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Al Muirhead: Still Cookin' at 90: The Canada Sessions, Volume II
by Jack Bowers
"Twelve years ago," bassist Kodi Hutchinson writes in the liner notes to The Canada Sessions, Volume II, “I found myself on a bandstand with 78-year-old trumpeter Al Muirhead. I remember thinking, why has this amazing musician never recorded under his own name?" Fast forward a dozen years, to 2025, and Muirhead, still going strong at age 90, has not only released five albums under his own name, he earned a prestigious JUNO nomination for the first one while continuing to ...
Continue ReadingDaniel Janke Winter Trio: Available Light
by Dan McClenaghan
Canadian pianist Daniel Janke calls the trio responsible for his Available Light the Winter Trio. The leader manages piano duties, accompanied by bassist Basile Racola and drummer Ariel Tessier. The inspiration for the name was Janke's home base, Whitehorse, Yukon, a city of thirty thousand hearty souls at sixty degrees north latitude, in the rain shadow of the Coast Mountains. It is a place of expansive available sunlight in the summer and minimal, dusk-like available light in the winter. The ...
Continue ReadingWinnipeg Jazz Orchestra: Tidal Currents: East Meets West
by Jack Bowers
When it comes to appraising contemporary big bands, Canada's Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra is on equal footing with the best of them. For its seventh album, Tidal Currents, the WJO has engaged two of that country's leading jazz composers, Jill Townsend and Christine Jensen, to present in musical terms impressions of places that have a special meaning to them, in particular the bodies of water that inspired them in their younger years and up to this point in time.
Continue ReadingThe Saskatchewan All Star Big Band: Saskatchewan Suite
by Jack Bowers
On Saskatchewan Suite, composer/arranger Fred Stride and the twenty-member Saskatchewan All Star Big Band have combined to paint a luminous and colorful portrait of that western Canadian province, canvassing 150 years of its history in eight picturesque movements that describe in musical terms the land itself, its indigenous peoples, newcomers from Europe and elsewhere, its recognition in 1905 as a province, the importance of various sports to Saskatchewan's inhabitants, and the legacy of jazz as an essential part of its ...
Continue ReadingThe David Restivo Trio: Arancina
by Dan McClenaghan
The David Restivo Trio's Arancina is all about “home," whether it is pianist Restivo's ancestral home in Sicily, projected with a beautifully-painted homage on his four-part “Sicilian Suite," or his brief home in Nova Scotia with “Raven's Wing," inspired by the dark birds soaring over the Northumberland Strait which separates Nova Scotia from Prince Edward Island. Then there is Restivo's coming home to his bebop roots with “It's You Or No One," the Jules Styne-Sammy Can song from the 1948 ...
Continue ReadingAudrey Ochoa: Frankenhorn
by Dan McClenaghan
Trombonist Audrey Ochoa's Frankenhorn has a big, bold sound. The set was originally planned as a feature for duets with pianist Chris Andrew, with remixes by electronica DJ Battery Poacher. But things got out of hand, in the best sense of things. A rhythm section and strings and keyboard seasonings were brought into the mix, resulting in a sound that almost certainly tops a duet approach. Battery Poacher remixes show up on two of the tunes, “The Huggy ...
Continue ReadingA/B Trio: Trioliloquy
by Friedrich Kunzmann
The suffix “-loquy" refers to something that is spoken. Alberta-based trio A/B Trio however has no intention of lecturing anyone on their third release Trioliloquy , but rather demonstrates how three musicians are able to create suspenseful narratives in a pool of colorful jazz tunes that be, bop and--once in a while--get blue as well. Thomas Bennett on drums, Dan Davis on saxophone and bassist Josh McHan are joined by trumpeter Kevin Turcotte for a couple of songs, augmenting the ...
Continue ReadingAl Muirhead's Canadian Quintet: Undertones
by Dan McClenaghan
Swing was the thing, until alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, and pianist Bud Powell helped give birth to bebop, and alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman set jazz free. Not that swing ever went away, it just got bumped into the back seat. So when “Confirmation" and “Dance of the Infidels" wailed on the dashboard radio, Johnny Hodges' alto sax sang sweet notes out of one of the back windows, Lester Young blowing them out the other. But ...
Continue ReadingAl Muirhead: Northern Adventures
by Jack Bowers
When you've been a musician as long as Al Muirhead has, you not only earn many friends in the business, you also recognize who among them can play. For Northern Adventures, Muirhead's second album as leader of his own group, the eighty-one-year-old Canadian trumpeter assembled a who's who of the finest musicians his country has to offer and let them have a go, jam-session style. The result is an album whose fun quotient almost eclipses its virtuosity. “Our only plan," ...
Continue ReadingHutchinson Andrew Trio: Prairie Modern
by John Kelman
If Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver are the only places in Canada considered, in any way, as hotbeds for jazz, the prairie provinces are, with the exception of the annual Banff International Workshop in Jazz and Creative Music, pretty close to the bottom of the list of other Canadian cities that have small but aspiring jazz scenes. If anything, the Alberta-based Hutchinson Andrew Trio (also going by the name HAT) is clear evidence of not existing jazz scenes in Edmonton and ...
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