Jazz and Improvised

Brown Sugar
Shakura S’Aida
Ruf Records Ruf 1155
(www.shakurasaida.com)

What a sweet blast. Shakura S’Aida has earned praise in Canada as a singer, songwriter and actress of substance and now she’s got a firm grip on the solo career ladder with a scintillating new CD to follow her excellent album “Blueprint”.

Released in North America in April and before that in Europe, “Brown Sugar” lets S’Aida, whose family arrived in Toronto in the 1970s, use the vast experience gained from working with luminaries such as Jimmy Smith, Ruth Brown and Patti LaBelle.

It’s a startlingly good album that bears repeated listening, diction so clear that the cool sounds one might expect don’t happen. There’s emotional connection and passion aplenty here on a dozen tracks, 11 of which employed power guitarist Donna Grantis to work with S’Aida in lyrics and music. The band is tight, featuring organist Lance Anderson, bass Dave Smith, drummer Steve Potts and Rick Steff on keyboards.

Mr. Right is a superb opener best at big volume and offers a glimpse of the vocalist’s attractive high warble. Walk Out That Door is a fetching shuffle while Gonna Tell My Baby is a slow burner with fierce wails. Two successive tunes, the grittily intimate Did It Break Your Heart and the swinging Missing The Good And The Bad would have been great fodder for Janis Joplin and they’re followed by a delightful trio of songs that break the raunch barrier - Sweet Spot, the bitter title track and Anti Love Song.

For the First Time
Hugh O’Connor; Mark Ferguson; John Geggie; Don Johnson
True North Records TND532
(www.truenorthrecords.com)
In an age when almost anyone can put out a CD and almost everybody does, in some cases reducing the music to the status of a calling card, it’s refreshing to come across a first time album by a veteran player who simply wants to “tell his story”.

The musician is Ottawa born saxophonist, Hugh O’Connor. At age 81 O’Conner, who began playing in the late 1940s, has just released his first CD. His approach is refreshingly melodic and he plays with an authority that says, “For me, here’s where it’s at.”

Recorded in the Almonte Ontario Old Town Hall, the CD consists of a programme of superior standards ranging from the seldom played A Portrait Of Jenny to the frequently performed My Funny Valentine on the opening chorus of which there is a Desmond-ish quality to the sound of his horn. But Hugh is definitely his own man and puts an individual stamp on this recording which also includes such great songs as In The Wee Small Hours, How About You and The More I See You.

He is ably and tastefully accompanied by pianist Mark Ferguson - yes the same Mark who used to be a trombone player in Toronto - bassist John Geggie and, on five of the twelve tracks, drummer Don Johnson.

Although active and successful, mainly around the Ottawa area, he has maintained a relatively low profile on the Canadian jazz scene. Perhaps that can change with the release of this very welcome CD.

More an enhancement than a replication of Quebec’s Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville (FIMAV), Toronto’s VTO2010 festival cherry picks some of FIMAV’s international performers, presenting them with invited Canadian musicians. As these CDs indicate, the improvisers are impressive no matter the location or formation.

One of the most anticipated concerts is the Six at the Music Gallery May 26. An all-star European ensemble, one of its distinguishing characteristic is the supportive synthesizer work of Köln’s Thomas Lehn. Close Up (MonotypeRec. mono024 www.monotyperec.com) demonstrates Lehn’s skills providing the underpinning for Bertrand Gauguet, a technically adroit French saxophonist, plus Viennese quarter-tone trumpeter Franz Hautzinger. As with the Six, electronics are part of this trio’s mix. So on Close Up’s three extended tracks blurry intonation encompasses loops of granulated tones mixed with rumbles and pulses from Lehn, air burbled through the body tube of Gauguet’s saxophones and tremolo buzzing from Hautzinger. Building up in sonic fervor through the intersection of synthesizer pitch shifting, distortion and flanging plus wide-bore whizzes and echoing patterns from the acoustic instruments, the CD climaxes with the over 26-minute Close Up 03. Cricket-like reed chirps and hand-muted brass vibrations are put aside for spectral processing which adds the affiliated extensions of most timbres as they sweep by staccato or glissandi. While the electronics’ wave forms undulate symmetrically, they also output enough percussive drones to subsume technical flaunting. The trumpeter’s braying bell-like reverb and the saxophonist’s feral animal-like squeals consequently meld with thumping synthesizer pedal-point expressions for a satisfying finale.

Colin McLean’s computer processing is also prominent on Everything but the Beginning (Unsounds U17 www.unsounds.com). But so is the prowess of British guitarist Andy Moor, a member of the EX. In Toronto his Music Gallery performance – also on May 26 – is as part of a long-standing duo with French poetess Anne-James Chatton. On this CD, his technical command of the six-string is showcased with McLean’s hardware usually confined to patched rumbles and processed burbles and rebounds. Moor often uses the laptop undercurrent as a click track, linearly exposing single-string snaps, rough twangs or chuffed reverberations. His improvising can be playfully decorative, as when he seconds the sample of a squeak toy on Delta Block. In contrast on The Flower of fixed idea it appears that piezo pickups multiply his twangs so that the theme is pulsed, pushed and twisted into voltage-shaking signals.

Acoustic interaction is also featured on May 19, with the Dans Les Arbes quartet at the Music Gallery. Consisting of one French and three Norwegian musicians, it offers the same sort of extrasensory perception its percussionist Ingar Zach brings to Mural Nectars of Emergence (SOFA Records 528 www.sofamusic.no). Interestingly enough Zach’s “Mural”-mates, Australian flautist/saxophonist Jim Denley and guitarist Kim Myhr, are at FIMAV in a different configuration. Minimalist and atmospheric, the CD’s seven tracks are built up from pointillist dabs of sonic colors, soaking together without abrasion. That doesn’t mean the performance is modest, just unshowy. Zach for instance use wood pops, bowl scrapes, chiming bells and drum-skin rubs to make his points. Meantime Myhr’s guitar preparations allow him to produce hefty church-organ-like chords in some instances, loops of electrified signal-processed clangs elsewhere and constant harsh strumming. Throughout Denley’s masticated split tones propel his saxophone pitches to the patchy edge of hearing with strident wolf whistles, tongue slaps and subterranean growls, while there’s nothing delicate about his buzzing flute expositions. Flash Expansion is particularly noteworthy. With Myhr’s rhythmic rasgueado meeting up with amplified drum-top rubs and harsh reed reflux, the processed loops bring the narrative in-and-out-of-focus, with the sound menacing and motor-driven one minute, the next as weightless as waves lapping against the sea shore.

A weightier Canadian balance to the international sounds is the exclusive-to-VTO triple bill at the Tranzac club May 14. The Rent and Hat + Beard are locals, while Shaman from Montreal is also on hand. Consisting of Jean Derome and Joane Hétu on woodwinds, voices and objects Nous perçons les oreilles (Ambiances Magnétiques AM 200 CD www.actuellecd.com) exposes Shaman’s strategy of D-I-Y ethnomusicology. Like ancient tribal healers the duo expresses itself through verbal screams, squeaks, murmurs, mumbles and cries as well as inchoate instrumental textures. The two recount 12 short narratives which are as much Dada as primitive, wrapped in onomatopoeia that bonds mouth expressions such as cheers, yelps and gurgles with slide-whistle peeps, unsequenced altissimo saxophone stridency, key percussion, clipping chromatic timbres and reverberating body tube echoes.

Bassist John Geggie is based in Ottawa but has achieved much in jazz and other art forms nationwide. Two new additions to his huge discography are of gripping interest.

His Geggie Trio + Donny McCaslin - Across The Sky (Plunge Records PR00632 www.plungerecords.com) particularly emphasizes his compositional skills, seven of the 14 tracks here his, the rest collaborative contributions from the foursome with pianist Nancy Walker, drummer Nick Fraser and saxman McCaslin. The album is zesty, tunefully inventive, stacked with shifting time signatures and superior, finessed work on the bass. This is top-grade contemporary jazz, McCaslin often straying outside the mainstream with dramatically engaging work that has a meaty individuality to match the forceful leader and Walker’s ability to make surprise connections and balance lyricism with toe-tapping passion. Quick-witted and poised, the group creates playful experimental music though it’s anchored by restless, absorbing imaginations.

With Geggie Project (Ambiances Magnetiques AM 179 CD www.actuelle.com), Geggie is in more avant-jazz heavyweight mode, with spacey Marilyn Crispell on piano and Nick Fraser drumming. Again there are 14 tracks, seven spontaneous appetizers by the trio and seven entrees from the leader - you get the idea with Geggie’s pliant and expressive if sober opening Credo with bass predominant, haunting colours and suggestions of anguished subtext and then the trio’s mercurial Ice And Meltwater. The album teems with incredible invention. Run-Away Sheep shows off superb bass craft and hints at Fraser’s pyrotechnic tendencies before gate-crashing Crispell-fuelled chords arrive. The threesome covers a wide swath of stylistic territory with lofty flights of notes yet remains very accessible compared to free skronk mayhem. The music’s impish and erudite, keeping the peace between energy and atmosphere, sometimes luxuriant, sometimes wallowing in dark sonorities and overall more melodic than impassioned. Especially attractive are the trio’s Weather Forecast and the leader’s Canon.

A third recording led by a bassist is also a great buy. The CD/DVD package is the Alex Bellegarde Quintet’s Live (Chien Noir 09-999 www.alexbellegarde.com) with the boss in virtuoso form at a Montreal Maison de la culture Mercier concert. He wrote the 10 cuts, including some with a global jazz viewpoint and an elastic pulse that’s underlined with the presence of Kiko Osorio on congas. Bellegarde’s other comrades - pianist Yoel Diaz, alto saxist Erik Hove and drummer Yvon Plouffe – are almost his match in versatility, with many tunes featuring unison leads, lucid soloing and passages that vary from church calm to bucolic celebration. This band plays with impetus and conviction, aided by miraculously layered textures and a sensitive range of inflections, with Bellegarde’s bass a brilliantly crucial inner voice.

Montreal is the base, too, for another rising star whose bold new quartet CD should fly off record shelves. On tenor saxist Chet Doxas’ Big Sky (Justin Time JTR 8558-2 8558-2 www.justin-time.com) he has the support of a close-knit, sympathetic team - Ben Charest (guitar), Zack Lorber (bass) and brother Jim on drums. The leader penned six of the eight lengthy tunes and from the opening For Jim games swiftly begin with time, harmony and undulating narrative themes, which leader Doxas attacks with confident tones and a breadth of ideas in the manner of Chris Potter, with Charest effectively counterpointing all the way. There’s delicate treatment for L’Acadie, off-meter challenges and twisting lines outside the melody on Sideshow and a melancholic farewell to Jimmy Giuffre with Goodbye, all of interest, and outstanding work on the title piece, a homage to guitarist Bill Frisell.

Montreal supplies half the Gale/Rodrigues Group in B3 organist Vanessa Rodrigues and guitarist Mike Rud for the quartet’s debut release Live At The Rex (Indie CGVR01 www.vanessarodriguez.com), a potent package that also features Torontonians in saxophonist Chris Gale, and drummer Davide DiRenzo. Here’s a bustling session that exploits the famed tenor-organ combos of yesteryear with great aplomb with a pleasing mix of standards and hard-hitting originals. Players take long, often bruising solos, notably the versatile Gale on the opening Wes Montgomery’s Full House with Rud in fine comping form as well as constructing clean lines. The big-hearted ballad Statement gets a searching reflection from its composer Gale while throughout the more-grounded Rodrigues ratchets up tension when needed to the level of bristling exchanges. The co-leaders have fun on the happy honker One-Eyed Monster while elsewhere the room’s full of quick turns of phrase, fierce careening solos and runaway grooves, with timely relief on calmer pieces such as Bye Bye Blackbird.

The Django Reinhardt tribute band Croque Monsieur has won the Canadian Collectors Congress annual album–of-the-year award given out at the organization of vintage jazz lovers’ 39th gathering in Toronto. The winner beat out four other finalists - the Happy Pals, Ron Joseph and friends, Dinny and the All-Stars and Braithwaite & Whiteley.