Prophet Marginals by Arthur Bull, John Oswald, Scott Thomson

Arthur Bull guitar
John Oswald alto saxophone
Scott Thomson trombone

I booked this trio’s only concert in July 2022 at Toronto’s Tranzac Club (where Christopher Cauley took the photos included with this release) and, based on that memorable experience, proposed the Prophet Marginals studio session near Montreal in December 2023.
However, the trio never felt like ‘my idea’; there’s too much interconnected history for it to feel less than inevitable that we would play together, geographical barriers notwithstanding. Arthur and John first played together surely before I’d lost my baby teeth, are key members of the first florescence of improvised music in Toronto, which cohered around the original Music Gallery.

John is my longest-term improvising partner; we’ve performed as a duo, what we’d eventually call JOUST, since 2001 I think, and in some crucial ways I learned a lot about what I do from John. I’ve known and loved Arthur’s music since hearing it at the Guelph Jazz Festival during that period, and we started playing together at Somewhere There, the Music Gallery-inspired studio venue in Toronto that I ran from 2007 to 2010.

Arthur had long ago moved to rural Nova Scotia, but his day-job travels would often route him through Toronto, where he’d coordinate a layover for a chance to play with Toronto musicians at Somewhere There, a contact I think he’d made through our mutual friend, the late Montreal painter and drummer, John Heward. Oswald was a certified regular at Somewhere There (which he’d call our “clubhouse”) and he played there countless times including at least one concert with Arthur, John Heward, and me.

After I’d moved to Montreal in 2010, geography made getting together an even rarer and therefore more special occasion. Arthur had been playing duo concerts with one of my very favourites, London drummer Roger Turner, and my 2017 Halifax residency helped to manifest Arthur’s idea to add me, forming the trio with Roger that we’d eventually call Monicker. With members in London, Montreal, and Digby Neck Nova Scotia, Monicker only exists on tour (and, happily, three times on record), and a 2018 Eastern Canada tour made it possible for Oswald to sit in –– appropriately at Silence, the Somewhere There-inspired studio venue in Guelph. I still remember that remarkable sound and kept it in mind whenever the three Canadians were likely –– or could be convinced –– to be in the same place.

Prophet Marginals is the sound of three guys who, after all these years and kilometres, are very much in the same place.

Scott Thomson, Victoriaville QC, October 2024

since 1994

pay what you can afford

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