ESP Free Jazz nights at Water to Wine
At the corner of Triller Avenue and Queen Street West, people stop to peer through the deep red curtains covering Water to Wine’s windows. Beyond this temporary barrier, lifetime bassist and musician Brent Tanemura plays “free jazz” with an evolving, weekly band.
Every Thursday, Tanemura collaborates with a group of musicians to improvise two long sets of never-before-heard music at Water to Wine, a neighbourhood bar that opened this year in Parkdale. The show is never planned before the first few notes are heard by the audience. The dim lighting and checkered floors of Water to Wine act as a temporary home for the band’s sets; the length of one musician’s breaks in playing can be attributed to the distance of their beer from their instrument; the clear acoustics are nurtured by owner Dan Losier’s adjustments.
A number of staff and students of the UofT Faculty of Music have played at ESP Free Jazz Thursdays, such as Brodie West, Tania Gill, Nick Fraser, Jake Burke-Kleinman, Aidan Miller, and Lauchlin Wood. Some, like West and Gill, have known Tanemura for decades. Otherwise, Tanemura recruits musicians that he has never met before, some of whom he finds on the internet. He intentionally aims to have “at least one person up there…who I have never met or who is unfamiliar with somebody” in the band.
“We can exist in the future by a millisecond:” Tanemura on musical experimentation
While patrons of Water to Wine play pool and talk about how Friday is soon to come, it’s hard to know what exactly is going through the minds of the band while they seem to seamlessly meld their styles together.
For Tanemura, the point of playing music is not “to necessarily perform for other people, or catapult myself as some musical, imaginary lateral. I’m going up there for an experience.” In playing, whether it’s alone on his regular strip of grass at the edge of King Street or in front of an audience, Tanemura aims to “create this environment [that] opens up a window” where “we can exist in the future by a millisecond.”
Tanemura grew up in Salmon Arm, BC, and started playing the piano at a young age, but it was during his time living in Nanaimo in the 1990s that he remembers transitioning from garage bands and jazz standards into a more experimental way of playing. He wanted to play like “walking or talking, in free flowing phrases or movements.” It was here that he met musicians like pianist and composer Tania Gill, saxophonist Brodie West, bassist Michael Herring, and recording artist David French.
Gradually, many of these musicians made their way to Toronto, where Gill, West and Tanemura would continue to play together. Tanemura recalls the first time that they played a more experimental show together at the Tranzac. He began the set by playing polyrhythms, claiming that West can be heard saying “fuck” on the recording while trying to determine the counts. West, who has known Tanemura for over thirty years, describes Tanemura as consistently “conjuring up exploration, and pushing into different things” when it comes to playing music.
Tanemura would later meet Dan Losier, now owner of Water to Wine, while working at Europe Bound—what was once an outdoor gear and bike store in Toronto. The two bonded over a shared interest in playing music, and Losier highlights that Tanemura expanded his taste for jazz and experimental music. It was years until a chance encounter last spring brought the two back together; they bumped into one another and Losier mentioned that he had just opened a bar and was seeking to hire more live musicians. Tanemura has since run the Thursday night ESP Free Jazz program every week.
The shapes and colours of live improvisation
Though the weekly Water to Wine show is called “ESP Free Jazz,” Tanemura and West describe how this name isn’t totally encompassing. For one, the show is improvised, so each week is completely different, with new instruments, artists, and ways of working together that don’t necessarily align with the genre of jazz. Tanemura also acknowledges that they are “just scratching the tip of the iceberg” in terms of experimental and improvisational music, citing some inspiring pioneers of free jazz like Cecil Taylor and Albert Ayler.
The Thursday shows are named after ESP-Disk: an independent record label from New York City that began in the 1960s and recorded free jazz artists like Pharoah Sanders and Sun Ra. ESP-Disk is named after Esperanto, a universal language meant to transcend barriers to communication, an ability that music also possesses.
For Brodie West, playing at Water to Wine is “very open and specific at the same time. It’s a chance to improvise and play with old friends and meet new people.” He says when improvising “everyone has their own ways of playing within that format; within that there’s colours and shapes, then everyone is kind of invited to bring their own thing or to just be themselves.”
Aidan Miller, a student of the UofT Performance Jazz program, describes Water to Wine as “a very welcoming space for people to just come hang and listen to very experimental music.” Miller highlights that “jazz and lots of Black American music, traditionally, was party music and not to be treated like European classical music, where you attend to seat yourself silently.”
Losier, in collaboration with his business partner Spencer Hendry, had planned for Water to Wine to be a relaxed spot for people to hang out and for artists to express themselves; this vision has truly come to life. Though audio recordings of ESP Free Jazz Thursdays can be found at Brent Tanemura’s Bandcamp page, when you sit in a repurposed pew at 1662 Queen Street West, the music becomes a religious experience.