Montreal Jazz Festival | Herbie Hancock: jazz fusion without cantaloupe or watermelon

The 83-year-old jazz alchemist is walking back down his own unbroken paths from half a century ago with a lot of certainty and the help of a few friends.

Even before playing, he addressed the audience: “The first piece, Overture, is weird and spacy, but it contains a potpourri of some of my compositions”. Clamor to the balcony.

We recognize a few scraps here and there, including the famous Chameleonthe 15-minute flagship track of the album repository Headhunters released in 1973, the thirteenth by the Chicago pianist. This appetizer is made expressly to titillate the spectator, because we will hear the jewel in its initial form later during the concert.

From the second piece, we enter into the same obsessive quest for jazz pushed back to its limits as imagined by Wayne Shorter, when he signed the transcriptions of the scores of Footprints in 1967 on the Miles Davis quintet album titled Miles Smiles and of which, of course, Hancock was a part.

A dense and avant-garde piece of ten minutes well counted, the musicians proceed to nourished exchanges; James Genus on bass (Saturday Night Live) and Jaylen Petiniaud on drums take care of the rhythm section, the cadences are served with nuance and efficiency throughout this great fusion jazz mass.

Other high-profile players in the roster include Beninese guitarist and singer Lionel Loueke, who played with Nate Smith just last Sunday, and New Orleans trumpeter Terence Blanchard (more than 50 film soundtracks to his credit). active), who dragged his slippers in the rue Saint-Denis in 1982 in the company of his fellow saxophonist Donald Harrison during the third edition of the festival. A wonderful reunion, it goes without saying, and the public let him know.

Hancock has several different keyboards at his disposal, including the Keytar, this synthesizer with keyboard carried like a guitar, just like his Rolland X-7, Korg, Clavinet and other instruments with 88 black and white keys. It even incorporates the vocoder on certain passages, a question of tampering with the voices into a synthetic substance.

The public approves and willingly walks in these footprints.

In the heart of the 1970s

Actual Prooftaken from Thrust (1974) and magnified in its version live on flood (1975), offers another deep dive into the uncertain waters of progressive jazz, jazz fusion.

The Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier is enveloped in this atmosphere of great evenings, there is something for the buffet and for the caboche.

Come Running To Metaken from the album sunshine (1978), takes its ease over almost ten nourishing minutes, vocoder as backup. As you will have understood, Monday evening was not the evening of the three-minute songs of the top 40even less that of his first successes, Cantaloupe Island (remixed by the Brits of Us3 at the height of Acid-jazz in 1991) or Watermelon Mantwo well-known tunes from the 1960s.

Secret Sauce, played in only a quarter of the concerts on the tour, was offered to the public of Montreal connoisseurs. We savor our luck. Selection all the more in harmony with the spirit of the concert as it is relatively recent (2019).

The observation is clear: the compositional spirit of the octogenarian is not running out of steam.

The dessert was coming. Chameleon and its 15 minutes of brilliant and melodic skids, emblematic piece of the group’s album The Headhunters would seal the deal. A quarter of an hour of deep immersion in which Hancock looks like he’s 30 again. What we also remember from the performance of the great jazzman is that he did not play rock it, his 1983 robotic hit that had made the heyday of MTV. No machines on Monday evening, the man clearly had the upper hand over the machine. More than two hours.

First part with impeccable execution

The Franco-American duo DOMi & JD Beck had a great opportunity to rally new followers. Great public reception. When the Frenchwoman with the lulus and the illuminated sneakers multiplies the punctures on her keyboard, we recognize a certain musical relationship with the music proposed by Herbie Hancock.

But what a right hand! Marrying each contour of the frenetic hard bop that starts the concert, it’s cascades of notes that spill out. The Texan Beck is for his part leaning on his snare drum and connects the rolls, follows the cadence of grapeshot at will.

The young duo hosted by Blue Note accomplish a lot with their music – instrumental, but sometimes sung. On the whole, it’s rather cold as music, cerebral, although the execution is irreproachable. Nice tandem.

DOMi & JD Beck will be in concert again on Tuesday, place des Festivals, at 9 p.m.