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Susanna Hood – voice & dance
Tania Gill – piano
Kayla Milmine – soprano saxophone

Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal-based bandleader and vocalist-dancer, Susanna Hood, along with the superb Tkaronto/Toronto-based musicians, Tania Gill (piano) and Kayla Milmine (soprano saxophone) have been working together since 2022 to develop a growing repertoire of songs by the great American jazz composer and soprano saxophonist, Steve Lacy.

Their first performance and recording project, unPacked brought poet, Judith Malina and composer, Steve Lacy’s 1995 “Packet” suite to life through sound and movement. These audacious new arrangements blur the lines between what is heard and what is seen. At the heart of the suite, a provocation: the emotional, embodied, unfettered female voice. Heart-felt, yet unsentimental, these eight songs hold no punches as they bring voice to a woman’s later life, grappling with imperfection, sexism, paradox, grit, beauty, regret, invisibility, death and love.

unPacked has been presented at the Suonil per il Popolo Festival, Montreal; the Something Else! Festival, Hamilton; and the Guelph Jazz Festival.

In March 2024 the trio released their first album: unPacked – words by Judith Malina, music by Steve Lacy on the Quebec label Ambiances Magnétique.

Currently the trio is working up Lacy’s suite Rushes – 10 Songs from Russia (1990) setting poetry by Russian poets Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and Marina Tsvetayeva. Like Packet, the suite was originally written with/for Steve Lacy on soprano saxophone, Frederic Rzewski on piano, and vocals from Irene Aebi.

What people have to say about unPacked:

“[…] absolutely stunning and warrants the deepest of dives.” — The WholeNote, Canada

“The resulting songs embrace a broad but intense emotional range, inspiring the compelling inventiveness with which this trio develops its own visions.” — Musicworks, Canada

“[…] aussi vitale qu’essentielle […]” – Le Devoir, Canada

“Remarkably, Susanna Hood proves to be impeccable when it comes to interpreting Steve Lacy’s repertoire of magnificent songs. Her voice, expressive and sumptuous […]”

 – Montreal drummer, Michel F Côté

“Susanna […] is the best interpreter of Lacy’s vocal music, bar none. unPacked goes further. The performances are astonishing. Those who have not heard the original 1995 Lacy recording, Packet (with Irene Aebi and Frederic Rzewski, New Albion Records), will marvel at the material, the pinnacle of Lacy’s art-song legacy to my ears. Those who know Lacy, however, will notice numerous details and alterations –– some arranged and some improvised ­­–– that make these interpretations distinct and brilliant.

Tania Gill, like Rzewski or –– closer to her approach –– Paul Bley, possesses a signature touch that is endlessly inviting. Her focus on the piano’s middle register lets her animate Lacy’s contrapuntal material with understatedly gorgeous invention and spirit. Kayla Milmine meets the unenviable task of playing Lacy’s music on soprano saxophone, maintaining its intervallic purity with the plummy timbres that mark the soprano specialist, but without mimicking the master’s inimitable style.

[…]

The music on this record is complete and fully formed, a monument of dedication and love. However, it cannot contain the art-digging impulse that, when the trio plays live, impels Susanna Hood to follow her appetite into the rhythmically charged dance improvisations that give the band such astounding dimension. As I wrote in the 2023 Guelph Jazz Festival brochure: ‘What makes [the trio] special are Hood’s riveting dance improvisations; as an improviser across dance and music, she is without peer.’ “

–  Scott Thomson, trombonist, composer, Artistic Director of the Festival International de Music Actuelle à Victoriaville

Excerpt from liner notes to the trio’s début album unPacked, Words by Judith Malina, Music by Steve Lacy AM 278