Kate Wyatt: Artifact

At this point, in June of 2022, there is not a lot of internet chatter concerning Montreal-based pianist Kate Wyatt. Her website does not include a biography. But a trip to YouTube land reveals a bit of music from her debut CD release, Artifact. That may be all anyone needs in terms of an introduction. It is uncertain what can be learned from those "played with" and "performed alongside" nuggets that are common in new artist intros anyway.

Wyatt's music speaks for itself. Artifact opens with its title tune, music meant to evoke the sense of mystery involved in the uncovering of relics from ancient times. It succeeds, with a dark mood that suggests maybe the relics in question come from another world, a new soundtrack to a movie rendition of novelist Stephan King's Tommyknockers (Putnam, 1987). Wyatt expresses her art in the quartet mode, joined by bassist Adrian Vedady, drummer Jim Doxas and trumpeter Lex French. The arrangement has a beautiful elasticity, and Wyatt and trumpeter French get a lot of room to ramble in this spontaneous exploration of long hidden things discovered.

"Underwater Chant" is inspired by a sense of peace that can be found beneath the surface, where time changes, where sound waves change, bass clef notes emerging out of the cool blue denseness, where currents flow and tides push in their inexorable rhythms.

Six of the seven tunes are Wyatt originals. She writes distinctive melodies and crafts lovely harmonies. The one non-original, Billy Strayhorn's "A Flower Is A Lovesome Thing," plays out in a lugubrious mood, as if that flower has faded; its petals are beginning to fall, a single one of them drifting away from its origin to lie alone on the cold ground. And again, great soloing by Wyatt and French.

Artifacts says that pianist/composer Kate Wyatt is on the rise.