Yesterday, something like a perfect evening at the Montreal International Jazz Festival. The weekend stretches into Monday, with festival-goers enjoying the warmth and a gentle breeze and, above all, a very high-calibre jazz program offered on the Place des Festivals: an electric and exciting concert by Louisiana trumpeter-multi-instrumentalist Chief Adjudah and his ensemble at 7:30 p.m., followed by the happy jazz-rap marriage of composer and pianist Robert Glasper, determined to get the crowd dancing with his quartet.
At the beginning of this concert labeled “The Special Event” of the 44e edition of the FIJM, we wondered who the special guests would be who would join Glasper and his colleagues on stage, as was written in the program; when we had to leave the Place des Festivals, some 15 minutes before the end of the said concert, the only guest we saw come on stage was the pianist’s little daughter who greeted us, hugged in her father’s arms.
Barring a last-minute surprise, there were no guests, which did nothing to dampen our appreciation of the performance. Glasper and his expert accompanists were more than enough for us. They sucked us into their jazz, hip-hop, and R&B-melting grooves in a way few other quartets have managed in the last dozen years. Giving them the privilege of hosting the festival’s “Special Event” was fully justified, with or without special guests.
Building on the foundation of the body of songs from his album series Black Radio (the first one released in 2012, the most recent in 2022), Glasper quickly set the mood downtown, with a band that was pretty much the same as the one he presented two years ago at the Théâtre Maisonneuve — Burniss Travis on electric bass, DJ Jahi Sundance on turntables and samples, only Justin Tyson on drums (accompanist to Esperanza Spalding, among others) wasn’t on the last trip. And yet, last night’s concert was, in many ways, very different for us.
Two years ago, Glasper and his musicians experimented more, sometimes even straying into winding jazz-funk-rap fusion jams; yesterday, in front of a huge crowd to conquer, the pianist concentrated his grooves, avoiding the slip-ups appreciated by jazz fans – which does not mean that he played it safe, as demonstrated by this long and nourishing exchange between him, on the electric piano, and Tyson during Black Superhero (taken from Black Radio III2022), offered at the start of the concert.
This performance was therefore a concentrate of the Robert Glasper experience, the groove that targets the hips and the sophisticated improvisations addressing our brains, this rhythm section dependent on the influence of the late composer J Dilla, with Travis the impassive, almost invisible on stage, his bass lines as deep as they are agile, and Tyson his surgical and strangely funky strike. Glasper had fun on the keys of his electric pianos, Jahi Sundance adding his sauce of special effects and vocal samples. Candy.
At 7:30 p.m., Chief Adjuah, we felt, took the festival audience by surprise, as they discovered the work of the bandleader (and of the Xodokan nation in Louisiana), this blend of modern jazz, traditional African rhythms and indigenous songs. The man who made a name for himself on the American jazz scene as a trumpeter showed up on stage with one of his Adjuah bows, an instrument designed for him, a sort of electric kora with which he led his orchestra (double bass, electric guitar, drums and keyboards) in a powerful Afro-jazz-rock jam.
Here again, the performance reached a level of energy very different from the one he had deployed at the Monument-National in 2022, still on the bill of the FIJM. After two songs (since the Chief also sings) that seemed to dismay the audience, he grabbed his trumpet to steer his performance on more jazzy tracks, but still tensed by the expressive playing of the guitarist. He, however, had a special guest, and not the least: Elena Pinderhughes, young flute prodigy, who joined the orchestra for two or three memorable pieces.
Listening to him play with such brilliance, a colleague jokingly whispered in our ear that Pinderhughes should give lessons to rapper André 3000, whose concert the day before, at the Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, turned out to be a non-event.
The colorful MC, a member of the cult Atlanta duo Outkast who has since converted to flutes, returned to Montreal in the wake of the release last November of his double jazz-new age album (which is very enjoyable if you feel the need to relax your eardrums). New Blue SunWith the stage plunged into darkness, André 3000 and his four accompanists launched the concert in a quasi-free-jazz chaos of percussion and synths, through which it was difficult to discern his playing.
The problem was that when the rhythm section dropped in tone, the playing that could be discerned was below expectations, if we had any since this concert was first and foremost an object of curiosity from an admired rapper who is still learning to play his flutes.
The whole program was improvised, he told us during his first intervention. Apart from the general sound quality of the long, quiet passages, no theme, no melodic motif reminded us of the comfortable qualities of his album. No conversation, no nourishing exchange, appeared in the playing of the musicians among whom we counted Carlos Niño on drums, the guru of this Californian jazz-ambient-experimental scene to which the ex-rapper has grafted himself. Let us nevertheless underline the contribution of keyboardist Surya Botofasina, the harmonies and colors of his synths giving a certain cohesion to this short (80 minutes) performance of which we will especially remember the work, frankly successful, of the lighting designer.