Dreaming of a complex blend of jazz, ’80s pop
While other jazz musicians are paying tribute this year to Ella Fitzgerald and Thelonious Monk, Montreal’s Joel Miller and Sienna Dahlen are singing the praises of Corey Hart.
The ’80s Canadian pop icon is the subject of the floating ballad Corey Heart, one of a dozen concise tracks on Miller’s album, Dream Cassette, which the saxman and composer released last year and features Dahlen’s lyrics and singing. How and why did Mr. Sunglasses At Night wind up being the subject of a jazz track’s adoration?
“That was an interesting coincidence,” Dahlen recalls.
Miller remembers that he wrote the music for the song without having any ideas for lyrics.
But when he emailed a demo of it to Dahlen, he called the file Corey Heart — typo and all — because the reverb-rich smack of the drum sound on the demo reminded him of “something in the 1980s, like Never Surrender.”
“Typical Joel, right? No rhyme or reason, but it just made sense in his head,” Dahlen says. “He’s a hard cat to follow sometimes, which is just the nature of the beast and that’s why his music is so interesting and unpredictable.”
Dahlen took that quirky per- functory title and turned the song into an ode to Hart. “When I was a teenager living in the sticks up in northern B.C., we didn’t have access to high culture, so I used to listen to the radio a lot. And a lot of it was Top 40, and Corey Hart was someone that I idolized for many reasons. I just saw myself in him, or I wanted to be him or I liked his hair. It was a weird obsession that I had with him. And so it was fitting that this song, I just said, ‘I’ll write this real tongue-in-cheek lyric.’ ”
Others have loved not just Corey Heart but Miller’s entire album. In April, Dream Cassette won jazz recording of the year at the East Coast Music Awards in Saint John, N.B. (Miller is a native of that province.)
This month, Miller, Dahlen and the four other musicians in Miller’s band are on a Canada Council-supported tour, playing gigs in Calgary, Medicine Hat, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Ottawa and Toronto in support of the album.
Miller plays Sunday afternoon at the Ironwood Stage & Grill with the JAZZYYC Lab Band and his group with Dahlen is to play a house concert in Calgary Sunday night.
Tickets for the 8 p.m. concert are $25. Email buckingjampalace@ gmail.com to reserve a spot.
All of Dream Cassette isn’t so di- rectly tied to ’80s pop, but it does go further afield from jazz than its predecessors in Miller’s discography.
“It’s basically jazz music with pop references,” says Miller, whose more in-the-box album, Dive, won a Juno Award in 2013 for contemporary jazz album of the year.
Dahlen, who won a Juno in 2014 for her singing on guitarist Mike Rud’s album, Notes On Montreal, avoids putting genre labels on Dream Cassette’s eclectic mix. "You just have to take it for what it is,” she says.
Whatever you call it, the music was “complex from the get-go,” Dahlen says.
She adds that singing her parts doesn’t come easily for her, even if she wrote the words. “It’s a challenge for me to wrap my tongue around those rhythms sometimes, and to sing the lines with confidence either as a lead singer or as a horn, but I always get a kick out of it.”
Miller is effusive in his appreciation of Dahlen, whom he met when the two 40- somethings were McGill University students in the 1990s. “She’s just so deadon,” Miller says. "She’s doesn’t sing until she fully internalizes so many aspects of the music.”
Miller says while the Hartthemed piece strikes him as funny, other songs on Dream Cassette are serious, musical reflections on “the search for wholeness.”
In particular, there’s the song Streamlined, a driving, upbeat rocking song written in response the death of Miller’s teenage nephew, Isaac.
“Creating something when you go through hard times, creativity can help you through that process,” Miller says.