4 (ish) questions with: Collateral (Tim Crofts, Sam Shalabi, and Norm Adams)

In support of their new album we talk micro-tonal improvising, dynamics(!), Halifax, and the value of being an improvising band for 10+ years.

Mar 03, 2025

I run a small label focused on the Canadian experimental/improv/jazz scene but so far its just been music that I’m directly involved in. I’d been hoping someone would reach out with a great record/project in order to work together on a release (keeping in mind I have limited resources), so I got really lucky when Tim Crofts reached out with this record.

(my) gigs this month:

March 12 - Brodie West “double bass” Quintet: two basses w/Rob Clutton, Josh Cole, Patrick O’Reilly, and Nick Fraser @ Tranzac - Toronto, ON

March 22 - Josh Cole trio+ string w/ John Oswald, Aline Homzy, Nick Storring and Blake Howard @ Central Library (Zula Presents) - Hamilton, ON

March 25 - Nick Fraser’s “Special Topics” w/ Kae Murphy, Max Stover, Josh Cole @ Tranzac - Toronto, ON

This piece by Jason Moran, "Artists Ought to Be Writing," where he plays the pitches of Adrian Piper’s talk on the subject, continues to serve as a sort of manifesto for this substack. In preparation for this interview I discovered that there was really no in depth documentation aside from a brief bio about Tim and the trio Collateral. Tim has been apart of the Canadian improv scene for a long time, but in my books has flown pretty under the radar. Its easy to fly under the radar in Halifax, in Canada even, but for those in the know they can attest to the really imaginative scene that exists on the east coast. It has its challenges like all small scenes do, but it has no shortage of really interesting creative people doing really interesting things. So, here is my attempt to talk more in depth about the scene and the people. Here is my chat with the trio Collateral featuring pianist Tim Crofts, guitar and oud player Sam Shalibi, and cellist Norm Adams.

the first show in 2014 at Suddenly Listen

JC: You guys have been a band for like a decade now, right?

Norm Adams

I wrote the dates down in preparation for this interview, 2014 was our first gig.

Sam Shalabi

Wow. So it's over, it's over a decade, actually.

Yeah, yeah. October 1st, 2014.

JC: My first real question is who’s idea was it for you guys to play together?

Norm instigated the group in a way, you know, by bringing me out to Halifax. That was the spark that sort of got the group going. I think that the first couple of shows became the first album. And then from there it's that sort of uh yin-yang scene of getting together whenever we can.

Yeah. Yep.

And, you know, and if we can record, we do. It's very similar probably to a lot of other groups that you guys are in if you're doing improvised music, it's not such an unusual process.

JC: Norm, can you tell me what you were thinking when you decided to bring the three of you together, the circumstances, your motivations?

For the last 25 years now I've been running a company called Suddenly Listen in Halifax, and part of what we would do is we would present or produce seven or six or eight or nine concerts a year over many years. And I would just dream up ideas of combinations of people that I thought would be fun or players that I wanted to run into.

Through many of those concerts, Tim and I played together. Tim and I have played together since 2006. I just want to play music with Tim all the time, and I invited Sam because I really enjoyed the idea of oud and a different musical language, a language from a different culture. And it was hilarious because when I picked up Sam from the airport, and at the time Sam was living part-time in Montreal and part-time in Egypt. I picked up Sam and we got in the car and he said, “man, it's so great to be back in the Maritimes.” And I said, “what?” And he said, “well, I grew up in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.” And I'm like “what!?”

JC: Nice. Ok, back to the question of motivation, Norm, what was the motivation behind putting the three of you together?

For me as a curator, I wasn't thinking of starting a new band, I was just interested in bringing people together to collaborate, and it doesn't always turn out to be a band. My only wish at that time was to get a sound from a culture that wasn't based in western music. Other than that I’d listened to Sam’s music, but I didn’t know Sam at all, and it just worked out really well, we just got lucky.

Tim Crofts

But, It's like the way that suddenly when you interact with somebody [new for the first time], something different starts to come out or emerges from the way you play. I really felt that right away with this group and I really loved that and wanted it to continue.

JC: What was the “something different” that came out with these guys that hadn't been present in other contexts?

You know, I think that a lot of it comes from the oud. To be honest, at first, I found the oud quite challenging to play with, and I mean that in a good way, like something you really want to interact with, but you're having difficulty. And part of it was its dynamic level, sort of where it was sitting frequency wise and what that forced me to do in order to interact with it. In order to interact with it, I had to sort of develop a much more dynamic way on the piano. So sort of stuff like that.

The interesting thing, the dynamic of the oud was really cool and it showed a kind of development in the band because when we first started out with the oud, it was amplified and we worked really hard on tour to make it so we could all hear the oud and at one point in Vancouver, I think we were playing through a crappy PA, it was loud and we were trying to make it louder. Then when we got to Guelph and we had a PA at our disposal we just decided, no, we're actually going to just play down to that level and that expanded our dynamic range and it allowed Tim to play inside the piano more comfortably and more audibly. So that development, that sort of evolution really changed a lot of things and then allowed us to really dig into the natural sound of the oud in its own world. That was a really cool development, I thought.

The other thing I was going to say is that that first record, too, is an entire concert. You know, it's about a 45 minute track and there was also this tendency with Sam to play really long improvisations and not as in like we're just keeping going, you know that thing where you're playing with people and you're like “we could stop”. But [with Norm and Sam] we're going to keep this level of intensity and focus to our performances. That was very challenging and something that I was really into.

Yeah, me too. Me too.

JC: Sam, did it feel like they were coming to you?

Well, there's always a little bit of that you know, unless you're playing with other traditional instruments then there's no kind of anybody going to anybody, really. But I think it's inevitable, particularly with the piano. I had a duo with a piano player for a while and I learned a bunch of stuff doing that about the piano, I guess just the sound of the piano against the oud and also just in terms of tuning, that was a good lesson. But the thing with that is what they're describing freed me up. So I think maybe they would agree. But when we started playing part of the time I was playing to be heard, I was playing a particular way which is something that I'm used to, but it's not really my favorite thing to do. But once they started to get used to the dynamic of the wood then that freed me up so I could come to them and navigate and sort of swim around in what they were doing more instead of saying “hey listen to this”. I didn't have to do that as much, I could do different things, I could play different things, I could kind of think differently. Think musically different instead of, for instance, in a band like Shalabi Effect, which is a band with a lot of electric instruments, I tend to play a certain way all the time because of volume. So the oud tends to be somewhat monochromatic. But I think that in our trio the more we do it, the more I can explore stuff with the oud and and try things with it that normally I wouldn't be able to do. As Norm said, my level opened up the dynamics like crazy. It opened up so much. I think for me it’s not so common, it's pretty rare in an improvised music situation because people tend to want to be heard you know, and I think in this situation there's an immediate cap on that, right? So you have to kind of think differently. You have to think in a slightly different way. And I think that's all good, you know, because it's not just them thinking in a different way, it's also me, you know, and what I play and how I play with them.

JC: How would you describe your approach as a band to improvising? Because there really is an approach. It doesn't feel like the soloistic ad hoc thing.

If I could answer, I mean, I think for me, part of it is I tend to situate myself in improvised situations where what's going on is more about composing than improvising because I think it's more of an interesting way for people to play together. This is from my perspective, but I think what that means is that everybody allows everyone else to kind of do whatever they have to do to do that so we're kind of coming up with a piece of music together. And if you kind of relinquish the idea that we don't know what we're going to do, that should become secondary, that we don’t know what we're going to do, [what's more important] is we're going to come up with a piece of music together. So I think one of the cool things about improvising is that sense of time or temporality, you can kind of throw that out the window, the idea that because we're improvising, and we don't know where this is going, we can't actually compose this thing together. But I think you can if a lot of the things that you're interested in are allowed to happen. So part of it is trust, part of it is listening. The two most important things for me are trust and listening. So if you're able to do that, that's the key to everything else. It's not so much about whether I can improvise, look at me or listen to me improvise. It's not so much that or “let's really improvise”, all that stuff I think is not very important for me because we know that's what we're going to be doing anyway. That's a given that we're going to be doing that. So I think in a way the interesting stuff, and I think part of it sort of speaks to what I ended up doing when Norm first brought me, which was we did a thing at a workshop where there were people who were not musicians. There was an improv workshop and some of the people there were clearly not trained musicians, and that's kind of something that I really like. It's something that I really like as a concept or a way to work because what it does is it gives you other elements besides musical elements to work with. And so when people are interested in improvisation they're coming to it with a compositional sense anyway, it's one of the only things that you can kind of go into something with. And I think people mistake this idea that when you're improvising, it's pure. The idea that it's just a pure thing that's unfolding with no kind of coherence at the finish line.

So anyway, this is kind of a long-winded way to say that I think it's those three elements working together in order to kind of compose a coherence that might be a new kind of coherence that you've never seen before, a kind of form that maybe stretches your idea of what a form actually is, or you know plays around with that. So that you can listen to and go, wow, I would never have been able to write that on my own, or, you know, even write that with other people sitting down and doing it but because we're using a technique of improvising and we're open to whatever that other people are bringing to it. That becomes the most important thing, to listen to what they're doing. Then I think it's a kind of alchemy in a way because you do end up with something, and I think that with this trio that's just getting better. Those elements are getting better where I kind of… can respond to what Norm and Tim are doing in a way that is very liberating for me.

And, you know, microtonality, that's a thing where when we started, it was kind of like, oh, wow, that's really cool. There's that element, but I just kind of noted it and went, yeah, that's a really cool thing that's going on there. But I think the more we do it, the more I notice that it's like, oh, wow, we're actually working with this. We're actually doing things with this in a way that we wouldn't normally be able to do if we sat down and composed something. So anyway, those are the three elements for me, composition, listening and trust. And I think those things are all getting better, and you know that they're interested in that as well, they're interested in a kind of composing attitude towards improvisation.

The kind of improvisation that I really am not interested in is what I would call kind of nihilistic, you know sort of destructive improvisation where you're just kind of going “I'm going to just make a mess of this and fucking deconstruct everything”, and I'm just not interested in that because that's already there. The chaos is already there, the idea for me is to corral that into something without destroying its essence, but to make it into something that's interesting that you would want to listen to.

JC: So you mentioned microtonality, how does that exists in this band?

That's something for me that for me started I guess around the time that I started playing oud and then I started to become interested in microtonality and learning about just intonation and whatever, you know the five limit tuning, seven limit, all those kind of things that like people like Partch or Ben Johnston... and you know in this trio, one of the cool things is everyone's open to that. I don't feel like I'm pushing anybody in that direction and I certainly know that they don't feel like they're being pushed in any particular direction. There's a kind of naturalness to it that's satisfying in that respect. It's not heavy-handed. We're not doing microtonal music, but it's sort of integrated into what we do.

I remember one moment in the last concert that we played where Sam and I were so slightly, we were in a world that was slightly out of out of diatonicism, and Tim came in with a chord that sounded to me so out of tune at the moment because we were quite firmly in this other, this middle world. So I think Tim was just as much part of the microtonality in a way because we kind of created a new tonal world that we were inhabiting and then Tim came in and dropped some uh, microtonality on top of us. I'll never forget that. I think I almost laughed out loud at the time.

Yeah, that's one of the really cool things about this trio is that we have an instrument that you don't normally associate with microtonal music right. But there's a thing, you know, we're not exactly doing this, but I know Harry Partch had this notion of what he called tonality flux which is such a cool idea where for him, it was that you can have microtonality between two instruments you know. Like say me and Norm, and then Tim can play something that is tempered, but because of the type of microtonality that that Norm and I are doing, he's automatically, he's microtonal as well. And so it creates a third state, or I guess a fourth state, a fourth kind of microtonal coherence. And I love that idea because I think it was such a bizarre notion at the time of stacking things that were essentially out of tune with each other to see what happened, and that's something I think we do all the time.

For myself, I studied with Joe Maneri, you know, who was a great microtonal composer and improviser. I played with him a lot, actually. And playing an equally tempered instrument was never a problem for him because as you're all sort of describing, those pitches are still part of what Joe would have called the virtual pitch continuum. It's almost like I'm dealing with a palette that has fewer colours, but it's still part of the colour palette, and it becomes then a different way of playing when you're playing legit piano or straight piano, I would call it. A lot of it gets into dynamics and duration and how you present pitch against what is sort of occurring, how long you are going to sustain that pitch and all those kinds of things. But I also studied Harry Partch and built a couple of his instruments when I was working at Dalhousie, and so I looked at that kind of system and these systems of modifying instruments in order to get microtones. The other thing about Harry Partch is you know he had to build all that shit or modify pre-existing things or find quote unquote garbage that already had those capabilities. So for me, playing the inside of the piano, I really absorbed that. So there's various ways I can get microtones on a piano without too much difficulty. There are other problems that are going to come into play, but there are different ways of modifying it from the inside so I can get into that territory. So it's interesting from the studies I did with Joe, which were more than 20 years ago to this point, how this has been an interesting development in my music that I didn't see right away. It wasn't really until quite recently that it was like, yeah, there's this thing going on that I'm trying to expand and deepen in my own playing. So that speaks to this thing of having a group where you get together and all kinds of really awesome shit happens and then you don't see each other for a while. And at the same time, it's like I'm working with the various trajectories that have come from that interaction. You know what I mean? It's like these cool things were happening, you know, microtonally between us and then in between us sort of playing, I'm working on those things [alongside] working on your various crafts. Then you come back together and it feels like…that's part of the deepening, I guess, for me.

JC: Can you tell me about the state of the scene in Halifax these days?

I could tell you lots about the improv scene in Halifax, but I would like to just mention that through my work with Suddenly Listen was largely assembling ad hoc groups, sometimes with local players like Tim and Norm or Tim and Lukas Pearse or other people that had played together, I am still really motivated to bring guests from other scenes into Halifax to play with local people.

Up until about five years ago, it sort of felt like the scene in Halifax was largely ad hoc. There wasn't the same kind of band culture that there was in Toronto. Toronto especially I think of as a band town, in the improvised music scene. But more and more now in Halifax I'm seeing that there are bands popping up and that maybe people are mature enough or I mean, maybe the scene has matured enough to sort of find that being in a band is more fun for some people or more satisfying or better to get gigs or whatever. But I see a band culture growing in Halifax a little bit more with groups like New Hermitage, other bands that Nicola Miller is putting together, including with Tim and myself that are sort of recurring. It feels like there's more bands than ever here. [And I] love ad hoc because I learn new things. I mean, as a classical musician, we're taught to, especially as an orchestral musician, we're taught to play to whoever we're playing. We play to whatever piece we're playing. If it's Beethoven, we play it a certain way. And if it's Brahms, we play a different way. And if it's big band music, we play it a different way. And if it's pop music, we're constantly shifting the way we play music. So I was very drawn to ad hoc groups because I felt I really was excited to change what my playing was to meet whoever was visiting, to see how that felt, you know, as I was kind of learning as I continue to do. But then every so often you get… and especially with Tim and Sam, I found this kind of combination of safety and cohesiveness, and repetition and memory through this group. Also, I continue to learn and it continues to grow and change. So it's not static. There's never a static environment, it feels like I have all the safety and the friendship with the learning still built in.

JC: Tim, what's your view on the state of the scene?

I think it's interesting in that there's always been a fair amount of activity but there's also always been not much happening. That's just how I generally kind of feel about it. It's like there's a lot of energy, creative energy to get together and do stuff, to play, but getting it any kind of further was never really a thing. And I think that's potentially why, as you've described there's Toronto, there's Montreal, there's Vancouver, and then there's not as much collective attention, et cetera, for Halifax. I think part of that is that organizations kind of came first. When you're talking about improvised music here [there’s] Upstream and then they created the creative music workshop and then later suddenly listen etc. It created what I would call a project culture where you were sort of getting grant funding periodically and you would do, say, a bunch of work around a project at that time and then you might not meet again or things like this. I mean, Upstream historically, I think was an ad hoc organization, you know, that you're bringing together a big band and bringing people from the outside.

I would say when I was younger ad hoc was really important to me. Particularly as a young improviser, it's like you want to play with as many people as possible and you kind of want to see if you can hang with this person, then can you hang with that person, so to speak. And then as I got older, that became less attractive to me because I knew what I could do at that point, I didn't need to… prove it. I don't know if that's the right way to describe it but at that point, I sort of started to want more deeper relationships and such. So in terms of Halifax, though, to come back full circle, I think of Granelli in particular and what he was doing at Creative Music Workshop. And that started to have connections to Obey, which is now Every Seeker Festival and Divorce Records, that started to open something up in the community because indie rockers started coming and kind of listening to Jerry Granelli, et cetera, et cetera. We've always had a really strong indie rock band culture in this town. I mean, that's really the meat and potatoes, I would say, of Halifax. But it's almost like the two started to come together a little bit. And so [that culture helped produce bands like] New Hermitage. That's how I feel about it anyways, is that somehow this sort of an indie rock kind of concept where you would be forming bands, making records, you know, trying to tour this stuff has started to [seep into the] improvisation scene. They've started to mix a lot more philosophically, so to speak.

So I think that, yeah, you will see groups coming, you know, in many respects coming from the creative music workshop and people meeting at workshops and public institutions where you can study or just hang out and play. That has improved, but I would say our real issue is we don't have a lot of places to play. In Halifax, that's always held things back. And it's always kept things kind of on simmer, so to speak. The other thing is it's really fucking expensive to live in Halifax right now, and I would say that that historically [affordability] has been a big part of why people stayed here and played music. So I know young musicians who are leaving, most of whom I'm saying [to them] like you should because of what's going on. So I would say that's affected things a little bit too. I think things are very much in flux. I mean, they seem to be around the world and in most areas, right? There's always been a real strong current of improvised music in Halifax, and it's had a variety of different kinds of manifestations over time.

We have to remember that when you talk about Halifax in the same breath as Toronto and Montreal and Vancouver, Halifax is a really small town. And for the amount of people we have here, the amount of improvised music is quite large. The reason you don't know about it in Toronto is only because, as Tim said, it was organization based. And it's also a tremendously long distance from Halifax to anywhere. So for us to get out and tour to tell you or Montrealers tell you, Sam, about our music, it's really hard. So, you know, there's a tremendous amount happening here, you just don't hear about it because we're not bringing it to you. But people in Toronto, they should check out what's happening here because there's lots.

Oh, I mean, not even Toronto, like across Canada and Europe and America, everybody.

Yeah, across Canada. Yeah, sure. I mean, Europe knows about us because lots of Europeans have come through here. And just as Europe knows about Romuski because lots of people go to Rimouski, you know… a lot of people that come through here, I don't want to say that it's not a pretty happening scene in many ways.

I think it's happening. But I mean, do people outside of Toronto know about Toronto musicians? I don't even know if they do, to be honest. So it's not a…

Yep. Yep.

It's not [a] Halifax only [problem]. Guys, thank you so much.

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