IT’S DOUBLE THE JAZZ FOR MACLEAN

Ottawa-raised pianist leads two bands in upcoming shows

Toronto-based, Ottawa-raised pianist Nick Maclean has made the long musical journey from Dixieland and Fats Waller to Herbie Hancock and funk.

The 27-year-old will make several trips this month to play for hometown-area listeners. On Saturday, he brings his electric jazz group, Snaggle, to the Avant- Garde Bar on Besserer Street.

A week later, Maclean plays the Options Jazz Lounge of the Brookstreet Hotel in Kanata with his more traditional but still powerful acoustic quartet. That group also plays Sunday, Oct. 14, at Merrickville’s Jazz Festival.

Maclean says he was introduced to jazz by his grandfather. “He sat me down and put on Dixieland and old swing records, even bought me my first jazz album, a best of Fats Waller disc,” he says. “I loved the joy that was in that music, and from then my childhood was filled with Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington and Count Basie.”

By the time he was finishing up at Merivale High School, Maclean was performing at Ottawa’s jazz clubs. “This experience was really the thing that made me decide this is what I want to do with my life,” he says.

After graduating, he made the move to Toronto to study music at Humber University and then the University of Toronto. But even with two degrees, Maclean still considers himself a student.

“I’m still learning important lessons,” he says." One of the deepest being the importance of developing one’s own personal voice and a personal narrative. Great improvisation is about storytelling and, in order to do that effectively, you have to find your own voice and develop an introspective, searching quality to figure out what stories you want to tell and where you’ll take them in the moment.

“I didn’t learn this lesson in school. This one came from one of my closest friends and colleagues, trumpeter Brownman Ali — a man of truly deep artistry and curiosity whom I respect and admire greatly,” Maclean says.

Ali will play in both of Maclean’s bands, that are Ottawa- and Merrickville-bound.

Snaggle, Maclean says, is “a cross between electric-era Miles Davis and Rage Against the Machine.” He adds that he writes “compositional odysseys” for the group, and that, in concert, the band, which Maclean launched five or six years ago during his final year at Humber, “swings between quiet and contemplative to brash and driving.

“The Nick Maclean Quartet is

much more capital “J” Jazz,” its leader says. “We’re much freer to go farther down the rabbit hole and explore lots of weird and wonderful in-the-moment interactions.”

Hancock, who closed this year’s TD Ottawa Jazz Festival, is an enormous inspiration for Maclean, who calls his debut recording — which includes four Hancock compositions — “kind of a love letter to Herbie.”

“He embodies so much of what I think of as the core principles of jazz — an exploratory searching spirit unafraid of taking risks onstage, and unafraid of changing directions and trying something entirely new,” Maclean says.