An expat sax man returns for Winter Jazz
Chet Doxas explains the artistic inspiration behind his latest effort
Over the past five years, when saxophonist Chet Doxas was touring with rocker and fellow Montreal son Sam Roberts, the horn man spent many an afternoon off at a museum. At some point, the visual stimulation began triggering music in Doxas’s head.
“All of a sudden, I would be standing in front of a painting, and it would go boom … sometimes these two- or three-voice melodies, like bass and harmonies, would come to me,” Doxas says.
Later, Doxas did what he could to make the most of these inspirations. He began visiting museums — it helps that his home base, New York City, is full of them — with blank manuscript paper at the ready, to transcribe and then work with the sounds he was hearing.
This new way of composing has one big advantage over toiling at the piano or with saxophone in hand, Doxas adds.
“One nice thing about it is when I’m looking at a painting and then working on the music, then my inner critic is silenced a lot more — that other voice that you have that says, ‘This isn’t good enough,’ ” he says.
“I’m looking at the painting and I just start writing. It’s a really very, very pleasant way to work, rather than facing that voice of crippling self-doubt that can get louder and louder if you let it.”
Rich In Symbols, Doxas’s latest album and the Juno nominee’s eighth as a leader or co-leader, pulls together seven of his artfuelled compositions and represents a major leap in style and content. Doxas and his band will play the music of Rich In Symbols on Friday at La Nouvelle Scène as part of the TD Ottawa Winter Jazz Festival.
Beyond its visual-arts roots, the album draws from another vein of inspiration. Because Doxas took a hyper-local approach, writing music as he viewed paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and other art revolutionaries of New York’s Lower East Side in the 1980s, he also pulled on the contemporaneous and equally experimental sounds of No Wave and post-punk music to colour his album.
“I thought, ‘Wow, this is kind of too good not to dig into a little more,’ this coexistence of a community that is geographically aligned, because the whole place is a 20-block radius,” Doxas says. “You have early Madonna, performing at CBGB in a dress that Keith Haring made for her. You’ve got Basquiat making album covers for his friends.”
Meanwhile, the video on YouTube for Doxas’s soaring, hardhitting piece Starcrossings revels in its own kind of gritty, nostalgic low-culture art, adopting the graininess and visual flutter of a well-worn VHS tape.
Still, it’s not as if Doxas was enjoying early ’80s avant-garde sounds during their heyday, mostly because the 37-year-old was only born in 1980.
Raised in a musical household in Montreal’s West Island, Doxas took up clarinet at the age of nine and then saxophone a few years later. In his mid-teens, Doxas played in dance bands with men several generations older. He studied jazz at McGill University, finishing his master’s degree there almost a decade ago. He racked up playing and recording credits with peers such as Juno-winning bandleader Christine Jensen and Roberts, elders such as pianist Oliver Jones, and U.S. jazz stars including trumpeter Dave Douglas and the late guitarist John Abercrombie. In 2014, Doxas, his wife and their two daughters moved to Brooklyn.
Doxas quickly found musical collaborators, including bassist Zack Lober, with whom he’d played in Montreal before Lober moved to New York City in 2005. Lober is in the core band featured on Doxas’s new album, as are guitarist Matthew Stevens, another Canadian expat, and drummer Eric Doob.
In 2013, before he moved to New York, Doxas released an album called Dive with this lineup. But with its larger sonic palette and beyond-jazz grooves and textures, Rich In Symbols breaks away from the lean and more conventionally jazzy approach of Dive in a few ways.
It’s worth noting that Rich In Symbols features additional guitar work on three tracks by Dave Nugent, also a member of the Sam Roberts Band. Furthermore, the album was produced by Liam O’Neil, whose resumé includes work with such rockers as Kings of Leon, Metric and Broken Social Scene.
While more usual jazz recordings can be one- or-two-day affairs with a minimum of overdubbing, Rich In Symbols involved a slightly longer, more rock-world approach in the studio.
“We would lay down a live take, and then the thing that took longer would be searching for sounds,” Doxas says. “If we were to try to find a certain synth sound, we
would take our time doing that, take an hour to find the right bass sound,” he says.
Rich in Symbols is the first album that Doxas made away from home, choosing instead to record at Giant Studios in Toronto.
“We got apartments for the week, and that’s something I stole from Sam as well,” Doxas says. “Getting out of your hometown, the only thing you have to do is record. It’s amazing the difference that makes.”
Doxas says he hopes to further explore the combination of visual art and original music. He dreams of touring to perform in museums, calling that change of venues “kind of uncharted territory.”
“I’d love to write music for permanent collections, that would be so hip,” he adds.
He has in mind writing some music inspired by works in the National Gallery of Canada, and has given that a go by viewing paintings via his computer. It would be better, Doxas says, if he could pop in for a visit before or after his Ottawa gig.