At the edge of the 44e edition of the Montreal International Jazz Festival, music lovers are rubbing their hands: for this edition, the programming committee has put jazz back at the heart of its poster, offering performances by some legends, discoveries and established artists who, at the top of their art, offer an innovative and fusional vision of this music as accomplished by the Australian quartet Hiatus Kaiyote, in concert on June 27 at the Place des Festivals. The duty spoke with keyboardist Simon Mavin about teaching music and the substance of the new album Love Heart Cheat Code which will appear the day after their outdoor concert.
Eight years after his short concert on a Saturday afternoon in Osheaga, Hiatus Kaiyote returns to Montreal through the front door. The invitation to the quartet to inaugurate the series of major events at the Place des Festivals has symbolic value: jazz regains its rightful place in this festival. Better yet, there is a place of choice for jazz which is not afraid to visit other musical chapels, nor to adopt its sacred texts as do these unclassifiable Australians who wander from jazz to funk to R&B by finding in hip-hop rhythms and electronic timbres add extra soul to their songs.
“We run away from labels,” says Simon Mavin, contacted at his home in Melbourne. “When people call us a jazz group, we respond: Issh… No. Others say we’re an R&B group, but that’s no. If it is difficult to put us in a box, it is because we are very open; all water is good to pour into the bath of creativity. And frankly, I don’t even know what we’re doing anymore, the musical genres confuse me. Simply, our music is the sum of everything we like to listen to, and the way we interpret these influences. At the end of the day, we’re just singer-songwriters that want to make shit that sounds good. »
In complete transparency, this question of musical genre has stuck with Hiatus Kaiyote since his second album Choose Your Weapon (2015), when its fusion grooves captured the attention of Americans, particularly the rap scene: Anderson Paak, Chance the Rapper, Kendrick Lamar, Drake, Beyoncé and Jay-Z sampled recordings of the group which, since , has built a tremendous following there.
And then, their albums (four on the clock, including the one coming out next week) have been nominated in musical galas in the jazz (in Australia) or “progressive R&B” categories (at the Grammys in 2022). Their sound, colorful, expressive, dynamic, is undeniably jazz in the playing of drummer Perrin Moss (disciple of the influential hip-hop composer J. Dilla), bassist Paul Bender, and in the agile technique of the singer (self-taught). Nai Palm.
As for Simon, he studied, among other things, jazz at university, “this intellectualized musical language”… to better unlearn it by meeting Bender and Nai Palm.
“It’s interesting because I would dare say that Nai and Bender also understand intellectualized music, but they express it in a different language — and it took me a while to learn their language. They fascinated me: How can you make music like that without having learned the traditional, academic language? Their approach changed my perspective on learning music because when I was studying at university, I wondered a lot about what genre of music I should get into; After meeting these two, I asked myself what music I wanted to create. »
head in the stars
If we always come back to a question of genre with Hiatus Kaiyote, it is perhaps also because their songs seem inscrutable to us. Nai Palm’s texts are mysterious, if not sometimes abstruse. Simon loves: “Take the song Telescope [du nouvel album]. I had found this sound that we hear at the beginning, made on my Prophet 600 synth. Arriving in the studio, Nai was excited: she had just discovered that on the NASA website, it was possible to do a search with the day of our anniversary to find what the Hubble telescope had spotted in the sky that day.
The four members each entered the day of their birthday, and the result gives the text of the song, to which the group grafted bits of the text of Space is the Place by jazz astronaut Sun Ra and quoted the chorus of My Girl by the Temptations — an astonishing reference since if we had to choose from the Motown repertoire, it was first and foremost the songs of Stevie Wonder which seem to have marked the sound of Hiatus Kaiyote, which Simon recognizes.
“On the new album, we first wanted to propose compositions, if what I’m saying makes sense? You see, the previous album [Mood Valiant, 2022] included several songs born from improvised studio sessions, such as Sparkle Tape Break Up And And We Go Gentle; everything happened very spontaneously. Whereas this album is more focused on composition, ideas already found that we work on and refine in the studio. »
It is also a briefer album, with short songs, and softer, overall, than the previous ones. However, he gets carried away at the end of the course with Cinnamon Temple — a song that the group has been playing live for years, but which they had never managed to record to their liking — and, at the very end, White Rabbit.
Yes, the White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane, transfigured by the four musicians. It is, on the album, Simon’s favorite song: “I love the direction it takes, I find that all the ingredients are in the right place and that it adds something to the Hiatus sound. It was Bender who came up with the bass guitar motif, we developed the groove from that; upon hearing it, Nai jumped on the microphone and started singing the lyrics of White Rabbit. I then said to myself: Good! It looks like we’re doing a cover of Jefferson Airplane! »
The group will be in concert at Place des Festivals on June 27, 9:30 p.m., on the TD stage.