For the next edition of the Suoni Per Il Popolo festival, the &records label will present a concert by Klaxon Gueule and Foodsoon at Casa del Popolo (Montréal) on June 5, 2005.

Canadian bassplayer and composer Norman Guilbeault offers an album of seven compositions by Charles Mingus. With his ensemble he already works some 15 years on the repertoire of this jazzlegend. His ensemble is a quintet consisting of the following musicians: Jean Derome (saxophones, flute), Ivanhoe Jolicoeur (trumpet, flugelhorn ), Mathieu Bélanger (clarinet), Claude Lavergne (drums, voice) and Guilbeault himself on doublebass and voice. All of them are top-players and feel very happy in the universe of Mingus as this CD shows.

Earlier albums of this ensemble often contain one or two Mingus-compositions. In 1995 Guilbeault released his first album completely devoted to Charles Mingus and now he compiled another album of works by this famous bassplayer and play a few standards like Pithecanthropus Erectus and Moanin, but also some lesser known works, such as All the things you could be by now if Sigmund Freud’s wife was your mother and Conversation. Jean Derome contributes also with a composition on this album called MDMD.

I’m not a dedicated listener of the jazz classics of Ellington, Parker, Mingus or any other. I do feel some affinity with the work of Sun Ra and Ornette Coleman, but in the end I must say jazz its not my thing. On the other hand I enjoy listening to — often European — free improvised music. So it’s from this perspective that I’m listening now to Mingus Erectus. I can’t judge whether this quintet stays close to the original and merely copies them, or whether they reinvent the compositions. I’m always a little suspicious when musicians play old jazz standards, as jazz is the art of improvising, which implies not merely repeating music from the past. But the marvelous playing of this quintet is tempting. Its done with soul and great energy. And this makes me forget the discussion I was just pointing at. For the piece Fable of (George Dubya) Faubus the lyrics have been changed and seem to concern president Bush, another sign of their up to date approach. All in all this is a very inspired live recording from 2004.

Pianist Lee Pui Ming will give a solo concert at Toronto’s Distillery Jazz Festival (Ontario) on May 27, 2005.

Hubbub, the quintet of musicians Frédéric Blondy, Bertrand Denzler, Jean-Luc Guionnet, Jean-Sébastien Mariage and Edward Perraud, is beginning a North-American tour. The group will give live performances at the Festival des musiques de création in Jonquière (Québec) on May 20, 2005, at the Festival international de musique actuelle de Victoriaville (Québec) on May 22, 2005, at the Victoriaville Toronto Overdrive (VTO) in Toronto (Ontario) on May 24, 2005, at the Artists-at-Large gallery in Hyde Park (Massachusetts) on May 25, 2005 for the Modern Improvised Music concert series, at the Flywheel diffusion space in Easthampton (Massachusetts) on May 26, 2005 and finally at the Deep Listening Space of the Pauline Oliveros Foundation in Kingston (New York) on May 27, 2005.

Although Michel F Côté is announced as a ‘veteran of Montréal’s thriving experimental’, I never heard from him. He is active in the musique actuelle community (and perhaps better known by Vital Weekly’s Dolf Mulder). As Mecha Fixes Clocks he recorded an album with himself playing electronics, percussion, keyboards, accordion, machines, computer and home-made instruments, but inviting a whole bunch of people from Montréal to play a whole bunch of other instruments, such as clarinet, bass flute, trumpet, viola, piano but also sampled CD, needles (by Martin Tétreault) and home spun electronics (by Christof Migone). Despite the long list of people playing on this record and the vast amount of instruments, this is rather a ‘quiet’ record, almost pastoral in atmosphere. Sustained notes played on wind instruments, usually only a few at a time, a guitar being strummed in sheer isolation, the field recording of an otherwise empty desert: it is perhaps easy yet not be avoided, but one can say that this is music for films — I’m not sure what kind of film it would be, but the sparsely orchestrated richness offers potential to anyone with a camera. Great music, where less is more, indeed.

Guitarist composer Antoine Berthiaume ventured to Mills College in San Francisco to record this remarkably fluid musique actuelle session with the contemporary palette of acoustic pianist Quentin SirJacq and the electronics of Norman Teale-a tasty and intriguing mix.