Lara Solnicki: The One and the Other
Outside In Music

Lara Solnicki calls her songs ‘tone poems,' which is about as good a term as any to describe the material on her third album, The One and the Other. Strikingly inhabiting a realm that has ties to jazz, spoken word, free improv, and poetry without favouring one over the other, the album distances itself from the kind of music other vocalists, female or otherwise, are creating. Elsewhere her material is likened to ‘word paintings,' which might actually come closer to capturing the character of her sound; one might even label her approach a variant of performance art, with poetry and music in place of visual theatrics. That said, each Solnicki song is evocative, so much so it makes the description of it as a “miniature movie” by album producer Jonathan Goldsmith a credible contention.

If all that makes The One and the Other sound like an ambitious, original, and unusual recording, it closely reflects the artist responsible for it. Classically trained and possessing a four-octave range, Solnicki was raised in Toronto by a Paris-born filmmaker father and English-teacher mother; that she grew up observing film production and reading poetry makes perfect sense, given such a family makeup. In addition to free jazz and musical figures such as Debussy, Ravel, and Bach, she cites Baudelaire, Plath, and Paz as literary influences. That Solnicki's songs are rich in musical, writerly, and visual aspects should come therefore as no surprise either.

As presented, the album performances are consistent with the concept she envisioned for the song cycle. Tension between music and text is omnipresent: at times, one is dominant and the other subordinate; at other times, a wrestling match is enacted between them. Regardless of the dynamic, an ever-evolving interplay is audible. Critical to the project's realization are those accompanying her: Goldsmith (keyboards, electronics, electric bass, electric guitar), Peter Lutek (alto saxophone, electro-acoustic clarinet, bassoon), Hugh Marsh (electric violin), Rob Piltch (guitars), Scott Peterson (basses), Rich Brown (electric bass), and Davide Di Renzo (drums). Each is sympathetic to her vision and tailors his playing to reinforce the musical concept in play.

Her affinity for wordplay is evident in the very title of the opening piece, “Bit Her Sweet Christopher Street,” which also references a particular spot in Manhattan's West Village. Solnicki's vocal tends towards natural speech utterance in its delivery, while the musicians adopt the role of sound painters, each gesture a vivid, colourful stroke that fleshes out the picture. A mood of romantic languour initially asserts itself before the music grows fractured, its interlacing patterns marked by dissonance. Lines such as “A birch ascends, sealed shadows heap” and “A rose's indolent injection / through the gothic holes of a cast iron fence” not only accentuate the poetic tone of her lyrics, they create, if impressionistically, a detailed visual evocation of the site. Voice cedes the stage in key moments, with Piltch's smolder, Lutek's alto, and Goldsmith's piano prominent colours.

Switching gears, “Idée Fixe” is a jazzy vocalese that sees her agile voice ably complemented by Lutek, Goldsmith, and Peterson on alto sax, piano, and acoustic bass, respectively. During the rubato reverie “The Embrace,” her delivery turns breathy, each syllable enunciated with care. The One and the Other ventures into spoken word territory for “Furling Leaf, Retrocede,” with the narrator's thoughts (“There are 102 houses, 408 steps between my house and the laundromat”) about nature, industrialization, and physical being unfolding in a stream-of-consciousness flow and with musical gestures emerging in tandem.

The album culminates with the twenty-one-minute title setting, a bold three-part suite grounded in text whose narrative coherence is disrupted by her penchant for enigma, Joycean wordplay, and poetic abstraction; in her own words, “Each phrase is a hologram with a number of meanings that, when held against each other, reveal conflicts in the work, and in the artist.” Oscillating between singing and spoken word, Solnicki advances with her musicians through a shape-shifting musical tapestry, with Marsh's electric violin a key textural addition to the musical backdrop.

March 2021