Nick Fraser arrived in Toronto from Ottawa in 1995 and has been embedded in the city's improvised music world ever since. His debut as a leader, Owls in Daylight, appeared in 1997, and then, for ten years, he co-led Drumheller, a cooperative group with Brodie West, Rob Clutton, Eric Chenaux, and Doug Tielli that produced four critically acclaimed recordings. Fraser also helped found the Association of Improvising Musicians of Toronto, a non-profit dedicated to supporting the local improvising community. "We had Anthony Braxton on board," Fraser said of those early days, "so what could we do? And it worked." Beyond Toronto, he has played and recorded with Marilyn Crispell, Roscoe Mitchell, and William Parker, among many others. As CBC Radio's Bill Stunt once put it, Fraser "hurls himself whole body and soul against skin and metal."
His trio with saxophonist Tony Malaby and pianist Kris Davis has now produced three albums over eleven years. Their debut, Too Many Continents, appeared on Clean Feed in 2015, and Zoning followed on Astral Spirits in 2019, with Ingrid Laubrock and Lina Allemano as guests. The new record, Areas, released by Elastic Recordings, takes an atmospheric turn, with Fraser's compositions pursuing longer and stranger forms and engaging the group's full range across lyrical passages, vigorous exchanges, and highly unusual sonorities. This record contains his most harmonically dense writing for the trio, and the distribution of material reflects that. "I gave Kris a lot more to play than I gave Tony," Fraser explained. "Some of the pieces are essentially a piano part, and Tony's part is sort of open. My part is open, too, but since I wrote the tune, I have an idea of how it's supposed to go."
Three of the album's seven tracks are credited to John Kameel Farah, the Palestinian-Canadian pianist and electronic composer. Farah built his contributions from processed improvised exchanges between Fraser and Malaby into brief electroacoustic interludes that bookend the record and divide it at its midpoint. Eerie and elliptical, they color the album's four ensemble pieces. The two had established a working relationship on Farahser, their 2024 duo recording. Later, presenting this album live, Fraser performed alongside Malaby and guitarist Ben Monder in place of Davis. "In 'Area,' some of those chords have about ten notes in them," he noted. "There are only six strings on the guitar, and if anyone could do it, it would be Ben Monder—but I just didn't want to have to figure out a way to translate the music to guitar."
Nick Fraser was recently a guest on The Tonearm Podcast. In his conversation with host Lawrence Peryer, Fraser discussed his compositional process for Areas, how long-term collaborative relationships shape his writing for specific musicians, the role of the studio in transforming raw material, and what distinguishes Toronto's improvised music community from those of other cities.
You can listen to the entire interview in the audio player below. The transcript has been edited for length, flow, and clarity.
Lawrence Peryer: I would love to start by asking you about the beginning of your latest album, Areas—not only the decision to open the album with a piece you didn’t compose yourself, but also the inclusion of those various musical interludes throughout the record. What's that all about?
Nick Fraser: The last record I made was called Farahser, a duo record with John Kameel Farah, a pianist and composer based mostly in Berlin, though he's from the Toronto area. The record came out in 2024, but we had recorded a day of free-improvised piano-and-drum duos. In addition to being a pianist, John is also an electronic composer, and we just decided to take these recordings and craft some pieces out of them. I really loved that process and wanted to keep it going.
I recorded duos with Tony Malaby, the saxophonist, at the session for this record—duos of me playing the inside of the piano, scraping the harp of the piano with a drumstick, which creates this kind of whale sound. With the sustain pedal down, all the strings resonate, and you get this giant reverb sound. I wanted to use them, but they didn't feel quite complete as pieces. I guess we could have just put way more reverb on Tony's saxophone so it would match the reverberation of the piano. But I thought someone who knows more about electronic music might have different ideas and strategies for how to transform them into something complete.
And John did. They're quite different from the original improvisations. So I figured we'll just use them. They're scene-setters, palate-cleaners.
Lawrence: I'm curious about your relationship with Farah and how working with an artist like that—someone doing something a little different from how you normally approach composition, performance, or production—gets you to think about your own music differently.
Nick: It's about feel and vibe—it's about variety, too. In the past, I've made some electronic music; I used to experiment with very low-tech, four-track tape stuff. It's not generally how I think about or imagine music these days, but I like it. So it's refreshing to work with an artist who will have this kind of transformative effect on something that's already been recorded.
There's also this thing—and this might sound silly—where I feel like having a purely acoustic recording almost puts you in a stance as a purist or a classicist if you're not using any electronics. Electronics just seem to be so prominent in all music today. Again, it's not calculated, but it's just something I noticed when I listened to the record. I thought, oh, right—these parts sound more contemporary, and these other things sound less contemporary, just by virtue of being purely acoustic.
Lawrence: As you were saying that, I was thinking that by not allowing some of these modern flourishes or new tools into the palette or the toolbox, you run the risk of almost making an unintentional statement. You come across as a purist or a classicist, even though that's not necessarily what you mean.
Nick: Exactly. I think there's a lot of territory to be mined with acoustic music and acoustic sounds, and I'm committed to jazz as acoustic music, particularly live. I'm not crazy about playing gigs where the drums are amplified and so on. I like smaller-scale work. But this isn't a live performance—it's a recording. You have the luxury of treating some of the things you're working with. It's not just treatments, either. It's transformation. If you heard the original improvisations John drew from to make these electronic pieces, they don't really sound anything like what we ended up with.
Lawrence: The studio really becomes another instrument, another collaborative tool. Was there a statement of purpose behind the atmospheric tone and direction of this music, or is that something that unfolded as you were in it?
Nick: Not a statement of purpose. What I noticed was that this set of music I wrote for piano was harmonically a bit deeper compared to things I've written in the past—just more chords, and more complicated chords. The tune called "Area," for instance, has some chords drawn from Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time. And even some of the titles that John came up with for his pieces have a slightly dystopian, post-apocalyptic feeling. The cover art, I think, is Rothko-esque. So it's possible that, because I wrote more harmony for this project than I have in the past, I was working in a certain atmospheric zone I wanted to support with the electronic pieces.
Lawrence: When you're in the composition process, were you composing for the piano, or were you composing for Kris Davis?
Nick: I think I'm more composing for the piano, but Kris is the person I want to have play it. She's a phenomenal musician. What I love about her is that she uses the whole piano—she really uses the very bottom range and the very top range—so she's perfect in a group like this where there's no bass, because she really can fill out the sound. She's also very structurally minded in terms of her improvising. I think she's a really nice foil for Tony Malaby, because he has a sort of deconstructive energy—although he might push back on that. I can kind of just slide in between them.
Lawrence: It's somewhat infrequent that I get to speak with an artist who has had the luxury of keeping a group together—especially in jazz and creative music—to be able to return to the same home over a period of time. I'm always fascinated by what that allows.
Nick: I actually work with a fair number of long-term groups now. With Lina Allemano and her band, the Lina Allemano Four, we recently celebrated our twentieth anniversary. I'm playing in a band called Peripheral Vision that's been going on for twenty years. And then there's the trio with Kris. It's true—we've been together for a long time, and we've known each other for longer than that. Though I want to say there hasn't been a ton of activity in the ten or twelve years we've been playing.
Lawrence: Three records. Is it three?
Nick: This is the third record of the trio. We did a larger tour in 2019—we played some Canadian jazz festivals and out on the West Coast, in Seattle, and so on. But it goes back to the question of whether you're writing for the piano or writing for Kris. The more we play together, the more I hear those things as the same. Writing for the piano is writing for Kris. The history of a group means you're not actually starting at square one when you go to rehearse a piece—you might be starting at square 27.
Lawrence: With this trio—you mentioned it hasn't been overworked—is this the right balance for this music and these people?
Nick: Of course, I'd always like to do more, because I love playing with them. I find my energy as a bandleader pops up every few years, and I decide, "Hey, I've got this record in mind," or "I've got this book of music, and I'm going to try to find some people to play it with," or "I'm going to see what Kris and Tony are up to." I've got a new group called Special Topics—with some younger people here in Toronto: Max Stover, Kae Murphy, and Josh Cole—that has been scratching my bandleader itch for a while. But I also love collaborating with other people, so it's really cyclical. Sometimes I'm focusing more on my own music, and sometimes I'm focusing more on Brodie West’s, Lina's, or whoever's.
Lawrence: I'm curious about the way your appreciation for Brodie West shows up in this record. I know there's the one track—could you tell me a little about what Brodie West and his music mean to you?
Nick: He's a close friend and a real inspiration as a composer and an artist. He's thoroughly committed to doing his own thing, and I'm really happy to be part of that. I think he's a great saxophone player and a great composer, with a highly personal approach that I've never come across in quite the same way anywhere else. You can say that about anyone, but his approach is such an amazing synthesis—and so personal—that I feel like nobody else comes close.
He loves rhythm, he loves drums. He has a band called Eucalyptus with two drummers and a percussionist, and a band called the Brodie West Quintet with two drummers. He has a duo with Evan Cartwright called Ways, which I pay tribute to on this record. He made a duo record, toured as a duo, and is close friends with Han Bennink. He did a duo gig a number of years ago in Hamilton, Ontario, with Hamid Drake, and I said, “It’s your thing: you love drums; you have a duo with a drummer; there are two drummers in all your bands. You should just call Hamid up and make a duo record with him."
His focus on rhythm obviously gives me, as a drummer, a lot of room to play with. We did a gig on Valentine's Day one year, and Josh Cole, a bass player, posted about it afterward. He said, "A love story between one man and the quintuplet." There's a lot of complex rhythmic music out there, and I feel like it often loses the folkloric element. Brodie's music doesn't do that. It's very relational and folkloric—sort of about us as people and how we're playing together, rather than about the concepts. He might push back on that, though. He says it's formalist—just about the rhythms.
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Lawrence: That's fascinating—that the same music can be both things depending on perception. That’s one of the beauties of it. Now, what does it mean for a piece to devolve? What does that require of the musicians? Is that a direction they're given?
Nick: Well, let me ask you—do you feel like there are pieces on this record that devolve?
Lawrence: It depends on how you define it. There could be a dissolution into complete, out-and-free playing. There could be a dissolution to sparseness and ambiance.
Nick: When you say "devolve," to me it evokes something where some kind of focus has been lost—where things have fallen into something different from the intended outcome.
Lawrence: Interesting. So there's almost a negative connotation—I'm picking up that it's hitting you that way a little.
Nick: A little bit—and obviously that happens sometimes. For me, when I'm playing, I want to keep a kind of focus and an eye on the arc and the endpoint, and be patient. If something has, quote-unquote, devolved into free ambient space, I’m still trying to maintain real focus on the details and not play in a general way—not be saying to myself, oh, I know what this rubato-free space feels like. I don't want to be defining it while I'm playing—I want to be listening for what it is and what I can turn it into, if that makes sense.
We just had a CD release concert in Toronto, and Kris unfortunately couldn't make it. We ended up getting guitarist Ben Monder, whom I'd never played with before. He's fantastic—there's real patience and a real willingness to sit with something and develop it. My friend Michael Herring, Ben's bass player, has this image of the parachute game—you know, when you're a kid, and everyone holds the edge of a parachute? He says everybody should be keeping their end of the parachute up. There should be no slack. Everybody should be focused on holding their spot and doing their thing to give the parachute integrity. I love that image when it comes to playing music. And it's true—sometimes we don't have that, and we have to deal with it. Maybe that's what's happening when things devolve.
Lawrence: This is the mystical realm of creativity that's fun to peek into. The piece I was thinking about was "Sketch 57." Maybe another way to approach a similar line of inquiry is to consider the relationship between what you write as a composer and the places in a piece—or moments in a performance—where things are more indeterminate. As a listener with passing knowledge, that's where the parachute could go slack: you don't know if it's going to stay tight, and then what do you do when it doesn't? You have to recover.
Nick: Exactly. That's part of the drama of the music.
"Sketch 57" is ten minutes on the record, but the part I wrote is less than one minute. It's a form. You could improvise on it as if it were a conventional jazz song form, but that's not what we did. After we play the material, Kris starts improvising—she's repeating some of the chords for longer than they're written, then moving to others—and she's playing as if it were a conventional song form, but she's making up the form as she goes. Tony responds very well to that kind of thing. He's not going to say, "What's happening? Where are we?"
But it doesn't have to work out that way, either. I recorded that piece on a different album by a group called The Imaginary Brass Band. In that case, again, it was a long piece, but we played the material one time and then went into a very stylistic improvisation that was a complete departure from the energy of the written material. The question of whether you're going to continue in the vein of the written thing or just discard it is always a very significant decision—and we didn't decide. It just unfolded that way.
Lawrence: Tell me a little about the Toronto community—it seems like there's a lot going on in the creative music realm there.
Nick: I think so. I get to play with a lot of people I really like. The thing I like about Toronto is that there's a sense in which everybody—maybe not everybody, but a lot of people—are doing lots of different things. I play a lot of conventional jazz gigs, and I played in a rock band called Deep Dark United for several years. I also played percussion in a West African banjo-fusion project. All these things coexist, and nobody feels like they need to specialize too much.
Someone like Ryan Driver writes songs; he has a band where he sings jazz ballads exclusively—he calls it psychedelic lounge music. He plays improvised music with Titanium Riot and with a band we have with Karen Ng and Lina called The Adjacence. He has a band called the Titillators, in which he invented his own instrument, the Street Sweeper Bristle Bass. None of these things conflicts. Whereas in New York, I feel like people want to make themselves stand out by doing one thing, though that might be changing, as people seem more varied in their tastes and activities than in the past.
There's also the fact that in Canada, we're really lucky to have some arts funding that's always under threat and waning, but still there. That kind of thing gives people some freedom to function outside a capitalist, market-driven framework.
Lawrence: It seems so civilized. (laughter) So simple and so civilized. Do you spend time writing grants and pursuing funding?
Nick: Oh, yes. This particular record didn't have any funding, but it wasn't for lack of trying. The arts infrastructure in Canada is heavily dependent on government funding, and I don't know that I'd have much of a career if it weren't for that.
Lawrence: When musicians band together in these ways, it reminds me of how subcultures and countercultures work. When you start to come together, you realize there are other people who do this weird thing you do. Even if it accomplished nothing else, that's great—letting everybody know they're not alone. There's a motivating power in that.
Nick: Yeah, that's true. That's beautiful. I recently talked with a drummer who told me there was a place called the Indigo Café that used to host shows in the late 1990s. He said, "I walked in there, and you were just screaming into your snare drum, and I thought, wow—you can do that?" (laughter) He was just saying, thanks for that. Thanks for letting me know that you can just do stuff.
Lawrence: I'm a big fan of "why not?"
Nick: It's funny—you can't always see your own house because you live in it. For one thing, I would say free improvisation is a kind of pillar for me. Even when I write tunes for improvisation, I don't feel like I'm a capital-C Composer, where the work exists as a discrete item that could be played by anyone. When I look at this new record alongside my very first record, Owls in Daylight from 1997, there are many ways in which they're the same. There's free improvising. There are some crude tape pieces on that early record that function as palate cleansers. There are sections where people are playing solo, sections where people are playing as a trio or duo—a lot of shifting orchestration. The tunes are sketches; they're not very involved. They're jumping-off points for free improvisation, but they're specific.
There's also a tension or paradox in jazz: people talk about finding your own voice, but they also talk about not doing the same thing all the time—about evolving. And I sometimes think those things are actually in conflict, because the things you like to do make up your artistic voice—those things are the content. I doubt I'm going to make a radical change and put out a pop record or a straight-ahead jazz record. I doubt that's coming, but stranger things have happened.
Lawrence: So what happens in terms of—for lack of a better way to put it—a release cycle? You've composed the songs, reconvened the trio, and put the music out into the world. Will the trio be able to perform at all, or do you immediately move on?
Nick: I would certainly perform. It's complex right now—I don't want to get too deep into it. When Tony was up here, he asked whether I was still going down to New York to play. Tony lives in Boston these days and teaches at Berklee. Going down to New York was something I would do periodically—once or twice a year. But with recent developments in the world, it started to feel a little less welcoming and a little more difficult. Not because of the musicians and community in New York—people are great, they want to play, musicians are not the problem. But collaborating in a cross-border trio with two Americans just means something different than it did five years ago—which, boy, that's too bad. But I'm open to it.
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