Nick Fraser

Nick Fraser has been an active and engaging presence in the Toronto new jazz and improvised music community since he moved there from Ottawa in 1995. He has worked with a veritable “who’s who” of Canadian jazz and improvised music and with such international artists as Tony Malaby, Kris Davis, Marilyn Crispell, Anthony Braxton, and William Parker. Nick’s recorded works as a leader include Owls in Daylight (1997), Nick Fraser and Justin Haynes are faking it (2004), Towns and Villages (2013), and If There Were No Opposites (2021). For 10 years, he co-led the co-operative group Drumheller, who released four critically acclaimed CDs between 2005 and 2013. Other projects that occupy Nick regularly are Ugly Beauties, Peripheral Vision, the Lina Allemano Four and Titanium Riot.

“Fraser not so much plays the drums as hurls himself whole body and soul against skin and metal… truly talented.” Bill Stunt, CBC Radio.

“The Toronto drummer is perhaps a little too progressive for the hidebound Canadian scene… Fraser is a deft and sensitive percussionist with a hint of an enigmatic streak, a feeling for economical gestures, and an innate sense of form.” Mark Miller, The Globe & Mail