| Jazz |
Summary: Ally Fiola’s Exit 10 blends contemporary jazz, East Coast traditions and cinematic grooves into a deeply personal portrait of Nova Scotia, home and return.
Ally Fiola’s Exit 10: Jazz, Roots and the Sound of Nova Scotia
There are artists whose music seems to carry, almost involuntarily, the geography of the place that shaped them. Not because they set out to reproduce folklore or turn their homeland into a kind of sonic scenery, but because landscape, weather, history and the ways people learn to live with one another inevitably leave traces in the way music is imagined and made. That was what struck me when I first heard Exit 10, the new album by Ally Fiola. A Nova Scotia native, Fiola is a saxophonist, composer, bandleader and musician whose work also extends into film and visual media. Until recently, I was unfamiliar with her music, which made the discovery all the more striking. Her career clearly places her within contemporary jazz and composition for the screen, yet Exit 10 resists almost every attempt to put it neatly into a box. Jazz is at its center, but so are funk and groove, the musical traditions of Canada’s East Coast, Celtic instrumentation, fiddle, accordion and tap dancing, along with the unmistakable presence of the ocean that seems to move beneath several of the album’s compositions. In another artist’s hands, such a mixture could easily become an exercise in genre blending. Here, it feels like something more organic. Exit 10 is less a showcase of influences than a story, an inward journey built from a landscape Fiola left behind and eventually returned to with an entirely different perspective.
I have always been struck by the idea that artists carry with them the sound of the places they come from, whether that place is a country, a city or a particular region. This is not a matter of geographical destiny, of course, nor does where an artist grows up determine what they will create. But place can leave a kind of fingerprint—in rhythm, color, silence, phrasing or simply in the way a musician understands musical space. With Fiola, that relationship is unusually clear. Anyone who has spent time in Halifax can sense the strength of the cultural identity that defines this corner of Nova Scotia. The ocean is never far away. The landscape is distinctive, the weather can be demanding, and the region’s history has produced communities accustomed to relying on one another. Music has long occupied a particular place within that culture. In Fiola’s work, however, Nova Scotia never appears as a postcard or a collection of picturesque references. The influence runs much deeper. It is present in the instruments, the rhythms and the references to specific places, but most of all in her ability to bring a distinctly local memory into dialogue with a musical language that is contemporary, expansive and entirely her own.
The circumstances that led to Exit 10 are therefore more than biographical background; they are part of the album’s meaning. After a decade in Halifax, Fiola returned to the Annapolis Valley, the rural Nova Scotia region where she grew up. Like many people who have spent years in Halifax, she encountered a reality that has become increasingly difficult for artists and other residents to ignore: housing costs have risen dramatically, reshaping the choices people can make about where and how they live. Leaving a city where artistic networks, performance spaces and much of the music industry are concentrated can easily feel like surrendering ground. For Fiola, returning home could have meant stepping away from the professional relationships she had built, moving farther from the center of the music scene or giving up some of the momentum she had accumulated over the years. Instead, something quite different happened. The Annapolis Valley offered her a thriving and welcoming artistic community, but it also gave her something perhaps more important: the distance necessary to see her own landscape differently. What might once have looked like a retreat from the cultural center became a new form of artistic freedom.
That shift is at the heart of Exit 10. Fiola is not returning as the person who left. Nor is she returning to exactly the same place. Ten years in Halifax altered her perspective, her musical practice, her references and her understanding of home. The Annapolis Valley consequently becomes something to discover all over again. Roads, villages, coastlines and familiar landscapes cease to be static memories and become material for new work. This is what gives the album its unusual narrative quality. The places named or evoked in these compositions are not simply geographical signposts. They function as chapters in a personal story. Fiola is not merely describing where she was born. She is exploring what that place became inside her after she had spent years away from it.
That perspective helps explain the album’s remarkable range of influences. Fiola brings together instruments and musical forms rooted in the East Coast tradition with a contemporary sound shaped in large part by her brass ensemble. Fiddle and accordion sit naturally beside jazz; tap dancing becomes part of the rhythmic vocabulary; funk gives the music its physical drive; and the sounds associated with the ocean lend certain pieces an almost cinematic sense of depth. Yet none of this feels assembled for effect. These traditions are not decorative elements added to give a fundamentally conventional jazz record some local flavor. They are embedded in the music itself. This is where Fiola’s work becomes especially compelling. She does not force a choice between tradition and modernity, between popular music and formal composition, or between regional identity and a broader contemporary vocabulary. Instead, she treats those apparent contradictions as creative possibilities.
In that sense, Exit 10 belongs to one of the oldest and most enduring impulses in jazz: the desire to absorb, transform and reinvent. Jazz has never been a fixed musical language. Its history is a history of movement, exchange and adaptation. Fiola extends that tradition from a very specific corner of the world. She is not attempting to establish some definitive “Nova Scotian” form of jazz. Her point is subtler and more interesting. A musician can allow the landscape and culture that shaped them to become part of a contemporary musical language without turning either into folklore. Nova Scotia is not simply the subject of Exit 10. It is part of the way the music thinks.
Fiola’s classical training is particularly evident in the arrangements. The first thing the listener notices, however, is not the craftsmanship but the energy. Exit 10 is generous, buoyant and frequently driven by a groove that makes it difficult to remain entirely still. Beneath that immediacy lies an intricate architecture. Instruments enter and recede with precision, and the brass carries enough power to dominate the music if left unchecked, yet Fiola consistently keeps that force within a larger balance. A trained ear may recognize the sophistication of the arrangements immediately, but even listeners less concerned with technique can feel the discipline holding the music together. That may be one of Fiola’s most valuable strengths: she can make highly constructed music feel completely natural, never as though the construction itself were the point.
Valley Drive In is perhaps the clearest example. The piece moves with the sensation of a road unfolding ahead, carrying a persistent momentum that captures the spirit of the album almost perfectly. There is something distinctly visual about it, a cinematic quality that makes sense given Fiola’s experience working with images. She knows how to suggest a landscape without describing it, how to create movement without words and how to make a place emerge from the arrangement of sound. A title that might otherwise function simply as a geographical reference becomes an experience. You are not merely being told about a valley. You feel as though you are moving through it.
That cinematic sensibility extends well beyond Valley Drive In. Exit 10 often feels less like a conventional collection of tracks than a sequence of scenes, with each composition carrying the listener toward another memory, another place or another emotional register. The ocean naturally occupies a central role in that world. Scott’s Bay draws directly on the maritime environment, while other pieces draw on the atmosphere of community gatherings and the musical traditions of the region. When fiddle, accordion and tap dancing enter the arrangements, they do not feel like interruptions or quotations from another era. They become part of the story. Tradition is no longer something viewed from the outside. It becomes living music, capable of changing and moving forward.
There is something particularly contemporary about that idea. A return to one’s home region can easily be interpreted as a movement backward, especially in a culture that tends to associate artistic ambition with cities and cultural centers. But Fiola’s experience complicates that assumption. Cities concentrate cultural institutions, professional networks and opportunities, while at the same time becoming increasingly difficult places for many artists to afford. Moving to a rural community can therefore feel like a compromise imposed by circumstances. Exit 10 suggests another possibility. Leaving Halifax did not mean abandoning Fiola’s artistic identity. It meant relocating its center of gravity. The Annapolis Valley is no longer simply the place she came from. It has become a place from which new work can emerge.
That may be what makes the album so affecting. Fiola does not romanticize her return, nor does she pretend that going home restored some untouched version of childhood. She understands that distance changes what we see. Her home landscape has become meaningful precisely because she no longer sees it as she once did. Sometimes it takes leaving a place to understand what it gave you. Sometimes it takes living somewhere else to recognize which parts of your identity came from within and which were shaped by the environment in which you grew up. Exit 10 seems to grow out of that tension, but it never turns the question into an academic exercise. The argument, if there is one, is made entirely through sound.
And the sound itself has a quality that cannot be explained simply through structure or technique: it is life-affirming. There is genuine pleasure in the way Fiola lets the groove circulate through the ensemble, in the physical energy of the brass and in the freedom with which she brings East Coast traditions into a contemporary setting. Yet the joy never feels naïve. It sounds more like the hard-earned joy of an artist who has experienced change, uncertainty and the necessity of rebuilding, only to discover that returning can itself become a form of beginning again. The album carries that realization lightly. It never insists on it.
When Things End introduces a more intimate note. Fiola wrote the piece several years ago, while completing her saxophone studies and feeling the end of an important chapter in her life approaching. Heard now, within the larger arc of Exit 10, the song takes on a different weight. Featuring Jah’Mila’s voice alongside Fiola’s tenor saxophone, it suggests that an ending does not necessarily represent a clean break. Sometimes it is simply a threshold. That idea seems to run quietly beneath the entire album: leaving, losing, returning, rediscovering and, eventually, transforming.
For that reason, I would resist describing Exit 10 simply as an album about roots. It is more interested in what happens to roots once we have moved away from them. Places are not fixed. They change while we are gone, and we change with them. Music offers a way to reconnect with memory without pretending that memory can be recovered exactly as it was. It does not resurrect the past. It reveals what the past has become after passing through the present.
At one point while listening to the album, I found myself wondering whether an artist from this part of the world could have absorbed groove quite this deeply. The question is ultimately too narrow, because what Fiola is doing reaches beyond any single regional identity. Still, the music has a character that is difficult to mistake. It is joyful without being lightweight, nostalgic without becoming backward-looking, sophisticated without calling attention to its own sophistication. Most importantly, it has found its own equilibrium. Fiola does not seem interested in choosing between Halifax and the Annapolis Valley, between tradition and modernity, or between jazz and popular music. She has discovered that the tension between those worlds can itself become the language of the work.
Exit 10 is worth lingering over not only because of the strength of its compositions, the precision of its arrangements and the sheer pleasure of its grooves, but because of what it reveals about the relationship between an artist and the world that shaped them. To encounter a musician within the cultural landscape that formed them is to hear more than the music itself. It is to hear what they have chosen to preserve, what they have transformed and what they have left behind. In Fiola’s work, place becomes memory, memory becomes music, and music becomes a way of coming home without ever simply going back. That is the album’s most resonant achievement: it turns a return to one’s roots into forward motion, and transforms a personal geography into a musical language capable of traveling far beyond it.
Cette version est, à mon sens, plus naturelle en anglais américain : elle conserve ton regard personnel, mais évite davantage l’effet « traduction française ». Elle donne aussi à l’article une voix critique plus crédible et plus proche d’un grand quotidien américain, tout en restant chaleureuse et accessible.
Thierry De Clemensat
Member at Jazz Journalists Association
USA correspondent for Paris-Move and ABS magazine
Editor in chief – Bayou Blue Radio, Bayou Blue News
PARIS-MOVE, October 3rd, 2026
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Musicians :
Alto & Tenor Saxophones (track 7) – Ally Fiola
Violin (tracks 1, 3, 5, 6) – Donald MacLennan
Trombone – Simon Oakey
Sousaphone & Trombone (track 6) – Addison Sowery-Quinn
Keys & Trombone* (track 6) – Tom Richards
Drums – Lowell Whitty
Electric Bass (tracks 4, 5, 6, 7) – Larry Bjornson
Tap Dancing (tracks 2, 3, 6) – Michele King
Accordion (tracks 3, 5) – Mary Beth Carty
Tenor Saxophone (track 1) – Evan Mahaney
Drums (track 7) – Clare Macdonald
Vocals (track 7) – Jah’Mila
Track Listing :
English Montain
Cumberland
The Lookoff
Valley Drive
Scott’s Bay
Wolfville
When Things Ends (feat. Jah’ Mila)
Recorded at Fang Recording in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia
Producer – Ally Fiola
Recording & Mixing Engineer – Graeme Campbell
Mastering – J. LaPointe at Archive Mastering
Artwork – Meredith Sadler
Funded by Arts Nova Scotia & Canada Council for the Arts