Jean Derome, founding figure of Montréal’s musique actuelle scene, took the stage of L’Astral. Playing music from his last album To Continue with his regular group les Dangereux Zhoms, comprised of longtime cohorts Tom Walsh on trombone, Guillaume Dostaler on piano, Pierre Cartier on electric bass and Pierre Tanguay on drums.

Derome, in deadpan delivery, described the tunes as a suite dedicated to the mundane incidents of life on the road, with titles like Nez qui coule and Cogné de genou.

Dostaler is a very deliberate player in every comping phrase and every line. It took a while before Tanguay unleashed his irreverence in the solo of Prières. Cartier sang La grenouille et le boeuf admirably in a trembling baritone and his electric bass allowed for a sustained, almost post-rock undertone to Nez qui coule. Walsh often relied on glissandi and extreme high register, often complemented by a plunger. Derome, on alto and soprano saxophones and flute, played with a fairly clean tone, marked by intentional spurts of overblowing and other extended techniques.

Compositionally, the pieces featured some intriguing structures — the Berg-like stacked tone row of La grenouille, the intervallic unisons of Nez qui coule. The blend between Walsh’s trombone and Derome’s alto was especially notable. The centrepiece of the set was Prières (based on Protestant hymns), with the horns in harmonized chorale, the cued repeated figures for Tanguay’s solo, and splitting the band into two time feels. Throughout the show, it was all very interesting but the spark was lacking — perhaps that was part of the tribute to the mundane as well.

Pour être international, le festival de jazz de Montréal n’en délaisse pas pour autant les musiciens canadiens présentés tout au long de la manifestation sous l’intitulé «Jazz d’ici».

Parmi eux, le saxophoniste, flûtiste et compositeur Jean Derome. Une référence, non seulement au Canada mais aussi aux États-Unis et en Europe depuis le début des années 1970. Parmi toutes ses activités — dont de nombreuses musiques de films, des collaborations régulières pour le théâtre ou la danse — il y a son groupe Les Dangereux Zhoms. Actuellement un quintette avec Tom Walsh au trombone, Guillaume Dostaler au piano, Pierre Cartier à la basse et Pierre Tanguay à la batterie. La formation était programmée, samedi 26 juin, à L’Astral, le club situé au rez-de-chaussée de La Maison du jazz.

Avec Les Dangereux Zhoms, Jean Derome équilibre au mieux une écriture sophistiquée et une forme d’humour musical qui n’avance pas avec de gros sabots. On peut sourire à l’expressivité de sa musique qui colle très bien à certains des titres de ses compositions: Nez qui coule ou La Grenouille et le bœuf, d’après la fable de La Fontaine. La première joue sur des mouvements lents, des sonorités liquides, fait entendre comme une inexorable coulée. La seconde fait passer dans les parties solistes de Derome ou de Walsh, ce gonflement de la grenouille, ses efforts à l’issue fatale. Tout le talent de Derome aura été de ne pas mener la musique vers l’explosion, évidence qui n’a pas besoin d’être surlignée.

Il y a dans la musique de Derome beaucoup d’éléments. Certains viennent du jazz, d’autres du rock, d’autres de la musique contemporaine, d’autres ont été captés lors de voyages dans le monde entier. Sans que cela soit démonstratif ou que l’on ressente un effet de catalogue. Cela sonne fluide, naturel. Beaucoup de musiciens étiquetés “expérimentaux” s’essayent à ces jeux avec les genres, les styles, les références. Derome et ses Dangereux Zhoms maîtrisent en plus l’art de la suggestion, de la discrétion.

Last year the festival silently got rid of something that certain of us kept a close eye on: the Jazz Contemporain series. It’s understandable; in 2008 (its final year) I saw a couple of concerts in the series that obviously lacked attendance. But the question remains: how do you present this more adventurous and demanding music that also inescapably belongs under the umbrella term ‘jazz’?

Luckily, the avant-garde still has a place at our jazz festival. This evening’s Jean Derome concert at L’Astral proved that the festival programmers still care to present the more challenging-though equally satisfying-side of the genre.

Saxophonist and flutist Jean Derome led a vigorous and inspired concert with his quintet Dangereux Zhoms. Drummer Pierre Tanguay, pianist Guillaume Dostaler, electric bassist Pierre Cartier and trombonist Tom Walsh played as a coherent and sympathetic group alongside the energetic leader.

As their name implies, the band finds a kind of surrealist balance between light-hearted witticism and trenchant word play. Derome’s music is difficult to classify and is packed with references to styles as wide reaching as funk and baroque music. Often he layers simple ideas on top of each other to create a dense but intelligible sound. A folk melody on flute will occur simultaneously over a sustained counterpoint in a different key, while bass and drums lay down a repetitive groove. Each section of a song will shift into a new register, a new zone of sound separate from the last. The success of the band isn’t so much what they do as how much they do and how seamlessly they move between such different musical styles.

If they weren’t amazing improvisers, the composing might even seem a bit flighty. At times, I found myself wanting less contrast and more commitment. But the subtle logic of the improvising held it together.

Where the composing may dip its feet in, the improvising dives head first. Each musician plays with a kind of patient insistence that is rare and delightful. Dostaler, Derome and Walsh, in particular, each have a way of chasing after an idea until they have wrenched some kind of emotional weight from it-seizing all they can. As a spectator it’s nothing short of fascinating.

The Fanfare Pourpour will be in concert in Sherbrooke during the series Concerts de la cité on June 30, 2010 at 8pm.