Montrealer Susanna Hood, musician and dancer, launched a fundraising campaign last summer to produce a recording of the performance unPacked that the singer had put together with her trio (Tania Gill on piano, Kayla Milmine on soprano saxophone). Let us thank the donors for having made it possible to realize the edition of this reinterpretation, as vital as it is essential in the subject, of the following Packages (1995), composed by the late pillar of avant-garde jazz Steve Lacy, based on poems written by actress and playwright Judith Malina, co-founder of the Living Theater, a beacon of activist and committed theater. Between contemporary jazz, lyrical art and contemporary music, Hood’s approach (and clear, nuanced voice) inscribes in our time these words which, Lacy summed up then, speak “of theater, of life, of death, of birth , of aging, of pain and the wandering of being a woman. » And theater (opera?), unPacked is stuffed with it, these songs bursting through the vigorous exchanges between the three performers.
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