India Gailey: to you through
Redshift Records

The cover of India Gailey's sophomore album shows the American-Canadian cellist's face prismatically refracted into separate pieces. Much the same occurs on to you through when her artistic persona's revealed through her interpretations of six contemporary composers' works, including one by Gailey herself. In each case, the sensibility of the composer is brought into sharp relief, just as the cellist's own crystallizes. The result is an exceptionally satisfying and well-realized statement, the result all the more impressive for being accomplished in a flab-free thirty-eight minutes.

Gailey (b. 1992) is based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, but her purview extends far beyond any one locale. The worldview of this graduate of Acadia and McGill universities has been enriched by tours throughout Canada, the U.S., and Germany, improvisation and Javanese Gamelan studies with Jerry Granelli and Ken Shorley, respectively, and through partnering with harpist Ellen Gibling, guitarist Ross Burns, and woodwinds player Andrew MacKelvie in the improvisational ensemble New Hermitage. All such endeavours naturally feed back into the work she creates as a solo artist, to you through a case in point.

In addition to her self-penned Ghost, Gailey presents pieces by Fjóla Evans, Yaz Lancaster, Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti, Michael Gordon, and Philip Glass, the latter two obviously the best-known. While their inclusion adds an American minimalism dimension to the release, its focus is in no way one-dimensional. Gailey carefully curated the collection, recorded at Stonehouse Sound in Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia, to reflect her own expansive range of interests, and of course selections were made that would showcase her instrument's textural potential. Each piece carries with it the long history associated with the cello yet, in being a bold, original creation, also feels untethered.

The album fittingly begins with Augun by Evans, an Icelandic-Canadian based in NYC and a fellow cellist with whom Gailey shares a powerful aesthetic kinship. For this scene-setting statement, whose compositional form is derived from the Icelandic lullaby “Vísur Vatnsenda Rósu,” seven cello parts are woven into a pulsating hive that's rendered all the more dynamic when a number of different techniques, tremolo and glissandi among them, are used to maximize the music's stirring effect. The haunting character of Augun extends into Gailey's composition, even if the levels of density and intensity are pitched at a lower level than in the opener. That doesn't make Ghost any less effective, however, especially when Gailey's intense bowing amplifies the cello's resonance and when she shadows its textures with her own wordless vocalizing. Voice is also a critical part of Lancaster's diepenveen, its title the name of a village in the Netherlands where a meteorite fell in 1873. Lancaster, a NYC-based transdisciplinary artist, wrote the mesmerizing 2020 work expressly for Gailey and has her sing the composer's text (from small forms, 2017) over an enrapturing cello foundation.

Written in 2013, Orbit is clearly a Glass creation though pleasingly not a by-the-numbers exercise; instead, it's a sombre and oft-supplicating expression that unfolds like a dialogue between contemporary writing and baroque music from long ago. Like many a NYC-based composer, Gordon was profoundly affected by 9/11 and responded to the cataclysmic event with music, in his case Light is Calling, a luminous meditation that bathes Gailey's vibrato-laden cello in a susurrant electronic glow; as sorrowful as the expression is, it's also uplifting in the way its incremental ascent suggests souls rising upwards as opposed to bodies plummeting from on high.

June 2022