Canadian trumpeter-composer-improviser-bandleader Lina Allemano celebrates the 20th anniversary of her label, Lumo Records, with a unique project, the Cannons for Trumpet and Creative Chamber Ensembles. Allemano wanted to challenge her compositional techniques and use Cannons as a compositional game of sorts, employing her trumpet with various unusual chamber ensembles, all using aspects of the cannon form and incorporating improvised sections alongside the composed material. The album was recorded at Union Sound Company in Toronto in July and August 2022.

Allemano is an innovative and highly imaginative trumpeter and improviser and Cannons extends these qualities to her compositions, reserved, and thoughtful but also quite mischievous and provocative. She opens the album with a «3 Trumpet Canon» matching remarkably the chamber and melodic with the experimental and the otherworldly, but still faithful to the cannon form. The playful «Bobby’s Cannon», with cellist Peggy Lee and Clarinetist Brodie West, the lyrical and beautiful «Butterscones» and «Twinkle Tones», for a quartet with double bass player Rob Clutton, guitarist Tim Posgate and analog synth player Ryan Driver, or the ethereal and mischievous duet «Cannon of Sorts» with German trombonist Matthias Müller, sound as corresponding with Third Stream pioneering ideas. These pieces highlight Allemano’s role as a bandleader who channels the gentle sonic commotion and is the center of it.

The four duets with Allemano’s partner in the trumpet-electronics duo BLOOP, Mike Smith, suggest the most provocative takes on the cannon form. Smith’s clever live-processing of Allemano’s often muted trumpet echoes gently her ideas, but also adds an enigmatic, subversive voice, that often distorts and challenges her sonic palette. These duets sound at times as if coloring some mysterious and atmospheric dream states of mind.

Allemano’s label always releases adventurous music and Cannons expands remarkably Allemano’s sonic vision.

Eyal Hareuveni

Lina Allemano (trumpet), Peggy Lee (cello), Brodie West (clarinet), Mike Smith (live-processing, effects), Rob Clutton (double bass), Ryan Driver (analog synthesizer), Tim Posgate (guitar ), Matthias Müller (trombone)