[…] Also going the innovative route are The Eastern Stars, who spray Moog, ukulele and omnichord over the 11 tracks featured on July 5th, 1961. The newbies — Rob Corradetti and Kaia Wong — looked to The Moldy Peaches, The Velvet Underground and Pink Floyd for inspiration on their first effort, according to a track-by-track breakdown. The New York folksters are giving the record a soft release this week in New York and San Francisco — so it can relish the 45th anniversary of the album title, which the band calls “a date on which nothing of political or social significance occurred, yet a date on which everything imaginable happened: birth, death, tragedy, baseball and slugging back to work with holiday hangovers.” The record gets a wide release in August.

C’est la batterie de Robbie Kuster qui accroche l’oreille dès l’ouverture de Tanz, en se balançant sur un rythme saccadé de mécanique claudicante. Puis, c’est la clarinette basse de Philippe Lauzier (aussi au sax) qui étonne. On dirait du Stravinski période Histoire du soldat… Pas vraiment étonnant de la part d’un trio jazz qui emprunte aussi deux pièces à Béla Bartók! Sa Mélodie pentatonique et son Bulgarian Rhythm prennent ici des couleurs étonnantes! Ailleurs, dans Porte des Lilas, par exemple, c’est la contrebasse de Miles Perkin qui semble se prendre pour un sax.

With these 18 tracks of solo music for prepared contrabass recorded in October, 2005 by a young Montréal musician, we have a perfect example of a trend in contemporary music that I find endlessly rewarding, familiar acoustic instruments put under a microscope to reveal unfamiliar possibilities. Martel is an example of a musician who’s drawn a personal cartography of nooks and crannies in their instrument’s potential sound space, and it’s in the solo format that we can hear their naked vocabulary and organizational impulses without any musical compromises. Averaging around 3 minutes apiece, these are miniatures that allow Martel to present a huge range of approaches; it’s possibly the most varied solo contrabass disc I’ve encountered. At the same time, the timbral and structural variety within each piece obviates a “catalog” effect. For short passages we hear rare shades of bow pressure recalling Fernando Grillo’s Fluvine or Stefano Scodanibbio’s Scelsi interpretations, and other restrained fixations echo the outstanding solo works of Domenico Sciajno, Michael Bullock, Tetsu Saitoh, Kazue Sawai, etc. Both non-repeating and repeating structures are employed, the former offering the joy of ephemeral glimpses of mystery sounds and the latter conveying the feeling of strange machines carrying out their strange lives in the middle of a short film by the Brothers Quay. Though the music was created via improvisation without overdubs or electronic processing, Martel achieves some grainy, static-like textures and unnatural harmonies that vaguely feel electronic. Much of the credit goes to the multiple close-miking recording techniques used, with as many as 10 (!) microphones collating heterogenous sound events. One can imagine Martel sometimes rapidly moving from one attack to another at a different location on his oversized fiddle, and several tracks have a semi-regular alternation between contrasting timbres that creates an illusion of ensemble interplay, with the kind of tightness of timing that can only come from a single nervous system overseeing an array of sounds, much like a drumkitter weaves the contrasting timbres of different cymbals, drums, etc. A truly captivating disc from start to finish!

Ambiances Magnétiques has been playing the talent scouts since 2002 or so, and that strategy is starting to pay off, with young musicians like Antoine Berthiaume, Pierre-Yves Martel and Philippe Lauzier all releasing new albums in May/June 2006. This is Lauzier’s second release for the Montréal label — the reedsman is the founder of Ensemble en pièces, whose Jardin d’Exil CD inaugurated the Ambiances Magnétiques collection back in 2004. Bassist Miles Perkin is one of Thom Gossage’s regular sidemen and he has performed in Tom Walsh’s NOMA} (although not on the group’s Ambiances Magnétiques release; this is his first appearance on the label). Drummer Robbie Kuster also comes from Montréal’s leftfield (yet more conventional) jazz scene, with to his credit several participations to projects led by Patrick Watson and Yannick Rieu. Recorded over two days in December 2005, Today is a Special Day offers 11 pieces, most of them written by Lauzier (Perkin contributes two, and there are two quirky readings of Béla Bartók} tunes). Lauzier’s compositions are usually playful, with an occasional tender side (Histoire du mendiant, featuring his seductive bass clarinet tone). The music stems from post-bop influences, with an obvious filiation with Jean Derome’s lighter side, although the trio’s music doesn’t have the latter’s angular feel. And how couldn’t we think of Steve Lacy when listening to The Cocoon with that graceful, slightly mischievous soprano sax leading the way. Perkin and Kuster form a supple rhythm section, adept at both freeflowing jazz and trashier jazz-rock (Ivresse} ending the album with a bang). Don’t pass this album by on the count that you don’t know these cats yet, especially if you’ve been longing for a new Jean Derome et les Dangereux Zhoms album — not that the Lauzier/Perkin/Kuster Trio emulates that band, but one finds in their music the same kind of intelligence, soul and joie de vivre.