You can't be more postmodern than Noma, the project that serves as vehicle for Tom Walsh's compositional ideas. A Montreal-based trombonist-composer well known across Canada for his blend of samples, funk grooves and trombone stylings, Walsh, has been at this for a few years now and Diversion is his latest release. It is an eclectic disc, distilled from live concerts at Montreal's Sala Rosa and Toronto's Music Gallery dating back to 2000. There are techno-leanings, Afro-grooves, funk, swing, musique concrete, Frank Zappa rhythmic and melodic things, and even a country-western meets the Stones lyricism.

The premise for the album, or at least the idea that gives the disc's collection of 11 pieces over 32 tracks its title, is presented in the poem "Diversion" (reproduced in the liner notes), whose dominant image is expressed in the lines: "Today I saw a pregnant man--/there has been a diversion//Brittle, battered winter night/still holds one delirious moon//brighter than the million stars/clutching at her shroud." While Canadian poets are in no way being challenged here by this verse, it is interesting that a poem should be part of the concept. I think it shows Walsh's eclecticism and artistic vision: he can conceive music on several levels, not only via his instrument or those of others. He has a vision and takes risks in presenting it. For this installment of Walsh's music, he makes use of parallel rhythm sections: guitarists Guy Kaye and Rainer Wiens; bassists Alan Baculis and Norman Guilbeault; and drummers François Chauvette, Thom Gossage and Pierre Tanguay. The experience of the whole disc is one of a landscape, with many peaks and valleys and thickly wooded areas: spare melodicism, urban dance parties, musique actuelle textures, combining, again in true postmodern style, the high and the low brow, gutbucket expiations and ethereal Mahlerian moments. In the cross-genre explorations Afro groove is juxtaposed with Ellingtonian suave, techno-wired stuff and a nod at Thelonious Monk, probably the omnipresent ghost in most post-modern creative music.