JAZZ FEST SERVES SMORGASBORD OF STUDIED COOL >>>
Session stories are like fishing stories: sometimes the best tales are about the ones that got away. Did you know, for instance, that guitarists Kevin Breit and Bill Frisell recorded an entire album of jazz standards with Norah Jones that, so far, has never seen the light of day?
When the suits at Blue Note heard it, Breit reports from a Montreal hotel, “They said, ‘Sounds like a barmitzvah band.’ Now, I don’t know how they got that. I can’t imagine that with me and Bill… A bar mitzvah? I could not figure that one out.”
He’s laughing, though. And he laughs again when he relates how Mark Knopfler shut him out of a Ruth Moody session, or at least kiboshed an elaborate guitar orchestration the Toronto-based multi-instrumentalist had arranged for the Dire Straits star to solo over. But at least he got something out of that date: a new musical persona, Johnny Goldtooth.
Knopfler had already taken one pass at the track, but Moody and producer David Travers-smith wanted something with more edge, a quality Breit has to spare. “I just wanted to make it the opposite,” Breit says, “so I thought of this guy—this guy wearing a bullfighter outfit, you know. He’s got the gold tooth, he’s a chain smoker, he pinches women’s asses, married five, six times—a weird, old, tough motherfucker who just plays what he plays. Like Link Wray—that kind of deal.”
The production team loved it. Knopfler didn’t. And a few weeks later Breit made a discovery that solidified Goldtooth’s character in his mind.
“I’d inherited our photo albums that my father and my mother kept,” he explains. “And I was showing my children my parents—they’d never met my parents; they were long gone before they were born, right? And it had been years since I’d gone through these photo albums, and I see the red one—it’s tattered, the cover’s off it—and there it is. There’s my father, dressed up in a bullfighter outfit, playing a Beltone bass, and he looks beautiful. And he is the character that I had in my head. I couldn’t believe it. I took the photo out, put it up in my music room along with pictures of matadors, and I got really into this character. Who is this guy? And I got so into it I became him when I played.”
Breit eventually turned his vision into a hilarious Youtube mockumentary and an album, Johnny Goldtooth and the Chevy Casanovas. The latter’s a bold, swaggering effort, and even if it sounds like it could have been made 50 years ago—it’s full of sly references to guitar pioneers Wray, Mickey Baker, and George Barnes—it’s also animated by Breit’s very postmodern sense of genre play. And fun. Lots of fun.
“It’s a wagging-tail-on-a-dog record,” says Breit, explaining that as the record evolved, Goldtooth became less of a hard-ass and more of a lovable eccentric.
More like his creator, in other words?
“Well,” says the guitarist, “sometimes it’s nice to walk into a room and not be yourself.” > ALEXANDER VARTY Johnny Goldtooth and the Chevy Casanovas play a free Downtown Jazz concert at 5:15 p.m. on Saturday (June 23), as part of the TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival. Kevin Breit will also perform with Shaun Verreault at Prestige Guitars (1332 Main Street, North Vancouver) at 7 p.m. on Thursday (June 21), and at the Cottage Bistro on Friday (June 22).
Au balances the playful with beautifully bittersweet
It’s not difficult, listening to Allison Au’s music, to determine that melody is her main concern. She’s one of those saxophonists who sing through their horn; rather than run flashy but emotionally vacant arpeggios, she always seems to be developing some sort of narrative idea. So it’s not entirely surprising to find out that her earliest musical influences were singers—and, more particularly, the singers that her father had favoured ever since he was a boy, growing up in Singapore.
“Exposure to vocal jazz came very early in my life,” Au tells the Straight, in a telephone conversation from her Toronto home. “My dad had a very wide variety of music in his record and CD collection when I was a child, and he just happened to have a lot more vocal representation in his collection. So that was what I first heard. He had some instrumentalists, too, just not as much. I think he really loved Nat King Cole while he was growing up, and people like Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald as well.
“I think I was maybe 6 when I first heard Ella Fitzgerald,” she continues. “What drew me to it was just the energy and the rhythmic playfulness.… it was just something that was completely captivating. I would listen to Ella’s version of ‘Mack the Knife’ on Repeat, ’cause I loved it. She imitates these instruments… I don’t know. It was just so engaging to me, as a kid. I’m not sure if I’ve deliberately tried to emulate it in my own music, but it’s worked its way in—although of course in a more modern context.”
Playfulness is evident in Au’s
Allison Au work, but it’s paired with a certain bittersweet quality, something she ascribes to her mother’s side of the family. On her debut CD, The Sky Was Pale Blue, Then Grey, she dedicates a song to her maternal grandmother, who survived the Holocaust before immigrating to this country after the Second World War. “She used to love to sing when we were little,” Au explains, “so it’s kind of a melancholy bit of nostalgia from my childhood. I have some other music inspired by my grandfather, so there are family-related stories that inspire the music, and they come from somewhat sad places. But I’ve tried to reflect on my gratitude to them, while also acknowledging what they went through to come to Canada.”
Au adds that her music is often inspired by nature, and this listener thought that might have been the case with “They Say We Are Not Here”, the final track on 2016’s Juno Award–winning Forest Grove. The piece sounds like Au is looking at an autumnal scene from behind plate glass, before putting on her boots to go dance in the fallen leaves—an interpretation that pleases the saxophonist, even if she gently says it’s all wrong. Instead, her source material was a New York Times video documentary on the late Ugandan LGBT activist David Kato.
“It was a very moving video essay, and at the end they kind of commemorate his life, because he was murdered after it was filmed,” she says. “He was talking about all the political stress that he’d been going through in order to advocate for equal rights in his country, and he said, ‘The government, they say we are not here. They don’t want to acknowledge us.’ That was particularly poignant for me. So, yeah, I draw from many kinds of inspiration.
“But that’s what’s wonderful about music and the arts,” she continues. “Everyone hears something different, regardless of the source.” > ALEXANDER VARTY The Allison Au Quartet plays a free Performance Works concert at 1:30 p.m. on Saturday (June 23), as part of the TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival.
Long-gestating Starebaby more than worth the wait
Dan Weiss’s new band, Starebaby, isn’t quite as new as it might seem: the idea has been percolating in the drummer’s mind for “12, 13 years”, he tells the Straight in a telephone call from his New York City home. And he even had fourfifths of the lineup in place from the beginning, starting with himself, keyboardist Craig Taborn, guitarist Ben Monder, and bassist Trevor Dunn. Meeting keyboardist Matt Mitchell in 2009, he adds, cemented the notion of doing “something that drew on the heavier influences that we’d all had”. But it wasn’t until late 2016—when he finagled a grant from the Shifting Foundation arts agency—that he had time to sit down and write a body of work for the quintet.
It’s been worth the wait.
But then, you’d expect nothing less from this combination of musicians. Trained in jazz and South Asian percussion styles, Weiss is an explosive performer. Monder—who played on David Bowie’s final recording, Blackstar—is a fluent and expressive guitarist who’s as much at home with fuzztones and looping pedals as he is with more traditional jazz sonorities. Dunn is one of the most muscular bassists in any form of music, whether he’s playing electric or acoustic. Meanwhile, Taborn and Mitchell have distinct but complementary styles that balance splashy expression with razor-sharp focus; both can play free with abandon, and both can bring a compositional sensibility to bear on structures that reflect the pulse-driven, modular nature of contemporary electronic music.
Starebaby is as close to a supergroup as it is possible to get in a world that largely resists the spotlight, and the band’s self-titled debut is nothing less than a trip—which is mostly due to Weiss’s intricate, demanding charts. The album’s eight tunes, a couple of which break the 10-minute mark, transport the listener into a place that’s fascinatingly vivid, mind-bendingly complex, and often also undeniably scary.
Track 4, “Badalamenti”, offers a clue to what Weiss hopes to achieve with his writing. “The vibe of the record was really influenced by a lot of music I’m into,” he says, citing technical metal as a particular inspiration. “But it was especially influenced by Twin Peaks. I was watching Season 3 when I was composing this, so that made its way into a lot of the material—just the vibe of the show. ‘Badalamenti’ is obviously for [David Lynch’s in-house soundtrack composer] Angelo Badalamenti, so his world was really intriguing for me as I was writing. It put me in this kind of zone where there’s a lot of pretty stuff on the outside and then there’s this undercurrent of a lot of dark stuff. That made its way into the music.”
What remains to be seen is what else makes its way into the music as the band matures. Weiss’s compositions will remain at the forefront, but all five players are master improvisers, and that’s been written into the plan. “Right now, the blend is probably 50-50,” Weiss says, “but the more we play, the more we get off the page and we improvise.” > ALEXANDER VARTY Dan Weiss Starebaby plays the Ironworks on Sunday (June 24), as part of the TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival.
Spectre of the Band looms large in life of Julian Lage
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“In the way that Indian music is kind of inextricable from the development of melodic music—it’s ancient, it’s epic, it’s all those things—so is the Band,” the 30-year-old performer continues. “Not as old, but it’s equally as influential in terms of orchestration, or understanding what you want from a drummer in relation to a guitar player, a bass player, and a singer. Although we don’t have a singer, but that’s kind of the guitar’s role.”
Lage’s vocal-inflected approach to melody is another hint that, despite his harmonic sophistication, he’s attracted to players and singers that are storytellers first and theorists second.
“I am fascinated by that,” he says. “The players I respond to typically have a version of that going on. It’s more common in the blues guitar tradition than the jazz guitar tradition, as far as just outwardly emoting in this way where you’re like, ‘Someone’s singing me a song, or telling me a story.’ I’ve always loved that quality, and the electric guitar especially lends itself well to that. But my biggest reference point would probably be steel-guitar players. I don’t play any pedal steel, but I’m fascinated by [pedal-steel pioneer] Alvino Rey, and Hawaiian guitar, and even Roy Smeck. They used that vocal quality almost like a vaudevillian bit— making it sound like a voice, or whatever. But I think that’s so cool, and it’s part of the electric guitar’s history.”
Add the Band to the limber melodies of Indian music, historical steelguitar sounds, and the evergreen jazz eccentricities of Thelonious Monk and Ornette Coleman, and you’ll have the building blocks of Lage’s style— not that he’s going to take too much credit for their assembly.
“I’d like to say it’s super deliberate, and it is, to a certain degree,” he says. “But it’s also kind of all I know.” > ALEXANDER VARTY The Julian Lage Trio plays Performance Works on Tuesday (June 26), as part of the TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival.