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Name: Scott Thomson
Nationality: Canadian
Occupation: Composer, improviser, trombonist
Current release: Scott Thomson teams up with his long-time creative partner Lori Freedman for Amber, out now via Clean Feed.

If you enjoyed this interview with Scott Thomson and would like to know more about his music, visit his official website.  



When did you first start getting interested in musical improvisation?

At about 14 years of age; whenever I first heard Jimi Hendrix.

Which artists, approaches, albums or performances involving prominent use of improvisation captured your imagination in the beginning?

Major milestones as a listener include Jimi Hendrix, Axis: Bold as Love; Ornette Coleman, The Shape of Jazz to Come; Spontaneous Music Ensemble, Karyobin; Steve Lacy & Roswell Rudd, School Days; Paul Rutherford, The Gentle Harm of the Bourgeoisie; ICP Orchestra, Bospaadje Konijnehol; and Lee Konitz, Motion.

Each of these, among many others, triggered the beginning of something novel in my imagination.



Focusing on improvisation can be an incisive transition. Aside from musical considerations, there can also be personal motivations for looking for alternatives. Was this the case for you, and if so, in which way?


I like to improvise and I like to compose for the same reason: With each I can produce music that I think is good.

They are complementary approaches and produce different kinds of result, so in that way they are useful alternatives to one another.

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to improvisation? Do you see yourself as part of a tradition or historic lineage?

As an improviser I am particularly interested in developing and deploying an expanded sense of melodism and cultivating a sense of time that grows the experience of what we refer to as ‘a moment.’ I pursue these especially because they serve my goal of producing good music.

I think that I am part of several complementary, unfolding, and genealogical traditions, but it’s not important to me to name them.

What was your own learning curve / creative development like when it comes to improvisation - what were challenges and breakthroughs?

I am an autodidact who started playing trombone at twenty-five. The perpetual challenge has been to engage the instrument with sufficient command to realise my ideas, surely a lifelong process.

A key breakthrough early on was modelled by saxophonist and all-around polymath John Oswald, my longest-term improvising partner. John showed me how it’s possible to play general (non-specific) musical material toward specific musical outcomes.



This is a process that I’ve mined and refined for the past two decades, and that remains very fruitful.

Tell me about your instrument and/or tools, please. How would you describe the relationship with it? What are its most important qualities and how do they influence the musical results and your own performance?  

I play tenor trombone and a variety of mutes. I’ve used countless mutes over the years, but these days I typically limit my use to a homemade metal plunger mute and a Harmon mute, sometimes supplemented by whatever I can find on hand –– Styrofoam cups are often very useful here.

My relationship to the horn is quotidian; I like to practice and typically do so every day. Much of my practice involves the mundane work on tone production as well as different technical skills, plus working on jazz standards, rich research material that I have little interest in performing. I also allocate time to improvise freely, a process that leads me to territories of sound-production that I wouldn’t access otherwise, and that allows me to assess technical needs therein.

It’s a simplification to put it this way, but when I hear and see other trombonists, they generally seem to be ‘meeting’ the instrument, engaging the mouthpiece in a relatively neutral and stable manner (a hallmark of ‘legitimate’ instrumental education, I think). Instead, I employ a range of pressures and interfaces with the mouthpiece –– some quite extreme –– as a result of my improvisatory research. (These I also learned in part from exemplars like Ray Anderson and Wolter Wierbos.)

This allows me to access a range of sounds that are characteristic of the music that I improvise, and to do so freely and flexibly in the context of, for example, the radically shifting musical contexts of much group improvisation.

Can you talk about a work, event or performance in your career that's particularly dear to you? Why does it feel special to you? When, why and how did you start working on it, what were some of the motivations and ideas behind it?

I work not only as an improvising trombonist and a composer, but also as a curator and producer. As the latter, I am particularly fond of my work founding and running the Toronto underground venue, Somewhere There, a site that hosted 850+ concerts of creative and experimental music during my tenure, 2007-10.

I conceive of listening, improvising, composing, and curating as activities that overlap broadly on a socio-musical continuum, and along these lines ST was a large-scale ‘composition,’ one to which many musicians –– myself included –– contributed as players and listeners.

How do you feel your sense of identity influences your collaborations? Do you feel as though you are able to express yourself more fully in solo mode or, conversely, through the interaction with other musicians? Are you “gaining” or “sacrificing” something in a collaboration?

The music, whether solo or group, involves different kinds of intersubjective negotiation. I don’t ‘express myself’ but instead work with other musicians as well as (vitally) with listeners to make the music meaningful.

Every context for this work is inherently collaborative and discrete, and no one particular kind of context categorically involves more sacrifice or gain in the process. Indeed, the rich potential of each situation is a motivating factor to continue the work.

Derek Bailey defined improvising as the search for material which is endlessly transformable. Regardless of whether or not you agree with his perspective, what kind of materials have turned to be particularly transformable and stimulating for you?

Pitch, rhythm, timbre, dynamics, articulation … as well as the socio-musical (interpersonal) conventions that inform how various group musics are made.

When you're improvising, does it actually feel like you're inventing something on the spot – or are you inventively re-arranging patterns from preparations, practise or previous performances?

It feels like both. I cannot escape my habits and tendencies fully, even if I really wanted to, so they are woven into everything that I play. However, every musical instance is a new one (“never to be repeated,” as Eric Dolphy famously put it) and thus I feel a responsibility to attend to it as such.

These sensations or assessments are perspectival; one can hear a music primarily in its incarnation in the present moment or primarily in correspondence or dialogue with the past (including a personal past of practice), or perhaps both at the same time.

To you, are there rules in improvisation? If so, what kind of rules are these?

I do not think there are rules, but I believe there are conventions, which are primarily social in nature. To consider these, it’s interesting to compare music-making with other social contexts.

If I act belligerently at a dinner party, I shouldn’t be surprised if I don’t get invited back! Music-making is similar. And if I act meekly, I likewise may not get invited back because my contributions are uninteresting.

Like many social contexts, I’m looking for musical ones that are sympathetic, provocative, and generative in various ways, and the fact that the range of these contexts that appeals to me still grows in scope feels like a promising sign.

In a live situation, decisions between creatives often work without words. How does this process work – and how does it change your performance compared to a solo performance?

No matter the context, there is always a lot of information. I am fairly adept at using language to describe music and musical processes, but I still find it to be a fairly clunky and inefficient means of communicating about (around, through) music.

If language is not needed, I gladly do without it.

There are many descriptions of the ideal state of mind for being creative. What is it like for you? In which way is it different between your solo work and collaborations?

I don’t strive to ‘be creative.’ I like doing the work, and ideally to be doing it all the time. I leave it to others to assess if I’ve ‘been creative’ or simply created something.

With this in mind, I love playing in groups, where my collaborators’ creativity holds the potential to inspire and provoke me.

How do you see the relationship between sound, space and performance and what are some of your strategies and approaches of working with them?

I will spare the reader a very long answer to this question, which has primarily to do with a series of spatialised, site-specific compositions for mobile audiences and musicians that I’ve been making and convening since 2006.

Interested readers can find information about these works at scottthomson.ca.

In a way, improvisations remind us of the transitory nature of life. What, do you feel, can music and improvisation express and reveal about life and death?

Any experience can (and perhaps should) remind us of the transitory nature of life. Musical experiences, for me, are key components of living (and eventually dying) well.