It hardly seems fair. A Canadian musician goes to the trouble of lining up a tour of the country's jazz festivals, no mean feat, only to find himself or herself competing for audiences and media attention with American stars who are playing the same cities at the same time. Here are six Canadians worthy of more notice than they'll likely receive as they make their away around jazz events this summer.
The Toronto twosome Barnyard Drama may be the most provocative Canadian act on the festival circuit, what with Christine Duncan's five-octave, cast-of-thousands voice and Jean Martin's setup of snare and bass drum, cymbals, electronics and turntables.
She's a former gospel singer who apparently went to the devil by stages in Vancouver during the 1990s: folk, R&B, jazz, New Music and now this. (She still sings with the Vancouver Ensemble of Jazz Improvisation.) He's a modernist jazzer, originally from Ottawa, whose credits include Chelsea Bridge, the D.D. Jackson Trio and another of this year's festival attractions, Jazzstory.
Duncan and Martin have described what they do together in this flight of adjectival fancy: "Jazz, fairy tales, musique actuelle, songs, nursery rhymes, electro-avant-garde-new-acoustic-tuvan-primpram-ambiant music . . ." Their repertoire ranges from old standards, including definitive re-takes on The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise and Miss Otis Regrets, to small explosions of pure gibberish. Whichever, it's cannily over-the-top in a nicely understated way.
Latest CD: Memories and a List of Things to Do, Barnyard Records, 2003.
Remi Bolduc has not been an easy musician to pin down over the years. The Montreal alto saxophonist started out very much "in the tradition" as a member during the 1980s of the Vic Vogel Big Band and the Bernard Primeau Jazz Ensemble, the former steeped in Ellingtonia and the latter in hard-bop. By 1991, however, Bolduc was in New York studying with Steve Coleman, whose stripped-down "m-base" mix of quicksilver solos and wicked rhythms had the potential to become the bebop of the 21st century.
Now that we're there -- the 21st century, that is -- Bolduc seems to have stepped back in search of a little perspective. He's mixing mainstream classics with his own compositions these days -- Body and Soul and Star Eyes are included on his 2001 CD Renaissance -- and he has moderated Steve Coleman's assertive lyricism into something rather less declarative, dryer and more quizzical. And so his search continues, lately conducted in the company of three younger Montreal musicians, pianist John Roney, bassist Zack Lober and drummer David Laing, who are on the road with him for these next few weeks.
Latest CD: Tchat, with Kenny Werner, Justin Time Records, 2003.
The story behind Jazzstory is the indefatigability of Tim Posgate. The Toronto guitarist has hustled up a modest though busy career over the past dozen years, keeping as many as four units on the go in styles that move unassumingly between the modern and the postmodern. (He, too, had his brush with Steve Coleman, although the effect seems to have been fleeting.)
Of late, two Posgate quartets have prevailed, Jazzstory and The Horn Band, each with Lina Allemano as its trumpeter; Jazzstory is completed by bassist Rob Clutton and Barnyard Drama's drummer Jean Martin, the latter possibly the busiest Canadian on the circuit this summer.
Jazzstory is a quirky read whose colourful vocabulary and sometimes rough syntax is laid out in fairly plain type. Think of Posgate as Bill Frisell for hosers. (Well, Posgate created the image with his first, pre-Jazzstory CD, Hoser City.) He's workmanlike in both his writing and his playing; to the extent that he departs from convention on either count, he does so cautiously and with a bit of an effort, leaving the really fancy stuff up to his bandmates.
Latest CD: Jazzstory, Guildwood Records, 2001.
The first that the jazz world knew of the Montreal alto and soprano saxophonist Christine Jensen, she had written three compositions included on Vernal Fields, the debut CD recorded in 1994 by her sister Ingrid, then a trumpeter on the rise in New York. It was an auspicious start for young Christine, just months out of McGill University; emerging musicians are generally noticed for the promise of their playing, not the maturity of their writing.
Nine years later, the Jensen sisters continue to work together. This summer, they're travelling under Christine's name with a quintet completed by the Toronto pianist David Restivo, the Montreal bassist Fraser Hollins and the Paris-based drummer Karl Jannuska.
The repertoire is mostly Christine's doing, of course -- a set list of original pieces blessed with long, soaring melodies and shifting substructures that push, pull and probe gently at various modern notions about jazz composition advanced by Maria Schneider, Wayne Shorter and Kenny Wheeler. It's a growing body of work that marks Jensen as one of the most important Canadian composers of her generation.
Latest CD: A Shorter Distance, Effendi Records, 2002.
Tanya Kalmanovitch plays jazz viola. It's a slower, darker instrument in the Calgary musician's hands than jazz violin. She calls her band Hut Five, which might be a play on Hot Five, a popular name in classic-jazz circles, except that the quartet -- yes, quartet -- works in a rather more modern style of low-voltage fusion jazz.
Actually, Hut Five is a building at the Banff Centre for the Arts, where Kalmanovitch, Boston guitarist Rick Peckham, Irish bassist Ronan Guilfoyle and Edmonton/New York drummer Owen Howard began assembling a repertoire in 2001. Kalmanovitch was in the midst of a move from the classical world to jazz -- she is a graduate of the Juilliard School of Music in New York and a former member of the Turtle Island String Quartet -- and has since ventured further afield, musically and geographically, into South Indian traditions.
Hut Five finds her alternating between short, group-composed "vignettes" and a variety of her own compositions. Jimi Hendrix's Manic Depression is also in the repertoire, no doubt a show-stopper for a group that could just be one of the summer season's surprise Canadian hits.
Latest CD: Hut Five, Perspicacity Records, 2002.
Michael Zilber likes to talk about "reimagining" the jazz canon. The Vancouver-born tenor and soprano saxophonist, a resident of San Francisco since 1992 via Boston and New York, describes it as a process whereby "everything in the tune EXCEPT some form of the melody (sometimes rewritten) is fair game, from [chord]changes to meter to form to tempo." Some of his associates call it "Zilberization," but in truth this sort of de/reconstruction has been going on in jazz for years.
The difference lies in Zilber's broad historical and theoretical frames of reference, which turn 1930s Ellingtonia, for example, into mid-1960s Miles Davis. ( Mood Indigo never sounded this hot before.) It might all be academic were Zilber not such a heady soloist -- as might be expected of a saxophonist influenced by Wayne Shorter and mentored by Dave Liebman.
Zilber has Liebman in the band for this rare return to native soil, along with three of the Bay Area's best, drummer Steve Smith (of Journey, Vital Transformation and Steps Ahead fame), pianist Paul Nagel and bassist John Shifflett.
Latest CD: Reimagined, Vol. 1: Jazz Standards, Bluejay Records, 2002.