When saxophonist Colin Stetson found out that his album New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges had made the Polaris Prize long list, he was surprised, elated and a bit relieved.
Even though the 36-year-old saxophonist has toured and recorded with Arcade Fire, Tom Waits and Bon Iver, and opened for the likes of the National and Godspeed You! Black Emperor, he’s hardly a household name.
And because he’s a fairly recent Canadian, having moved to Montreal from the United States just four years ago, he was especially delighted to have made the first cut. (He made the Polaris short list, too, it was announced on Wednesday.)
“Living in Canada now, it means a lot to me to be recognized like that,” he says over a late lunch in Toronto.
“And to be recognized alongside all of my friends and collaborators.…” He shakes his head. “I’m just really proud of this record. I like what it was that we created, and I’m really, really happy that it’s gotten such a life.”
New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges isn’t a big hit, to be honest, but the fact that it has found an audience at all ought to be worth some sort of prize. Apart from a bit of French horn and a couple of Laurie Anderson recitations, the album consists entirely of solo saxophone, with no overdubs or digital manipulations. Stranger still, Stetson performs much of the music on bass saxophone, a rarely used behemoth of an instrument.
Not that you’d recognize the sound of it. Between Stetson’s arsenal of arcane techniques and an “invasive” approach to microphone placement that put mikes inside the sax and up against Stetson’s throat, the clicking, buzzing, thrumming sounds that emerge from Vol. 2 sometimes seem too otherworldly to have come from any instrument.
Unless, of course, you happen to be a student of advanced saxophone technique, and Stetson, as it happens, is precisely that. A saxophone prodigy, he mastered the more common saxophones – alto, tenor, soprano and baritone – in his teens, and studied contemporary classical music at the University of Michigan. There, he developed a fascination with the lower end of the sax spectrum, savouring the “heft and physicality” of the instruments, and decided that what he really wanted was a bass sax.
That was easier said than done. Although fairly common in the 1920s, bass saxophones these days are hard to find and even harder to afford, with new horns running upwards of $18,000. “Not that they’re worth it,” says Stetson, who adds that his own horn – a century-old Conn – cost him “a fraction of that.”
Then there’s the challenge of playing the thing. Standing more than 120 centimetres tall, the bass saxophone is far more demanding than the baritone. “It was literally spreading my hands out as far as they’ll go, and taking more air than I had,” recalls Stetson. “I had to woodshed for some time, and really hard.”
Even now, Stetson finds that he’s expanding his technical command of the bass sax, particularly when it comes to things like multiphonics, or using his voice to get two notes at one time. But for all that goes into his playing, it’s the writing that most distinguishes Vol. 2.
“When I did Vol. 1, I was still searching, and things were still in an amorphous, improv-ey, place,” he says. “And then, when I did Vol. 2, it was night and day. I had been touring with Arcade Fire, doing music that was all song-form, and it had to have been rubbing off, because I started to craft these pieces more concretely. So when I went into do Vol. 2, there was very little that I would call improv.”
In part, that was because Stetson was able to polish his ideas on the road. “I remember I was opening for the National, and there were some things for Vol. 2 I was still writing,” he says. “Certain nights, I would do something, and it would totally work. It reminded me of the way that comics talk about developing a bit on the road. Certain things work, and certain things don’t, and that started to inform the composition.”
Colin Stetson performs Saturday at St. Matthews United Church in Halifax, as part of the Halifax Jazz Festival (halifaxjazzfestival.ca).
