The pandemic will have shown Jean-Michel Blais the benefits of the dawn. “I don’t know about you, but me, as I get older, I get up earlier than before and I like it,” says the composer. At 6 a.m., I go for a run. During the confinements, everyone seemed to say: “Montreal is no longer the same, it’s quieter, fewer cars, fewer people in the streets…” To which I reply: “Finally, the quiet town!” In the park next to our house, I started to see animals that we did not see before. This ecological reflection greatly nourished his inspiration when composingAubadea third career album that stands out for its orchestrations of strings and winds, hitherto absent from the pianist’s work.
“I was incredibly lucky,” admits Jean-Michel Blais. On January 15, 2020, he invited friends and collaborators to his little party celebrating the nearly two years of touring that followed the release of his album. In my hand. Two months later, the Earth also stopped rotating. “I remember that at that time Alyosha had just released his album, and Alex [Stréliski] had to postpone or cancel a lot of concert dates “, when he had just taken advantage of a vacation in the Andes and would take a professional break. “I came back from vacation and clac!, everything closed. »
If Jean-Michel Blais did not have to put his career on hold due to confinement, his personal life nonetheless suffered the blow. He was then experiencing a separation, a move, and now the loneliness imposed by the pandemic which he also went through, he says, in “resilience mode”. He did sports. Started learning Russian, why not. And one morning, he went back to work: “Well, I’m going to start composing again. I got there, it seems…”
“I was very surprised at what was coming out of me — it was empowerment, motivated, toned. That’s the strength of the morning, he says. This idea of the beginning of a new day, of spring, this energy” which, he noted, contrasted with the often elegiac character of his first two albums. “I even wrote pieces in major mode! He is still surprised.
The desire to orchestrate
Bright from Whispers in opening, Aubade is an album of regeneration and rebirth, hopes Blais, who let himself be influenced by the first light of day as much as by his obsessions with confinement. We easily recognize the melodic, pop and romantic breath of Joe Hisaishi, official composer of the director Hayao Miyazaki, co-founder of the legendary Studio Ghibli, famous for these masterpieces of animated cinema (Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Kiki’s Delivery Service, among others), who accompanied Jean-Michel during the pandemic. The first piano motif heard on Ouessantin the middle of the album, is a nod to the theme of the TV series The Officewhich the musician also devoured.
On Loafer, love and absinthe, his playing and the orchestrations even reveal some jazzy colors, another first in his work. “For jazz, I think the culprit is Ravel — I studied him a lot, he was tripping on Gershwin, who was tripping on Ravel in return. Ravel also has jazz colors, but in a very rational, calculated way. It allowed me to open my orchestrations to that — jazz allows me to extract myself from a diatonic, very pop mode, and to explore other colors. »
In addition to Russian, jogging and “telephagy”, Jean-Michel also invested himself in the work of arrangement for orchestra, without however imagining that these strings and these winds would give all the character to his third album. . “The soil was fertile [pour que je m’intéresse à l’orchestration]. Basically, my music starts from improvisation, which I then structure and repeat — I don’t compose like someone who studied that, at the University of Montreal or at McGill. However, even when I was studying at the Conservatoire, I had this desire to compose and orchestrate. It’s always been in me. »
The confinement gave him the space and the time to deepen this art, which changed his way of conceiving his music: “For the first time, I have a more critical look at my work since I also have to write for other musicians. I can’t improvise on the piano and say to the violinists: “Come on, do something!” Everything has to be thought out in advance, it’s a whole other process. »
The human side of music
It is besides the pretty paradox of this album: composed in solitude, recorded in collegiality, with the participation of a dozen accompanists. After two solo albums, Jean-Michel Blais chose to surround himself with a chamber orchestra when social distancing was encouraged instead. “During my loneliness, I had made imaginary friends! he assures. In my composition room, I imagined musicians — an oboist here, a clarinetist here, violinists there. Seven days a week alone is a long time; Now, it’s funny, I think I made a much more jovial, dancing, optimistic album! As if I had composed my own therapy. »
He was able to count on the support of colleagues, more specifically to correct his shortcomings as an orchestrator. “I wrote everything down, but I needed verification. I approached a few people, but each time I was disappointed: when my music fell into someone else’s hands, I felt that it lost its nature, that it was no longer me. So, either you distort yourself, or you learn”, which he did while discussing with the prolific colleague Nico Muhly as well as benefiting from the wise advice of Alex Weston, composer and assistant to Philip Glass, then lights of his new neighbour, conductor Nicolas Ellis.
“Luckily, when we finished the scores, in the spring of 2021, came the deconfinement, recalls Blais. Going back to the studio to record these songs was one of the best moments of my life. I was extremely intimidated to play in front of these exceptional musicians”, whom he insisted on recording up close, to capture their breath, the “click” of the keys of the clarinet, of the hammer which relaxes in the piano, of Ellis which count the times. “I wanted to hear the human side of the music, I also wanted each musician to have their moment, their solo, their voice, for there to be life. In the studio, I cried: it had been a year since I had seen musicians play music live, and there they were twelve. I had missed the music. »