Scott Thomson
(b. 1975)
Scott Thomson is a trombonist, a composer, and a key member of a new generation of improvising musicians at work in Toronto. Thomson performs with numerous groups and musicians in many styles, and values ad hoc improvising activities as a way to meet and learn from new collaborators.
He leads The Rent, a quintet dedicated to repertory by Steve Lacy, with Susanna Hood (voice and movement), Kyle Brenders (saxophone), Wes Neal (bass), and Brandon Valdivia (drums). Thomson was a founding board member of the Association of Improvising Musicians Toronto (AIMToronto) and co-directs and plays in the seventeen-piece AIMToronto Orchestra, which was formed for a celebrated collaboration with Anthony Braxton in September 2007. Thomson is also the Artistic Director of Somewhere There, a performance space in Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood that hosts live creative music six nights a week.
As a composer, Thomson makes site-specific, cartographic pieces for creative musicians and mobile audiences with the aim to animate particular public spaces. This series of pieces includes MUSIC(in)GALLERIES, Acoustic Orienteering, Terpsichorienteering (with Susanna Hood), Arborienteering, and Sonorienteering (three of these pieces will première in 2009). Thomson’s recording of solos and duets with clarinetist Lori Freedman, Plumb (2008), can be heard on Barnyard Records.
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