François Carrier/Michel Lambert/Daniel Thompson/Neil Metcalfe/Guillaume Viltard

Shores and Ditches
FMR CD 340-0512

The Lone Ranger of Canadian Jazz, Montreal-based alto saxophonist François Carrier is as likely to turn up improvising with like-minded players in St. Petersburg, Milan or Katmandu [!] as in any North American locale, usually seconded by his Tonto, percussionist and fellow Montrealer Michel Lambert. Shores and Ditches is a high-quality souvenir of the duo’s United Kingdom sojourn in 2011 with extended examples of Carrier’s art.

The alto saxophonist, who in the past has explored an assortment of sound matches, ranging from sax-and-rhythm-section combos to those featuring piano, viola or other saxes, highlights four separate strategies here. Three of the six tracks are duos with Lambert; one is completely solo except for occasional bell shaking plus ambient sounds; a third presents the classic Free Jazz trio adding French-born, London-based Guillaume Viltard’s thick double bass lines to the drums and saxophone; and the last expands that trio with Britons Neil Metcalfe on flute and guitarist Daniel Thompson.

That tune, “Wadi”, is a contrapuntal narrative that calculates the sonic permutations available from five instruments united in percussive interaction. Sympathetically restricting his contribution to measured pulsing as he does in most instances, Lambert lets Viltard and Thompson assume the rhythmic role(s), which they do with slapped, stopped and clinking string patterns. Except for the occasional flutter, Metcalfe also eschews the traverse instrument’s lyrical tendencies, while Carrier recurrently vibrates strident split tones, the better to join with the strings metallic-sounding strums. Finally as the flutist reaches a staccato climax, the saxophonist completes the exercise with harsh snarls.

Those snarls are put to good use on the almost 19-minute tour-de-force which is “Upstream”, as the bassist, drummer and reedist contribute to the intense currents to create this broken-octave sound torrent. Viltard is particularly resolute here, sometimes walking, but mostly hewing his contributions out of stentorian string rubs and buzzing vibrations. Lambert chuffs his cymbal tops and occasionally produces drum rumbles, but again its Carrier’s mercurial strategy that defines the tune. Beginning with short reed bites and stutters, his highpoint is semi-lyrical exercise in positioned slurs and whorls.

Carrier’s versatility is even more pronounced on the saxophonist’s duets with Lambert which settle into familiar back-and-forth challenges involving slippery slurs and flutters verses bounces, rattles and pumps. The saxophonist’s mercurial skill is highlighted more spectacularly still on the solo “Shores and Ditches”. Infrequently accompanied by bell tree shakes and introduced by the sounds of a church carillon, Carrier takes his cues from those vibrations, testing and re-testing tonal variations from all parts of the sax, sometimes revealing almost romantic trills, most other times intense, altissimo spews.

Carrier and Lambert are two Canucks who can hold their own or even dominate the proceedings in any musical situation, domestic or foreign. This CD merely confirms that truism.

--Ken Waxman

Track Listing: Shores: 1. Caldera 2. Upstream 3. Lava 4. Reef 5. Wadi 6. Shores and Ditches

Personnel: Shores: François Carrier (alto saxophone); Neil Metcalfe (flute); Daniel Thompson (guitar); Guillaume Viltard (bass) and Michel Lambert (drums)

May 1, 2013

François Carrier/Michel Lambert/Alexey Lapin

All Out
FMR CD 321-0911

Alexey Kruglov/Alexey Lapin/Vadimir Shostak

Composition #37

SoLyd SLR 0413

Maïkontron Unit

Ex-Voto

Rant 1140

Alexey Kruglov

Identification

Leo Records CD LR 616

Something In The Air:

Common Ground Between Canadian and Russian Improvisers

By Ken Waxman

Unlike many Canadian improvisers, François Carrier is no home body. Peripatetic, the Montreal-based alto saxophonist spent months gigging in Italy and England, was one of the few Westerners to play the Kathmandu Jazz Festival, and most recently has put out discs recoded during his 2010 Russian concert tour. A session such as All Out FMR CD 321-0911 recorded with his long-time associate, Toronto drummer Michel Lambert, and St. Petersburg pianist Alexey Lapin, is not only notable musically, but also shows how erudite players from two of the world’s Northern hemisphere nations have much in common.

Carrier’s reed strategy includes elements of Cool Jazz note gliding as well as Avant Garde dissonance, and the Russian pianist constructs proper responses with alacrity. “Ride”, for instance, leaves the bomb dropping and clattering to Lambert’s kit as Lapin’s multi-fingered kinetic runs syncopate alongside Carrier’s spiky vibrations and false-register nasality plus dexterous explorations in the tenor register. Despite the saxophonist squeezing out multiple theme variants until he reaches conclusive downward runs, Lapin stays the course with unflappable chording as the drummer balances both men’s lines with military precision. In the solo spotlight, Lambert approximates the power of Art Blakey on “Wit” with cross-sticking rim shots and bass drum thumps, the better to later mix it up with Lapin’s dynamic cadenzas plus Carrier’s stuttering rubato lines and quivering split tones. The percussionist also asserts himself on “Of Breath” with a mallet-driven solo of whacks, bangs and ruffs, leading to the crescendo of high intensity further propelled by Lapin’s metronomic pulsing and Carrier’s flattement and triple tonguing.

Lambert’s talent is given full reign on the Maïkontron Unit’s Ex-Voto Rant 1140. Although he and Carrier often seem like the inseparable Damon and Pythias of Canadian Jazz, this trio CD features the drummer with bassist/cellist Pierre Côté and saxophonist/clarinetist Michel Côté. Both Lambert and reedist Côté also play the maïkontron, a valves and keys reed instrument with a range below the bass saxophone’s. Lambert, has divided the CD into tableaus based on images from Hieronymus Bosch, although the performance is actually less programmatic than intuitive, with straightforward pulsing as well as dissonant timbre extensions. Despite a forbidding title, a track such as “Marinus” (Tableau 9) for instance, is an out-and-out swing piece. It features pin-pointed snare work and clean cross sticking from Lambert, unbroken vibrations from the bassist and Michel Côté’s clarinet exploring the theme with mid-range chirping and tonguing. Other tunes such as “Votivae Noctes” (Tableau 4) are slow-paced and constrained as Côté’s supple clarinet line contrasts markedly with the maïkontron’s blurred snorts and an at first quivering, than walking, cello line from Pierre Côté. As reed split tones accelerate, they’re exposed nakedly beside splayed string motions. Both reeds burbling and puffing plus the string player’s sul tasto strumming end up creating other tableaus elsewhere, with sly references to half-recalled ballads, or in contrast, intricate multiphonics. Lambert’s drum versatility is given expanded showcases on Fluctus… the first part of Tableau 10, and “Praestigator”, the introduction to Tableau 19. The second features kettle drum pops and faux gamelan-orchestra-like resounds playing off rhino-like snorts from the maïkontron; while the irregular counterpoint of “Fluctus…” matches clarinet shrieks with hand slaps and pats that suggest congas and steel drums.

Percussion in a formal sense is absent from Composition #37 SoLyd SLR 0413, but the same high standard of musicianship Carrier and Lambert exhibit is present on this live recording in St, Petersburg by their confrère, pianist Lapin, along with Moscow-based alto saxophonist Alexey Kruglov and 5-string bassist Vadimir Shostak. Both the pianist, who has also recorded with British drummer Roger Turner and German saxophonist Matthias Schubert, and the bassist take turns maintaining the extended composition’s bottom pulse, with the majority of counterpoint between Lapin and Kruglov. Unexpected kazoo-like echoes and peeps arise when the reedist plays using only his mouthpiece; later he creates equally unsettling wounded animal-like lows with a trombone mouthpiece screwed onto his horn’s neck. Reacting with the same aplomb he uses with the Canadians, Lapin’s styling ranges from tremolo cascades and rugged string strumming, to plucks and thumps emphasizing the piano’s inner strings preparation, to wide-ranging lyrical harmonies that mirror Russian romanticism. With studied silences marking the composition’s development, no variant is overused. Plus with Shostak’s wood rubbing and string slaps employed prudently and judiciously, no number of reed bites, mouthpiece yelps or inside piano string scraps cam derail the narrative. As Lapin’s fortissimo syncopation attains a similar muscular lyricism as Kruglov’s tongue fluttering slurs, the bassist’s low-pitched arco work sweeps the individual sounds together with enough power to reach a satisfying finale.

Working with his own trio, filled out by bassist Dmitry Denisov and drummer Vladimir Borisov, Kruglov struts his stuff in the magnum opus that is Identification Leo Records CD LR 616. Emotional and polyphonic, “Identification” supposedly translates certain Russian words and letters into sounds. Someone who has recorded with major Glasnost-era stylists such as drummer Vladimir Tarasov and pianist Vyacheslav Ganelin, Kruglov plays alto and tenor saxophones, saxophones without mouthpieces, mouthpieces alone, block flute, piano and prepared piano, sometimes simultaneously. In fact the session begins with pseudo-romantic, prepared piano tremolo chording backed by the mere hints of bass and drum textures, until reed squeaks explode in tandem with the pulsing piano. This sets the pattern for the 64½-minute narrative which showcases different variants and intermezzos from Kruglov as he cycles through all his instruments. One interlude matches jittery tenor saxophone slurs with Borisov’s bass drum, pushed into parade-ground tempo; another is made up of strained sul ponticello lines from Denisov as well as echoing plucks on internal piano strings; yet another contrasts rim shots and rolls from the drummer with waves of unstoppable glossolalia from Kruglov’s alto saxophone. At junctures, the piano’s soundboard plucks start to resemble baroque era harpsichord playing. Besides improvising on keyboard and saxophone at the same time, Kruglov also creates fortissimo slide-whistle shrills using only the mouthpiece or masticates and French kisses the reed to expose spittle-encrusted smears. Not only can Kruglov blow both saxophones in unison, producing both high-pitched and low-pitched glottal punctuation, but he’s also able to split the peeping timbres of the block flute into distinct multiphonics. Throughout the meandering upturns and downshifts that make up the segmented piece, the bassist and drummer contribute fierce strums, resounding clatters, vibrating echoes and tough plucks. For the finale a slow-paced, emphasized line is sounded by tenor saxophone and doubled with harsh plucks from the bassist, only to conclude with Kruglov again echoing piano chords to recall the exposition.

Russians and Canadians have long related to one another due to a shared legacy of a cold climate and a large land mass. The high-standard of playing exhibited on these CDs confirms that as far as free-form improvisation is concerned, musicians share another attribute as well.

-- For Whole Note Vol. 17 #7

April 11, 2012

Jeb Bishop/Harris Eisenstadt/Jason Roebke

Tiebreaker
Not Two MW 789-2

Michael Bates’ Outside Sources

Clockwise

Greenleaf Music 09

Francois Carrier/Michel Lambert/ Jean-Jacques Avenel

Within

Leo CD LR 512

John Heward-Joe McPhee

Voices: 10 Improvisations

Mode Avant 05

Expatriates or homebodies, Canadian improvisers interact with many first-class players from and in any country. The results can be imposing, even if there’s nothing intrinsically Canuck about the music.

Take the Jeb Bishop/Harris Eisenstadt/Jason Roebke CD, Tiebreaker, Not Two MW 789-2. The crowd at this Krakow, Poland date probably thought they were applauding three Americans. Yet while astute trombonist Bishop and solid bassist Roebke are both Chicago-based, versatile drummer Eisenstadt is a Toronto native now in New York.

Bishop’s gutsy slurs and growls lock in place so completely with Roebke’s steady walking and Eisenstadt’s rumbling, funky beats that other instruments aren’t missed. While some tracks may be snappier, the key performance is the almost-39-minute medley that seamlessly links two of the trombonist’s compositions, one by the drummer and another by the bassist.

As the tunes flow into one another, Bishop’s buzzing grace notes elongate into brays, strengthened by Eisenstadt’s drags and rim shots. Moving to “Double Dog”, the second tune, brass chromaticism turns to horn whistles and squeaks, until the drummer’s cymbal embellishments signal the shift into his own “How Are You Dear”. Bishop’s lip burbles personalize the tender line, while adding vocalized tessitura. The bassist’s “Northstar” brings out trombone snorts and tongue gymnastics, answered with fidgety arco sweeps and timed drum strokes. The four compositions fit together as effectively as the players improvise together.

Another essay in co-operation is Clockwise Greenleaf Music 09 by Michael Bates’ Outside Sources, a long-standing quartet. Like Eisenstadt, bassist Bates and tenor saxophonist/clarinetist Quinsin Nachoff are ex-Torontonians now Brooklynites. Americans, trumpeter Russ Johnson and drummer Jeff Davis, join them to create notable sounds.

Steadfastly tonal, the bassist’s nine compositions flit among polyrhythms, waltz time, odd bar lengths and multi-part counterpoint to tell stories ranging from emotional balladry to rhythm dissertations. Bates’ admiration for composers such as Prokofiev and Shostakovich is expressed most profoundly on “The Russian School”, a nocturne with its drama and passion channeled through Nachoff’s saxophone. As the saxophonist’s guttural lines augment in pitch and strength, they transform into coarse, excited cries, as trumpeter Johnson’s muted harmonies add placid coloration. Balanced on top of the bassist’s fierce string-thumping, the tune darken, deepen and is resolved with a steadying confluence of measured sul tasto sweeps from Bates and flutter tonguing from Nachoff.

Nachoff confirms his clarinet credentials on “Fellini” and “Lighthouskeeping”. Stop-time, the later tune allows him to vibrate the pitch-sliding theme contrasted with parallel staccato trumpet, bass and drum intonation. Before the piece concludes diminuendo, both horns interlace with flowing flutter-tonguing. Like its namesake’s films, “Fellini” is buffo and sensuous, as waltz time advances slinky reed motions, ruffs and bounces from Davis and the trumpeter’s half-valve ornamentation. Eventually back-and-forth theme splintering resolves the tonal divide.

Featuring a similarly other-directed saxophonist and a solid bassist, but in trio form, Within Leo CD LR 512 provides a variation on this theme. Alto saxophonist Francois Carrier and his long-time associate, drummer Michel Lambert, are Montréalais, but bassist Jean-Jacques Avenel is French.

Like Tiebreaker, Within captures a first-time alliance that sounds as if the players have worked together for years. The three parts of the 60-minute improvisation, recorded at the Calgary Jazz Festival, depend on mind-melding between the guest and the long-time duo. Avenel’s spiccato thumps help stretch the thematic line to its furthest without shattering, whenever Carrier’s spetrofluctuation and reed-biting threaten to do so. In the tune’s mid-section however, the saxophonist’s slithery, human-sounding cries make common cause with each musician in turn. His contrapuntal interlude with Avenel features ground bass sweeps and col legno sawing used as connective tissue to bond with Carrier’s curt squeaks and flutter tonguing. A similar strategy is apparent on the Lambert-Carrier duets. The drummer’s opposite sticking and ratamacues subtly counter Carrier’s blustering pressure that metaphorically follows every note with an exclamation point. Expanding the time frame the drummer creates kalimba-like plinks and tam-tam resonations. His Asiatic echoes moderate Carrier’s strained Arabic textures so that the resulting timbres simultaneously resemble a gagku orchestra concertizing and Bird and Bags in a bop improvisation. In his duets with Carrier, Avenel’s tremolo plucking allows the saxophonist’s tensile reed-biting to downshift, creating a climatic section that is stately, harmonic and discreet.

Montreal-based visual artist John Heward organized a similar meeting with Poughkeepsie N.Y. multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee. Matching Heward’s drums and kalimba with McPhee’s pocket trumpet and soprano saxophone Voices: 10 Improvisations Mode Avant 05, aurally illuminates Heward’s skills and the extent of McPhee’s instrumental virtuosity. As comfortable in microtonal New music situations as screaming Free Jazz blowouts, except for some watery bluster from McPhee’s saxophone, Voices’ powerful improvisations angle more towards the later than the former.

McPhee’s tenor talents allow him to glide from harsh hocketing to portamento slurs in nanoseconds during “Improvisation 9”. When he reorients the line by blowing colored air through the instrument’s body tube, Heward’s response encompasses frame drum-like resonation and individualized strokes. Beginning the track with bugle-like emphasis in double counterpoint with Heward’s press rolls, the saxophonist’s glottal punctuation ceases by the climax. Completing the “Reveille” inference at the top, his final notes suggest “Taps”, with the drummer’s strokes appropriately martial.

Equally impressive on the trumpet, McPhee chromatically emphasizes various textures where appropriate. He brings an understated 1950s-Miles-vibe to “Improvisation 2” as his muted grace notes, coupled with Heward’s kalimba plucks, conjure up an African savannah as much as an American night club. Matched in broken-octave story-telling, Heward’s drum tops bangs and cymbal smacks complement McPhee near-static internal horn breaths and plunger squeaks.

These CDs don’t make the self-defeating case that Canadian improvisers are good enough to play with outsiders. Instead they confirm that this mixture of locals and others creates a common musical ground notable by any criteria.

-- Ken Waxman

-- For Whole Note Vol. 14 #3

November 1, 2008

Giant Steps

Portrait of creative alto saxophonist François Carrier in mid-career
By Ken Waxman
CODA Issue 338

Riven like much of the rest of Quebec by long-standing divisions among its population, Montreal’s jazz scene includes a variety of cliques and factions that rarely mix. Standing slight apart from this set of circumstances is saxophonist François Carrier, 46, whose focus is decidedly inward, spiritual and universalistic.

Although un vrai québécois, the Chicoutimi-born Quebec City-raised, Montreal resident decidedly goes his own way, only playing his own music. Leading his own bands since the early 1990s, Carrier’s singular vision has led him to recorded and live collaborations with such non-Québeçois as Swedish pianist Bobo Stenson, American violist Mat Maneri and French bassist Jaean-Jacques Avenel – to name only three of many.

Carrier’s own music is also more “outside” than that played by many other Montreal jazzers, and consequently this too limits his local gigging. “For many reasons, the more you’re unique, singular and creative the less you play locally” he begins. “Most people working in the music industry do so for one unique reason, to make money. The music industry creates competition. Competition creates division. Division creates envy, jealousy and war. So let’s be creative and free. The only collective I am interested in is the living collective, with love heart and spirit.”

Although he has played the Montreal Jazz Festival and done Montreal club dates, overall local indifference has, over the past decade, led him to develop unique strategies to bring his music before the public. In 1998, he founded NoEMI (Nouvel Ensemble de Musique Improvisée), a non-profit organization which allows him to organize several Happenings Musical in Montreal, featuring him in concert with local and international musicians.

Carrier has also played in Europe, including at the North Sea Jazz Festival and on an Italian tour, and completed three cross-Canada tours, with different sidemen. Winner of the Jazz Juno in 2001, in 2002 an award from the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec allowed him spend six months in Rome, to compose and explore the Italian musical milieu. During that time, a trip to the Borgani Saxophone warehouse in Macerata resulted in the company giving him a brand-new soprano saxophone to add new sounds to the profound improvisations on the alto saxophone, he describes as “my voice”. In 2006, he and his closest musical associate, drummer Michel Lambert, visited Nepal to play at a jazz festival in Katmandu.

Activities are multiplying again in 2008. Besides a new series of Happenings Musical scheduled for later in the year, plans for a North American tour with a specially constituted Canadian-European group are in the works as well. Meanwhile London-based Leo Records will soon release a live date he recorded at last year’s Calgary Jazz Festival with Carrier, Lambert and French bassist Jean-Jacques Avenel. Later in the year, Stockholm-based Ayler Records will make available for downloading a multi-CD digital box featuring a variety of Carrier performances from over the years.

“Since I released my first CD I decided to record as much music as I can,” the animated, bespectacled saxophonist explains. “That’s the only way for the music to reach a wider audience. With all this music out there, soon we will play more.”

Expressing himself musically has been part of Carrier’s make-up ever since he took his first cello lesson at the age of seven – he switched to alto saxophone six months later – and self-assurance has never been a problem. For instance, at 16, while still a student at Conservatoire de Musique de Québec, he was nervy enough to ask if he could sit in with Oscar Peterson, who was playing a concert in a nearby auditorium. Rebuffed, he ended up jamming with the Canadian icon on a couple of bop standards at Peterson’s hotel the next day

“My jazz background started only two years earlier to that event so as you can imagine I could play just a few standards then,” he recalls ruefully. “I never asked myself if I was good enough. I just felt like playing and I went, period. Of course I couldn’t really play, but it was fun anyway.”

Afterwards Peterson gave him some advice which he’s followed to this day: “If you want to be a real jazz player”, the veteran pianist opined, never be afraid to ask great musicians to play with you; “they’re as human as you are.”

Carrier has proved the truth of that statement by working or recording with established musicians such as Americans, pianists Jason Moran and Uri Caine, tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman and bassist Gary Peacock; Canadians, guitarist Sonny Greenwich, pianist Paul Bley and bassist Michel Donato; Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stánko; as well as Avenel, Stenson and Maneri. How did these connections come about? “I called them, I invited them, they listened to some of my music and they accepted my invitation to play with us. Great players like these are interested in only one thing, good music,” Carrier explains.

A few years after the Peterson experience his self-confidence also got him on stage at regular jam sessions at a jazz club in Victoria, B.C., not far from the Navy base where as a member of the Armed Forces he was studying music. Why did he join the Navy in 1980? “I joined because I had heard from a couple of musician friends that I could play music and earn good money at the same time,” he replies “But after a few months I discovered that I would never have the possibility to develop the way I deeply felt, my own voice and identity. It wasn’t possible for me to be free in the navy. I had to follow the rules which don’t fit in with who I really am. So I faked a nervous breakdown to come back home.”

He formed his first jazz trio shortly after that and played around the province, testing and experimenting as his style evolved from bebop (“all I initially cared about was playing jazz, like Charlie Parker and Phil Woods,” he remembers) to freer music.

Admitting that it took him 15 years to start developing an individualistic musical identity, he reveals. “As long as I’ve been playing I’ve had a very distinctive tone and voice but all my teachers told me to play a certain way – their way.” Someone who in his teens owned 500 jazz records to which he listened to obsessively, he eventually found his own voice under the influence of the music of John Coltrane’s band with Elvin Jones and Miles Davis’ with Tony Williams – neither of which featured an alto saxophonist. He also took a year-long sabbatical at the end of the1980s to refocus his thinking, which helped him come up with his own stylistic synthesis. “I had a drug problem and to put an end to the struggling, I had to get rid of old habits and friends.

“All you have to be is totally yourself,” he affirms, sitting comfortably in his sparsely furnished apartment in downtown Montreal, not far from McGill University in one direction and polyglot Boulevard St. Laurent and the semi-bohemian Plateau district in the other.

“The inspiration comes from the inside; the influences come from the whole universe,” he continues “I have never intended to be this or this, or to chose a certain style of music. To me music is music, no matter how you label it. No label, no conditioning, no concept. To achieve this, one has to get rid of all fears. Freedom comes from within; being creative means to be in the here and now, with no reference to the past and no projection into the future.”

In fact, he and Lambert have played noting but free-form, improvised music on their gigs and recordings since 2002. “That means that in all occasions, we show up and start playing,” the drummer notes. “When we have guests, they do the same thing.”

Another Quebec City native, also domiciled in Montreal, Lambert was first contacted by Carrier in 1998 when the saxophonist was planning to organize a new trio. Lambert had played for extended periods at different times in his home town with local musicians, bassist Pierre Côté and drummer François Côté. Both were subsequently members of Carrier’s trio, so the drummer had heard about the saxophonist before he telephoned. Since 1998, as the drummer recalls, “was a time of change for both of us, I was happy to check out his ideas. I knew that François was working on the creative side of music, and he had a nice and strong alto sound.”

Nearly 10 years later, when Lambert isn’t involved with his own projects, which often encompass his own notated orchestral works, he continues to work with Carrier for both practical and inspirational reasons. “Together we generate ideas for musical situations and partnerships and ways to realize them. Then we try to overcome many of the practical obstacles,” he states. “We also allow each other total freedom when it comes to playing.”

Confirming the saxophonist’s statement that Carrier’s insightful, heartfelt improvising was almost fully developed by the 1990s, the drummer says: “To my ears, over the years if his sound has changed, it’s that it has become even more direct than before and much freer.”

Carrier’s strategy for grand encounters with international musicians usually involves both live dates and a recording session, planned or unplanned and he says he often learns as much from them off the bandstand as on it. Putting nationalism aside, he says he tries to play with veteran jazzmen like Redman and Bley because “there are so few Great Jazz Masters in Canada”. Most of so-called Jazz Masters are modest and supportive to other musicians as well, he reports, to perpetuate a tradition they themselves experienced.

In 1999, for instance, he and Lambert participated in “an elevated learning experience” on a Quebec City gig with late Texas tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman, best known for his work with Ornette Coleman’s band. That gig was released as Open Spaces on the Spool label. Rather than pulling rank, the older saxophonist told Carrier he was aiming to be like John Coltrane the most “egoless” person Redman ever met.

“Dewey went to Mr. Coltrane’s place in New York for a lesson when he was a teenager,” recalls Carrier. “He would turn around the block for hours and then knock at Mr. Coltrane’s door. ‘What can I do for you young man’ says Mr. Coltrane. ‘I would like to learn to play the saxophone like you Mr. Coltrane’, he replied. ‘I can’t teach you how to play like me because I don’t know how to play,' Mr. Coltrane told Redman. ‘All you can do is find different things to do with the 12 notes you have’.”

Montreal-born, but long-time American resident Bley was also encouraging to the altoist, but in a subtly humorous way,” Carrier mentions. In 2003 the pianist and legendary bassist Peacock came to Montreal for the concert and recording that became Travelling Lights on Justin Time records. As Carrier recalls it: “After the studio session he told me: ‘Listen François, yesterday the concert was so good, that I asked myself how in the world will we be able to be better during today’s studio session? And we did it. Now you can tell everyone that Paul Bley is the only piano player in the world to have played with Charlie Parker, Ornette Coleman … and François Carrier’.”

With his spiritual bent, Carrier confirms that his duo gig with Lambert at the 2006 Jazzmandu Festival in Nepal affected him deeply. Invited by jazz drummer Navin Chettri, the international trip was almost unfunded until, as with 2002’s experience in Rome, a grant from the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec came through almost literally at the very last minute.

Flying from Montreal to Kathmandu took more than 30 hours, and just after they arrived there Lambert came down with a sudden case of food poisoning. He recovered in time for the duo’s concert the next night, though. Later in the week the two played individually with both local and Western musicians.

“It’s very inspiring experience to play in these open sky situations,” reports Carrier. “The energy of this country is so powerful. No wonder it’s Buddha’s homeland. People look right into your eyes with love and spirit. No needs of words. Just feeling, pure feeling. I knew such energy existed because at all times I’m filled with that kind of energy that we westerners refuse to connect with. But in Nepal all you have to do is surrender and be joyful and playful.”

Additionally, although the duo’s uncompromising improvisations were probably the most “outside” music heard at the festival and quite different from anything else there. “The Nepali people appreciated it a great deal,” Carrier confirms many months later in Montreal, recalling the experience. The Lambert-Carrier duets, which the alto saxophonist recorded with portable equipment is available as Kathmandu on FMR Records. Reflecting on his experiences, Carrier confirms that the 12 short tracks are “in that spirit of joyfulness and playfulness,” the two experienced in the country. “All my life I have never reached a level of connection as deep as with the Nepali people.”

The one connection that so far hasn’t materialized, however, is for gigs in the United States. But all in good time, as the philosophical saxophonist might say. Connections are being made.

Carrier’s habit of recording his gigs means that he has the equivalent of several CDs on hand waiting to be released. Since he’s always open to new concepts, the idea of releasing a multi-volume downloadable (DL), digital box set on Ayler, the innovative Swedish label which made Noh available late year, is an experiment he welcomes.

Carrier “has been very active,” reports Jan Ström, Ayler’s executive producer. “He’s very organized and the promo CDs he sends me are very nicely presented.” Although Carrier’s music is different from the hard-core Energy Music in which the label specializes – “how could it not be, he has a different background”, contends Ström, “but it’s still live music with spirit, so it fits.”

The DL set will likely include tracks from the Montreal Jazz Festival and Happening Musical concerts by Carrier’s trio; the duo with Lambert; and with the two featured with special guests such as Donato, Redman and Greenwich. Buyers will be able to either download the CDs individually or download the entire box – both option include downloadable cover art and booklet notes. This creative solution to the challenge of distributing non-mainstream jazz fits in with Carrier’s musical philosophy of constantly creating new opportunities.

“What is Creativity exactly?” he asks. “Creativity comes from the moment, the instant, the here and now. All that comes from the known, from the past or any projections in the future is not creativity. There’s no creativity in the mental and the memory or in something predictable. Creativity comes from intuition and total attention to life, with spontaneity. I have good news for those who think that everything has been said. ‘It’s not true.’ Everything is still to be discovered. What we know is nothing compared to all there is in the universe or in the multi-verse.”

March 15, 2008

Giant Steps

Portrait of creative alto saxophonist François Carrier in mid-career
By Ken Waxman
CODA Issue 338

Riven like much of the rest of Quebec by long-standing divisions among its population, Montreal’s jazz scene includes a variety of cliques and factions that rarely mix. Standing slight apart from this set of circumstances is saxophonist François Carrier, 46, whose focus is decidedly inward, spiritual and universalistic.

Although un vrai québécois, the Chicoutimi-born Quebec City-raised, Montreal resident decidedly goes his own way, only playing his own music. Leading his own bands since the early 1990s, Carrier’s singular vision has led him to recorded and live collaborations with such non-Québécois as Swedish pianist Bobo Stenson, American violist Mat Maneri and French bassist Jean-Jacques Avenel – to name only three of many.

Carrier’s own music is also more “outside” than that played by many other Montreal jazzers, and consequently this too limits his local gigging. “For many reasons, the more you’re unique, singular and creative the less you play locally” he begins. “Most people working in the music industry do so for one unique reason, to make money. The music industry creates competition. Competition creates division. Division creates envy, jealousy and war. So let’s be creative and free. The only collective I am interested in is the living collective, with love heart and spirit.”

Although he has played the Montreal Jazz Festival and done Montreal club dates, overall local indifference has, over the past decade, led him to develop unique strategies to bring his music before the public. In 1998, he founded NoEMI (Nouvel Ensemble de Musique Improvisée), a non-profit organization which allows him to organize several Happenings Musical in Montreal, featuring him in concert with local and international musicians.

Carrier has also played in Europe, including at the North Sea Jazz Festival and on an Italian tour, and completed three cross-Canada tours, with different sidemen. Winner of the Jazz Juno in 2001, in 2002 an award from the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec allowed him spend six months in Rome, to compose and explore the Italian musical milieu. During that time, a trip to the Borgani Saxophone warehouse in Macerata resulted in the company giving him a brand-new soprano saxophone to add new sounds to the profound improvisations on the alto saxophone, he describes as “my voice”. In 2006, he and his closest musical associate, drummer Michel Lambert, visited Nepal to play at a jazz festival in Katmandu.

Activities are multiplying again in 2008. Besides a new series of Happenings Musical scheduled for later in the year, plans for a North American tour with a specially constituted Canadian-European group are in the works as well. Meanwhile London-based Leo Records will soon release a live date he recorded at last year’s Calgary Jazz Festival with Carrier, Lambert and French bassist Jean-Jacques Avenel. Later in the year, Stockholm-based Ayler Records will make available for downloading a multi-CD digital box featuring a variety of Carrier performances from over the years.

“Since I released my first CD I decided to record as much music as I can,” the animated, bespectacled saxophonist explains. “That’s the only way for the music to reach a wider audience. With all this music out there, soon we will play more.”

Expressing himself musically has been part of Carrier’s make-up ever since he took his first cello lesson at the age of seven – he switched to alto saxophone six months later – and self-assurance has never been a problem. For instance, at 16, while still a student at Conservatoire de Musique de Québec, he was nervy enough to ask if he could sit in with Oscar Peterson, who was playing a concert in a nearby auditorium. Rebuffed, he ended up jamming with the Canadian icon on a couple of bop standards at Peterson’s hotel the next day

“My jazz background started only two years earlier to that event so as you can imagine I could play just a few standards then,” he recalls ruefully. “I never asked myself if I was good enough. I just felt like playing and I went, period. Of course I couldn’t really play, but it was fun anyway.”

Afterwards Peterson gave him some advice which he’s followed to this day: “If you want to be a real jazz player”, the veteran pianist opined, never be afraid to ask great musicians to play with you; “they’re as human as you are.”

Carrier has proved the truth of that statement by working or recording with established musicians such as Americans, pianists Jason Moran and Uri Caine, tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman and bassist Gary Peacock; Canadians, guitarist Sonny Greenwich, pianist Paul Bley and bassist Michel Donato; Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stánko; as well as Avenel, Stenson and Maneri. How did these connections come about? “I called them, I invited them, they listened to some of my music and they accepted my invitation to play with us. Great players like these are interested in only one thing, good music,” Carrier explains.

A few years after the Peterson experience his self-confidence also got him on stage at regular jam sessions at a jazz club in Victoria, B.C., not far from the Navy base where as a member of the Armed Forces he was studying music. Why did he join the Navy in 1980? “I joined because I had heard from a couple of musician friends that I could play music and earn good money at the same time,” he replies “But after a few months I discovered that I would never have the possibility to develop the way I deeply felt, my own voice and identity. It wasn’t possible for me to be free in the navy. I had to follow the rules which don’t fit in with who I really am. So I faked a nervous breakdown to come back home.”

He formed his first jazz trio shortly after that and played around the province, testing and experimenting as his style evolved from bebop (“all I initially cared about was playing jazz, like Charlie Parker and Phil Woods,” he remembers) to freer music.

Admitting that it took him 15 years to start developing an individualistic musical identity, he reveals. “As long as I’ve been playing I’ve had a very distinctive tone and voice but all my teachers told me to play a certain way – their way.” Someone who in his teens owned 500 jazz records to which he listened to obsessively, he eventually found his own voice under the influence of the music of John Coltrane’s band with Elvin Jones and Miles Davis’ with Tony Williams – neither of which featured an alto saxophonist. He also took a year-long sabbatical at the end of the1980s to refocus his thinking, which helped him come up with his own stylistic synthesis. “I had a drug problem and to put an end to the struggling, I had to get rid of old habits and friends.

“All you have to be is totally yourself,” he affirms, sitting comfortably in his sparsely furnished apartment in downtown Montreal, not far from McGill University in one direction and polyglot Boulevard St. Laurent and the semi-bohemian Plateau district in the other.

“The inspiration comes from the inside; the influences come from the whole universe,” he continues “I have never intended to be this or this, or to chose a certain style of music. To me music is music, no matter how you label it. No label, no conditioning, no concept. To achieve this, one has to get rid of all fears. Freedom comes from within; being creative means to be in the here and now, with no reference to the past and no projection into the future.”

In fact, he and Lambert have played noting but free-form, improvised music on their gigs and recordings since 2002. “That means that in all occasions, we show up and start playing,” the drummer notes. “When we have guests, they do the same thing.”

Another Quebec City native, also domiciled in Montreal, Lambert was first contacted by Carrier in 1998 when the saxophonist was planning to organize a new trio. Lambert had played for extended periods at different times in his home town with local musicians, bassist Pierre Côté and drummer François Côté. Both were subsequently members of Carrier’s trio, so the drummer had heard about the saxophonist before he telephoned. Since 1998, as the drummer recalls, “was a time of change for both of us, I was happy to check out his ideas. I knew that François was working on the creative side of music, and he had a nice and strong alto sound.”

Nearly 10 years later, when Lambert isn’t involved with his own projects, which often encompass his own notated orchestral works, he continues to work with Carrier for both practical and inspirational reasons. “Together we generate ideas for musical situations and partnerships and ways to realize them. Then we try to overcome many of the practical obstacles,” he states. “We also allow each other total freedom when it comes to playing.”

Confirming the saxophonist’s statement that Carrier’s insightful, heartfelt improvising was almost fully developed by the 1990s, the drummer says: “To my ears, over the years if his sound has changed, it’s that it has become even more direct than before and much freer.”

Carrier’s strategy for grand encounters with international musicians usually involves both live dates and a recording session, planned or unplanned and he says he often learns as much from them off the bandstand as on it. Putting nationalism aside, he says he tries to play with veteran jazzmen like Redman and Bley because “there are so few Great Jazz Masters in Canada”. Most of so-called Jazz Masters are modest and supportive to other musicians as well, he reports, to perpetuate a tradition they themselves experienced.

In 1999, for instance, he and Lambert participated in “an elevated learning experience” on a Quebec City gig with late Texas tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman, best known for his work with Ornette Coleman’s band. That gig was released as Open Spaces on the Spool label. Rather than pulling rank, the older saxophonist told Carrier he was aiming to be like John Coltrane the most “egoless” person Redman ever met.

“Dewey went to Mr. Coltrane’s place in New York for a lesson when he was a teenager,” recalls Carrier. “He would turn around the block for hours and then knock at Mr. Coltrane’s door. ‘What can I do for you young man’ says Mr. Coltrane. ‘I would like to learn to play the saxophone like you Mr. Coltrane’, he replied. ‘I can’t teach you how to play like me because I don’t know how to play,' Mr. Coltrane told Redman. ‘All you can do is find different things to do with the 12 notes you have’.”

Montreal-born, but long-time American resident Bley was also encouraging to the altoist, but in a subtly humorous way,” Carrier mentions. In 2003 the pianist and legendary bassist Peacock came to Montreal for the concert and recording that became Travelling Lights on Justin Time records. As Carrier recalls it: “After the studio session he told me: ‘Listen François, yesterday the concert was so good, that I asked myself how in the world will we be able to be better during today’s studio session? And we did it. Now you can tell everyone that Paul Bley is the only piano player in the world to have played with Charlie Parker, Ornette Coleman … and François Carrier’.”

With his spiritual bent, Carrier confirms that his duo gig with Lambert at the 2006 Jazzmandu Festival in Nepal affected him deeply. Invited by jazz drummer Navin Chettri, the international trip was almost unfunded until, as with 2002’s experience in Rome, a grant from the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec came through almost literally at the very last minute.

Flying from Montreal to Kathmandu took more than 30 hours, and just after they arrived there Lambert came down with a sudden case of food poisoning. He recovered in time for the duo’s concert the next night, though. Later in the week the two played individually with both local and Western musicians.

“It’s very inspiring experience to play in these open sky situations,” reports Carrier. “The energy of this country is so powerful. No wonder it’s Buddha’s homeland. People look right into your eyes with love and spirit. No needs of words. Just feeling, pure feeling. I knew such energy existed because at all times I’m filled with that kind of energy that we westerners refuse to connect with. But in Nepal all you have to do is surrender and be joyful and playful.”

Additionally, although the duo’s uncompromising improvisations were probably the most “outside” music heard at the festival and quite different from anything else there. “The Nepali people appreciated it a great deal,” Carrier confirms many months later in Montreal, recalling the experience. The Lambert-Carrier duets, which the alto saxophonist recorded with portable equipment is available as Kathmandu on FMR Records. Reflecting on his experiences, Carrier confirms that the 12 short tracks are “in that spirit of joyfulness and playfulness,” the two experienced in the country. “All my life I have never reached a level of connection as deep as with the Nepali people.”

The one connection that so far hasn’t materialized, however, is for gigs in the United States. But all in good time, as the philosophical saxophonist might say. Connections are being made.

Carrier’s habit of recording his gigs means that he has the equivalent of several CDs on hand waiting to be released. Since he’s always open to new concepts, the idea of releasing a multi-volume downloadable (DL), digital box set on Ayler, the innovative Swedish label which made Noh available late year, is an experiment he welcomes.

Carrier “has been very active,” reports Jan Ström, Ayler’s executive producer. “He’s very organized and the promo CDs he sends me are very nicely presented.” Although Carrier’s music is different from the hard-core Energy Music in which the label specializes – “how could it not be, he has a different background”, contends Ström, “but it’s still live music with spirit, so it fits.”

The DL set will likely include tracks from the Montreal Jazz Festival and Happening Musical concerts by Carrier’s trio; the duo with Lambert; and with the two featured with special guests such as Donato, Redman and Greenwich. Buyers will be able to either download the CDs individually or download the entire box – both option include downloadable cover art and booklet notes. This creative solution to the challenge of distributing non-mainstream jazz fits in with Carrier’s musical philosophy of constantly creating new opportunities.

“What is Creativity exactly?” he asks. “Creativity comes from the moment, the instant, the here and now. All that comes from the known, from the past or any projections in the future is not creativity. There’s no creativity in the mental and the memory or in something predictable. Creativity comes from intuition and total attention to life, with spontaneity. I have good news for those who think that everything has been said. ‘It’s not true.’ Everything is still to be discovered. What we know is nothing compared to all there is in the universe or in the multi-verse.”

François Carrier - Discography

• 1994 François Carrier Trio, Poursuite (Boff Amplitude BJACD-4030) with François Carrier (alto saxophone); Pierre Côté (bass) and Yves Jacques (drums)

• 1997 François Carrier Trio, Intuition (Lost Chart Records LC-1015) François Carrier (alto saxophone); Pierre Côté (bass) and François Côté (drums)

• 1999 François Carrier/Dewey Redman/Michel Donato/Ron Séguin/Michel Lambert, Open Spaces (Spool LINE 27) with François Carrier (alto saxophone); Dewey Redman (tenor saxophone); Ron Séguin or Michel Donato (bass) and Michel Lambert (drums)

• 2000 François Carrier Trio + 1, Compassion (Naxos Jazz 86062-2) with François Carrier (alto saxophone); Steve Amirault (piano); Pierre Cote (bass); and Michel Lambert (drums)

• 2002 François Carrier Trio with Uri Caine, All’Alba (Justin Time JUST 203-2) with François Carrier (alto saxophone); Pierre Côté (bass), Michel Lambert (drums) and Uri Caine (piano)

• 2004 François Carrier, Michel Lambert Paul Bley, Gary Peacock, Travelling Lights (Justin Time JUST 203-2) with François Carrier (soprano and alto saxophones); Paul Bley (piano); Gary Peacock (bass) and Michel Lambert (drums)

• 2004 François Carrier Trio, Play, (482 Music 482-1033) with François Carrier (alto saxophone); Pierre Côté (bass) and Michel Lambert (drums)

• 2006 François Carrier, Happening, (Leo Records LR 451/452) with François Carrier (soprano and alto saxophones); Mat Maneri (viola); Uwe Neumann (sitar, sanza, ektara and anandolohori; Pierre Côté (bass); Michel Lambert (drums); and Lin Snelling, Brad Denys and Chantal Lamirande (voices/dance)

• 2007 François Carrier Quartet, Noh (Ayler Records aylDL-027) with François Carrier (soprano and alto saxophones); Reg Schwager (guitar); John Heward and Michel Lambert (drums)

• 2007 François Carrier/Michel Lambert, Kathmandu (FMR Records FMR CD236-0607) with François Carrier (alto saxophone) and Michel Lambert (drums)

March 15, 2008

François Carrier

Happening
Leo LR 451/452

Convergence in its proper sense, Happening is offhandedly exotic, since Montreal saxophonist François Carrier places no limits on the musicians expressing their specialties – nor emphasizes the differences for effect. Thus at various junctures during the seven tracks on this fine two-CD set, the soprano and alto saxophonist’s regular trio of bassist Pierre Côté and drummer Michel Lambert is spelled by razor-sharp microtonal asides from violist American Mat Maneri or exotic Indian-inflected tones from the South Asian instruments played by Uwe Neumann, a German-born, Montreal resident.

Rather than aiming for conscious or unconscious East-West or classical-jazz fusions as earlier reedmen as different as John Harriott and Jimmy Giuffre did, Carrier’s game plan merely acknowledges the presence of these slightly unconventional instruments and works them into the improvisatory mix. Thus the timbres of Neumann’s anandolohori or Indian talking drum are utilized as if the Carrier Trio was making room for a vibraphone soloist, while the violist’s distinctive note patterns work into the collective creation as if he was playing guitar.

This isn’t to say that the guests’ talents aren’t fully utilized. There are points when Maneri’s fiddle contours surge in double counterpoint to Carrier’s mid-range, slurred soprano saxophone lines or harsh alto saxophone vibrations. Yet with pulsating Côté and solid Lambert sensitively nudging the tempo along jazz lines – and rarely soloing – there’s no need for sonic braggadocio about the admixture.

Recorded in concert last year, Happening can easily be accepted as a text book example of contemporary improv. However careful listening reveals the unconventional touches that have been insinuated into its seemingly comprehensive exterior.

-- Ken Waxman

March 20, 2006

François Carrier

Travelling Lights
Justin Time

Stitch Wynston’s Modern Surfaces
Transparent Horizons
TCB

By Ken Waxman
November 14, 2005

So unfamiliar are most Americans with Canada that they think of the giant land mass north of them as a puny area with one culture and a single conception.

True, most Canadians live close to the United States border, including those in the northern country’s three largest population centres that surpass most American cities in sophistication and multiculturalism. This accident of geography makes it fairly straightforward for Canadians –comedians including Mike Meyers and Martin Short, actors including Keifer Sutherland to Kim Cattrall and entertainers including Celine Dion Young and Avril Lavigne – to list the most recent examples – to covertly become part of the American entertainment fabric. Even committed jazz fans sometimes forget that stylist as varied as trumpeter Maynard Ferguson and pianist Paul Bley, to cite two of many instances, are from Canada.

But despite this situation, Canada isn’t the United States and Canadians aren’t Americans. There’s an entire different culture up there, that takes as a given long winters and the snow – although there’s a lot less of that than American imagine. Consciously or not, many Canadian improvisers express this tinge of unhurried Northern sensibility in their work. This chilled, but not cold, calm draws these CDs together.

Arriving from the country’s largest (Toronto) and second-largest (Montreal) cities, both sessions have a faint ECM-like Nordic tint. Quartet dates, they’re also closer in conception and execution to one another than most Ontarian and Quebec improvisers imagine their musical sensibilities are.

Transparent Horizons is the second CD by drummer Stitch Wynston’s Modern Surfaces ensemble. The Toronto-born co-founder of the bop-jive Shuffle Demons band, Wynston has played with musicians as different as cult singer/songwriter Jane Siberry and alto saxophonist Julius Hemphill. Band members include guitarist Geoff Young, who teaches jazz at a local college and has played with singer Carol Welsman, plus bassist Jim Vivien and soprano and tenor saxophonist Mike Murley, both of whom are originally from the Atlantic Provinces. Versatile Murley, another original Shuffle Demon, has been in bands ranging from the electric jazz group Metalwood, to trombonist Rob McConnell’s mainstream Boss Brass.

Travelling Lights is helmed by another exceptional reedist, Montreal soprano and alto saxophonist François Carrier, whose playing associates have included American pianists Jason Moran and Uri Caine. Variations of his combo, which has been together for years, are always driven by drummer Michel Lambert, who works in both Montreal and Toronto. This CD however, features two special guests. American bassist Gary Peacock is old enough to have recorded for ECM when it was most improv-oriented, as is Montreal-born pianist Bley who did the same. Serendipitously enough, Bley also recorded with Modern Surfaces on its first CD.

With each session running more than an hour and writing duties parceled out equitably – Carrier is responsible for three of the tunes on his CD, Bley and Peacock two each, and Lambert one; six pieces on the other date are Young’s, four Wynston’s – both are memorable, mature efforts. Travelling Lights has a slight edge, possibly because of the two veterans intuit each other’s strategies after 40-odd years of collaboration. No hauteur or division occurs between the guests and the hosts however. Everyone is responsible for its success.

With a title that’s perhaps illustrative of his inspirations, Lambert’s “Europe” is an almost-14½- quartet showcase. Clattering cymbal strokes and concentrated rumbles from the lowest part of the piano soundboard introduce Bley detonating sprightly tremolo overtones, flashing note patterns and shuddering cadences. Meanwhile Carrier double tongues and flutters phrases on top of Peacock’s walking bass lines. Given his head, the bassist turns to double stopping and rising fingerboard movements while keeping the beat. Stopped piano action and dissonant chords soon give the saxophonist enough space to introduce split tones – tempered of course, with Canadian restraint and an absence of bad taste. With ringing piano chords blending with the reed output, the drummer’s metallic ratcheting is left to maintain the tune’s angularity. Climatically, Carrier offers up a theme variation, leading to a finale of ringing sonority. During the course of the piece, the four sometimes split into complementary duos: Carrier and Peacock, for instance or Bley and Lambert, and this strategy or some variation on it, is followed elsewhere.

Cognizant of a variety of extended strategies from seesawing tongue slaps to smears and multiphonics, Carrier never gets so technically involved that he neglects tone purity. In fact, there are places where he sounds disconcertingly like Paul Desmond. Nor is emotive melody ignored either, as he demonstrates on his own “Africa” and “Oceania”.

Simple and lilting, the second tune features harpsichord-like clanging from Bley, played off against irregular pulsations from Peacock and steadied by bell-shaking from Lambert. Joining these rondo-like interactions with trilling tongue stops, Carrier introduces a skewed swing line on top of feathery chording from the pianist, suggesting a contrafact of “Surrey with the Fringe on Top”. Confident in his solo, the reedist slides from andate to allegro before its completition.

More complex, the almost-11½-minute “Africa” brings out harder-toned arpeggios from Bley and squeaking fingerboard movements from Peacock. Half-way through, the composer begins a set of honking and smearing variations that somehow introduce quotes from a familiar Christmas theme. Piano strokes and strides underline a counter melody that is cut short by an understated drum solo. Brought back to the initial theme with kinetic pulses, Bley is almost eclipsed by a series of side-slipping obbligatos from Carrier.

This sort of close cooperation among musicians is on show from Modern Surfaces as well. Regrettably, some of the cohesion comes unglued when Wynston moves from his drums to the piano stool. One meandering interlude borders on the jejeune, while another nearly suffocates under ProgRock pretensions. Mixing an unvarying keyboard pattern, overstated drum rolls and vocoder-helped vocalizing, the track is further weakened by Jaco Pastrorius-type (electrified?) bass stabs and fusion-oriented saxophone drones.

Luckily this lack of taste is limited to a couple of tracks. Most of the compositions are framed within the parameters introduced by Wynston’s “Outward Bound” at the start and Young’s “New One” at the end of the CD. That is, well-modulated legato tones reflecting Nordic impressionism are tweaked with in-character but unique licks from Young and distinctive reed patterns from Murley.

“Caboose”, for example, is all level and horizontal lines maneuvered by push-pull guitar textures and low-pitched sax runs. Condensing and concentrating his responses, Wynston explores the rims and sides of his kit, and clatters microtones from his drum and cymbal tops rather than rattling or striking them. Turning his hands to nerve beats, cross-stick concussions and pulsating ruffs, the drummer seems to be rolling inert objects onto his skins. Are these the modern surfaces of the title? Eventually clattering cymbals and pulsing toms introduce thumping basso guitar runs and tenor saxophone torque, leading to triple counterpoint that pushes the piece into a kind of film noir expressionism,

Young’s “Existential Departures” on the other hand contrasts a sonorous vibrato-laden intro, with a theme finger-picked on a nylon-string amplified guitar. Although the brawny drum beats may be a tad overdone for the temperate harmonies of Murley’s soprano saxophone, Vivien’s shuffle bowing as well as the deliberate Julian Bream-like picking of Young fit tongue-in-groove. Eventually, as the tune advances even Wynston’s strokes get a touch less bulky. Moving from broken to lockstep cadences, the conclusion involves even gentler patterning from the percussionist.

Another stand out is “Automatic Entry”, another Young line. Vaulting from flanged guitar pulses on top of rat-tat-tat drum beats, a counter line of bowed bass is added, freeing Young to output echoing guitar licks. Murley’s serpentine soprano saxophone interlude – some of his best playing on the disc – is not only built on sophisticated double tonguing, but rubato spins that make it sound as if he’s systematically replicating the sound of unraveling a ball of wool. The guitarist provides sympathetic reverb-laden chording as both players moderate into a darker unison melody that ends with orgasmic certainty and a single, concluding cymbal shimmer.

Although the canny listener should skip over some of Wynston’s cruder attempts at producing modern surfaces on his CD, both discs effectively capture contemporary Canadian modern mainstream sounds.

November 14, 2005