Tegan and Sara take a stand

While the musical twins are marking an important anniversary, their focus is very much on the present

With the deplorables not only controlling the most powerful nation on earth, but setting the tone for a world that’s increasingly intolerant, these aren’t the best of times for the more enlightened among us.

Seeing as there’s no point sugarcoating things, Tegan Quinn doesn’t bother when she’s reached in Los Angeles. Along with her sister and bandmate Sara, she’s rehearsing for a fall tour to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Tegan and Sara’s breakthrough release, The Con.

That’s not the only thing going on with the twins, who both call Vancouver home. Determined to make the planet a better place, they’ve launched the Tegan and Sara Foundation, a charity devoted to improving the lives of the more vulnerable in the LGBTQ community. They’re also ramping up promotion for The Con X, a tribute album that sees artists ranging from Ryan Adams to Cyndi Lauper to Mykki Blanco cover songs from The Con, which arguably remains Tegan and Sara’s most beloved release.

And then there’s getting their live show perfected for the tour, which will have the duo turning the wonderfully weird electro-indie songs on The Con into stripped-down versions designed for maximum intimacy.

But despite everything on the Quinns’ plate, Tegan has had plenty of time to think about the state of things in 2017. Tegan and Sara spent the past year touring for 2016’s Love You to Death, a record that received strong reviews everywhere

to the point where we can coexist with it. Anything that’s extreme just wants to be heard. It wants to be expressed.

“I think there’s so much strength and connectedness to be gained through vulnerability,” she continues. “It’s like having a conversation with someone, and they drop their guard, and all of a sudden you feel safe to drop your guard because they’ve been so transparent with you. I’m happy I’ve got to that point with my writing.”

> KATE WILSON

Belle Game plays the Commodore Ballroom on Friday and Saturday (October 20 and 21).

Jesse Cook is woke as fuck. 2

Six words that were never meant to inhabit the same sentence, perhaps, but times are strange—as the Toronto-based guitarist found out when he questioned the results of the 2016 U.S. election on his Facebook page.

“I was amazed to see the pushback from my own crowd,” he reports from his Ontario home. “I mean, my concerts are pretty much a big globalmusic party, right? And if people come to a concert, I’m assuming that they’re open to that, and they’re people who think of themselves as world citizens, or that they think there’s good in all cultures—and I realized that’s simply not the case. Some of my fans in the States are in fact Republicans and voted for Donald Trump, and I started getting all kinds of comments that I found really pretty scary.”

One of Cook’s fans posted pictures of former KKK leader David Duke on the guitarist’s wall. Others went off on anti-muslim tirades, clearly oblivious to the Arabic and Middle Eastern elements that have been part of Cook’s music since the beginning. Nearly a year later, Cook is still rattled, and he makes finding Republicans in his fanbase sound about as enjoyable as discovering cockroaches in the kitchen.

But, as a maker of instrumental chill-out music, it’s not like he was going to write a protest song. Instead, he’s made a protest album in the form of Beyond Borders, which stands as a subtle rebuke to the Great Divider.

“Mostly, when people interview me, they’re interpreting the title to mean musical borders—that I’m moving beyond musical borders, and perhaps cultural borders,” he says. “And my career has always been about that— moving beyond cultural borders. But in this day and age, this is a political title, and intentionally so. I want to put it right out there, because we live in a time when people are talking about building walls again, you know? When I was young, we were tearing walls down. Europe was becoming united, and North America was becoming one big free-trade zone. And now, suddenly, we’re building walls, and England is separating from Europe, and Europe is not sure that it’s going to be around, and you’ve got Donald Trump saying a lot of pretty nasty things about a lot of groups—all of which are represented in my music.

“I mean, think about it,” Cook continues. “At the foundation, it’s rumba flamenca, which is Gypsy music. Then you add Arabic elements—and obviously we know what Trump thinks about Arabic people. There are Persian elements from Iran and Iraq, and we know what he feels about those places. And there have always been Latin elements— salsa, merengue, cumbia, Colombian music, elements of Cuban music— and we know how he feels about Mexicans. All of those elements are in my music, and here we’ve got this guy who’s the most powerful person on the planet, and he’s pointedly attacking these groups of people.”

It’s not that Cook’s music is suddenly aimed at energizing the left: it remains more of a balm for a troubled world than a bomb pointed at the current inhabitants of the White House. It’s just that the guitarist can’t remain silent in the face of injustice.

“I know I’m not doing myself any favours by taking this position, because immediately I’m splitting my audience,” he says, “and I’m probably going to have people picketing my concerts in the U.S. But that’s fine.… At this time, I think everybody has to take a position.”

> ALEXANDER VARTY

Jesse Cook plays the Queen Elizabeth Theatre next Thursday (October 26).

Who is Matt Mitchell?

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To B.c.–born Anna Webber, whose trio with Mitchell and drummer John Hollenbeck opened the 2017 Vancouver International Jazz Festival, he’s “a brilliant musician”.

“Matt is the kind of guy,” she says, reached at her New York City home, “for whom you’ll write a piano part so difficult that you are worried it might be impossible to play, and after sight-reading it perfectly at rehearsal he’ll say, ‘Actually, it’s a little tricky.’ ”

Local guitarist and oud player Gordon Grdina, who’s joined by Mitchell and drummer Jim Black in the improvisational group MGB, feels much the same. “Matt is an incredibly inspiring individual,” he says, checking in with the Straight from an Arcata, California, tour stop. “He manages to make things you thought were impossible effortless.”

Meanwhile, Tim Berne—mitchell’s fellow Brooklyn resident, as well as his bandleader in Snakeoil, which recently played to a packed house at the Western Front—reduces things to their essentials. “Oh God, he’s the best,” the saxophonist reports from his home. And that’s a good thing, as one of Mitchell’s current projects is playing Berne’s music for solo piano, which is what he’ll be doing when he comes back to the Front next week.

With førage, recently released on Berne’s own Screwgun label, Mitchell has aced the difficult job of retaining Berne’s unique voice on the saxophone while translating it to a polyphonic instrument, simultaneously revealing some of the music’s antecedents and suggesting where it might go. It’s a beautiful conversation, with one participant being Mitchell’s piano, and the other the terse guidelines Berne has set down on staff paper.

“For each of the tracks on the record, there’s about two to four pages of composed material—or sometimes just one,” Mitchell explains on the line from Paris, where he’s performing with saxophonist and composer Steve Coleman. “But, you know, if I was to play the charts as notated, each would be done in about 30 seconds to a minute. So you could say the music is about 85 percent improvised—but all the improvising I’m doing is in some way informed by the environment of the piece that I’m playing at the time.

“Maybe I’m extracting a harmonic framework from one of the tunes, and I’m just going through it like one would do with a jazz tune,” he explains. “Or maybe I’ll extract a few bars that appeal to me, and I’ll play that as a vamp, or I’ll just play something else that’s a conscious reaction to avoid whatever else is there—like a negative-space kind of thing. But the DNA of Tim’s pieces heavily informs whatever I’m doing, so it’s not as clear-cut as ‘This is the composition, and now this is improvised.’ ”

It sounds heady, but part of Mitchell’s musical excellence is his way of bringing a visceral physicality to everything he plays, whether it’s with his own mind-boggling jazz-and-electronica constructions—check out his just-released album A Pouting Grimace

for evidence of that—or Berne’s sinuous and wide-ranging forms.

“Tim just likes a lot of different kinds of music,” Mitchell says. “He has a very advanced harmonic concept that comes from an appraisal of the modern aspects of jazz harmony, and also from contemporary classical music, possibly. But it has a heavy dose of blues feeling to it, also, and there’s a very lyrical side to him which I think is not often talked about. People always talk about how crazy the stuff is when his bands really get going, and that’s true; it definitely gets ecstatic. But there’s a lot of lyricism in what he writes, and groove feeling, too.”

Berne couldn’t be happier about what Mitchell has found in his scores, so perhaps we’ll let him have the last word.

With førage, the saxophonist says, “Matt ended up doing exactly what was the best-case scenario for me. So it’s just going to be one superlative after another when it comes to his interpretive ability. Really, the guy is phenomenal.”

> ALEXANDER VARTY

Matt Mitchell plays the Western Front on Wednesday (October 25).