and release of their self-titled 2022 album. Ostara’s de facto theme song, at least until new cuts from their upcoming session enter the mix, is Allison’s composition: “Delta Sky”, the inviting, New Orleans-inspired groove tune. On Wednesday, it was arguably an even better vehicle for Allison's improvisation and for Jodi's joyful presence on the bass than it has been in Ostara.

On the drums, Mili was patient and sensitive but vigorous when the arrangements reached their peak or when the group needed to be egged on. She played this way in Vancouver for a decade, activating her Millennial contemporaries’ bands and inspiring those coming up just behind her; bassist Eli Davidovici and Mili were like Larry Grenadier and Jeff Ballard, a model of what it means to play time, to my cohort. Mili’s drum solo on “Footprints” dispensed with the downtempo groove and ran around the kit, hitting the show’s dynamic peak at the top of the second set.

The lifestyle of musicians like Allison, Jodi, and Mili is demanding in different way than the long hours that session pros logged in decades past. The pace of social motion is unrelenting and prompts you to constantly document your vulnerability. If that is indeed table stakes for the vocational path that these three have taken, they didn't seem fazed. Quite simply, they were chilling and having fun. We all had fun in that packed Tyrant loft on Wednesday, but not too much; we have to go to work in the morning, Mili has to fly to play with another saxophone Allison, and the Ostara pair have to go back for their final day in the studio.