THE NEW JAZZ
Meet the musicians who are changing the face of the genre.
‘Iknow we’re at a jazz festival,” says Christian Scott, onstage at Montreal’s Upstairs Jazz Bar and Grill, “and there’s all those underlying things about how to conduct yourself, but … We want you to enjoy your life.”
The New Orleans trumpeter is happily responding to banter from a crowd so enthused by the powerful, dense music he makes, that they’re interrupting him as he introduces his young sextet. If jazz as a genre seems commercially moribund, Scott and a new generation of ambitious musicians are giving it a creative shot in the arm by loosening its strictures. Here’s a look at three shows each from this year’s festivals in Montreal (all of which occurred in one jampacked night on June 29) and Toronto that takes the pulse of jazz — and finds it not so much steady as racing forward. THE NEW ICONS Christian Scott calls his work “stretch music”; as described on his website, it “attempts to ‘stretch’ jazz’s rhythmic, melodic and harmonic conventions to encompass as many other musical forms, languages and cultures as possible.” A tall order, and a broad one too, but held together by Scott’s magnetism, on and off the horn.
He can make his trumpet sound like ’ 60s Miles Davis, a clarion call, a crying jag (free of histrionics), a dusky croon, and unexpectedly, a breathy whisper. At Upstairs, his approach referenced rock, Latin music, and hip-hop, aided by the seemingly octopus-limbed drummer Joe Dyson, who plays those rhythms while adding other, deeper layers. His new group is less aggressive than his earlier quintet on albums such as Yesterday You Said Tomorrow (2010), but he retains his political engagement — one of his new tracks is called “Liberation Versus Gangsterism.” He makes a big deal of how young his players are, and if at times the group exhibits more talent than triumph, maybe that’s part of the point. At a venerable 32, Scott is incubating the shape of jazz to come.
Equally committed is pianist Robert Glasper, who in the most affecting moments of his piano trio set at Toronto’s Jane Mallett Theatre on June 23, played work from his new album Covered with voiceovers about the contemporary African-American experience. He, too, bantered with the crowd, telling the story of his appearing on eight tracks on Kendrick Lamar’s incendiary To Pimp a Butterfly — some of which, stylistically, is more conventionally “jazz” than what he plays himself. Having won Grammys in the R&B category for his last two releases, the star-studded Black Radio and Black Radio too, he’s now collapsing soul back into jazz. And just as the ever-inventive Miles Davis hewed to pop standards live, Glasper plays Radiohead and J Dilla beats (by request), a floating rendition of Prince’s “Sign ‘O’ the Times,” and during a kind of musical game, elicits singalongs to hoary pop tunes as his band looks on, bemused. But Glasper knows what he’s doing: a spoonful of Cyndi Lauper makes the polyrhythmic, polytonal, adventurous playing go down, time after time. THE NEXT GENERATION Where jazz, as a genre, has mostly left the dance floor, Manchester, England’s GoGo Penguin brings the dance floor back into jazz. At a packed L’Astral in Montreal, they proved a preternaturally tight outfit reproducing the tropes of electronic music, from pulsating breakbeats to layered texture to the skittering of a stuck CD. Drummer Rob Turner has the stamina of a drum machine, and pianist Chris Illingworth upends the role of the freewheeling trio pianist by repeat- ed figures that build steadily in intensity. Eschewing the jazz tendency to jam out indefinitely, they play short numbers circumscribed by crafty arrangements; often their tracks ebb away unexpectedly. By the end of their set, their minor-key approach can seem a little relentless, but they close with the winningly wistful new track “Quiet Minds,” which finds Turner whacking dulled cymbals like a steam engine remembering better days — the ghost in their machine.
Brooklyn’s Snarky Puppy also draw in younger crowds, and in Toronto, they packed the 1,100-capacity jazz tent — quite the achievement for a jazz-fusion band in 2015. They import ideas from dance music — but also rock, and Indian ragas, and funk, and jazz, and so on ad infinitum; earlier this year, they won an R&B Performance Grammy for “Something,” featuring soul singer Lalah Hathaway, but their Toronto show is made up of instrumentals so complicated, there isn’t even room for the kitchen sink. At times, the players (who include Toronto drummer Larnell Lewis) can seem overeager — it’s obvious they’re former music students who thrive on challenging arrangements. But they’ve hit on the commercial masterstroke of attracting jam-band-friendly crowds who both sing along to their tunes and thrill when they take left turn after left turn. It’s one thing to hit No. 1 on the jazz charts (as they did this year with their album Sylva, an unapologetically proggy suite recorded with the 64-piece Dutch Metropole Orkest), another to cross over, and these cats — errrr, puppies — are doing so without selling out. THE BIGGER BANDS At a time when everything’s downsized, it’s exciting to see 19 people onstage together, and the free show by the double Junowinning Christine Jensen Jazz Orchestra in Toronto’s Nathan Phillips Square on June 25 proves a triumph of logistics, funding, and musical innovation. Montreal saxist/composer Jensen’s arrangements are colourful and dense, providing thickets of sound for her character-filled soloists to wind, rather than hack, their way through. Her sister, trumpeter Ingrid Jensen, uses a pedal to loop her playing, creating curtains of sound against which she solos. It’s a thrillingly strange thing to hear in such a context, but this isn’t your grandmother’s big band. On the ending song “Wink,” they evoke Charles Mingus, but with a wobbly, lurching swing that ends with Ingrid and lead trumpeter Jocelyn Couture duelling in a stratospheric register — working their way through the past to the future.
Norway’s Jaga Jazzist, meanwhile, have eight people but sound like an entire town. At Montreal’s Club Soda, every player seems to have at least three instruments — Line Horntveth played both flute and tuba and sang — in order to navigate leader (and Line’s brother) Lars Horntveth’s head-spinning arrangements. Flanked by poles of light that shine in various colours and blink on and off in time with the band’s shots, Jaga play a swirling, heady mesh of epic rock, internal organ-rearrangingly squelchy synths, winsome woodwind-and-brass choral sections, and contemplative interludes with chimes, all overlaid with melodies so stirring they could be anthems for new planets. There are, indeed, galvanizing solos, but some would say this music isn’t strictly jazz. Fair enough: it isn’t strictly anything, except mindblowingly inspired and intense. By the end of the show, it feels as if the club has reached escape velocity, with jazz, in all of its history of creativity, as the launch pad.
They import ideas from dance music — but also rock, and Indian ragas