Karen Ng, the builder

Toronto-based improviser Karen Ng played the Western Front last night in support of Backwards Blue, her debut record as a leader. The set also featured four guests, locals who weren't on the album. One was Tyson Naylor, playing a RadioShack Realistic MG-1, an analog synth that Ng credited with spurring on her project. Later, three other saxophonists appeared in dramatic fashion: Gordy Li, Ruthie Ha, and Nanaimo's Liam Murphy.

Backwards Blue came out on October 17th via the label Halocline Trance, founded in Toronto by experimental musician David Psutka. (I've covered one of their previous releases: local guitarist and SFU professor Eldritch Priest's Dormitive Virtue.) I looked up the word halocline, and it means something like 'an area where saltwater and freshwater overlap', which gives divers a shimmering optical illusion, perhaps a trance. It's an obscure enough word that the abstract video for one of the album's most abstract tracks. "Inflatable Grey". ends with a stylized misspelling of it.

On the album, Ng plays saxophone, clarinet, synthesizer, bass, and guitar; Psutka joins her on guitar and electronics. For an electroacoustic improv record, Backwards Blue is relatively gentle. Each of its nine tracks has a name with an adjective and a colour, while the cover art shows nine objects with those colours, out of sequence. Few synths hiss or blare. Bass loops and synth chords anchor some tracks. A sweet, haunting surprise awaits at the end of the last track.

Last night wasn't my first time hearing Ng live. In October 2023, I emceed Coastal Jazz's IronFest at Ironworks and heard a set from bassist Josh Cole's Kind Mind, which included her and vibist Michael Davidson. And this past fall, I wrote about Ng's feature role in a drumless lineup of the band Sick Boss, who played at Tyrant Studios.

Somehow I'd never been to the Western Front. We filled the room upstairs, with four speakers boxing us in to produce surround-sound effects later in the set. Evidently a sophisticated bunch, we refrained from clapping between Ng's first three solo pieces, as if they were movements. Virtually all of us stayed through an intermission for a short artist interview and Q&A, conducted by the Western Front's executive director, Susan Gibb.

Ng used software that captured and responded to "articulation, and the durations of my phrases," she said in the talk. The mix of samples and triggers allowed her to play on top of tracks while also producing live reactions to her playing. These reactions ranged from sounding like shooting stars to TV static.

The highlight of the show was mid-set when spotlights descended on the three guest saxophonists, Li, Ha, and Murphy, who stood along the walls. They contributed ambient sounds while Ng continued her dialogue with the machine. You couldn't hear the guests much, but the effect was cinematic.

In the talk, Ng opened up about her influences and peers, mostly in response to an audience question from Dominic Conway. Her time in Amsterdam led her to befriend the much older Netherlands-based American saxophonist Michael Moore. She studied with members of the ICP Orchestra, associated with the Dutch improv label Instant Composers Pool. Ng said that this period of time, not the time she'd spent in jazz school, truly represented "the start of [her] formal education",

She also shouted out Don Palmer (1939-2021), a Cape Breton-born saxophonist. Palmer went from Halifax to New York in his youth, learned from the Tristano/Konitz school, and came back to Nova Scotia in the 1970s. Then, as a university instructor, he educated some now-greats from the next generation including Mike Murley and Kirk MacDonald.

Palmer had a chordless trio, Alive and Well, with bassist Skip Beckwith and drummer Jerry Granelli, both also Nova Scotian musicians who have passed. (Granelli is known as the drummer on the Vince Guaraldi Trio's A Charlie Brown Christmas.) One of the trio's albums called Way Out East is on a Jerry Granelli Bandcamp page.

"This is scary!" Ng said and laughed between numbers, taking in the exhilaration of the human-computer balancing act. Last night the computers cooperated, and they don't all cooperate every night, so it was time to enjoy it. Ng is a bona fide builder: an artist who broke ground on a fresh concept in her career, while still stacking it on the strength of everyone whom she holds close.