Photo of the Kurt Rosenwinkel Quartet by Frédérique Ménard-Aubin; courtesy of the Montreal International Jazz Festival
If you’re paying attention at the jazz festival this year, you can’t help but notice the new sounds and new vocabulary being introduced to the art form. Jazz lives on in many ways, whether it’s through challenging odd-metered rhythms that take you away from the comfort zone of 4/4 time or alternative chord progressions that sound like no tune you’ve ever heard before.Maybe there’s some electronica thrown in for good measure or perhaps a drummer who sounds just like a drum machine.
Take Mark Guiliana for example. The New York drummer was holding court at Upstairs on Tuesday, leading his band Beat Music into a head-on collision between jazz and drum-and-bass riffs. With bassist Tim Lefebvre, they laid down funky, complex lines that made you feel one minute like you were at a dance party and the next in a geometry class. If a computer or a synthesizer can do a more precise job than Guiliana, I haven’t heard it.
What made the evening really fun were the guys who got to play on top of this sonic churn: guitarist Nir Felder and alto saxophonist David Binney. They delivered edgy and daring solos that stretched the boundaries of this music even further, helped by the judicious use of electronic atmospherics and sound loops. How about a basketball discourse on the art of the jump shot or part of a speech about television by a former head of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission? It all found its way into the music.
Later, at Théâtre Jean-Duceppe of Place des Arts, another innovator took the stage – the celebrated guitarist and composer Kurt Rosenwinkel whose quartet played music from their new Star of Jupiter CD. As the name would suggest, it was pretty celestial stuff. Rosenwinkel had a ringing sound to his guitar work (sometimes doubled by his own wordless vocals) and a sonic vocabulary all his own. His tunes were full of surprising twists and turns. Unfortunately, they were often stuck in medium tempos that didn’t really swing or jump out at the listener, so the space music at times got a little sleepy.
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