Here's a somewhat pretentious editorial about jazz culture I wrote recently, highlighting the work of Falcon Punch, BADBADNOTGOOD, Secretmen, Dixies Death Pool, and Whiskey Chief. It's basically an expansion of the jazz blog I posted last week.
The first musical trend I've come across for 2013 (a year I'm quite certain will see countless 80's synth pop inspired hipster records) is indie jazz. Or I guess a better way to describe it is jazz bands who treat their careers like indie bands. Rather than sign on with a marketing company to play high profile corporate gigs and festivals these bands favor the solidarity of the Canadian venue. It's jazz but you can book it and scenester kids will lose their shit over it. You can press it on vinyl and sell it on tour. It should only be a matter of time before jazz bands start appearing on festival line ups, beside the long lists of Pitchfork and Exclaim approved acts.
Not that the Fraser Valley has any established jazz scene worth mentioning. I worked with one group of highly talented high school fellows, who have now parted ways for post-secondary this and that. In Vancity and Victoria (even Nanaimo) there are places you can go to with jazz bands, playing every night of the week. You can go to these places, sit there with a drink of choice, and just take it all in. Why this seems like such a foreign and unheard of reality in the Bible Belt is beyond me.
Inarguably the pioneers of this new trend are BADBADNOTGOOD, a troupe out high schoolers out of Toronto that made their initial mark with hip-hop jazz beats. Not that jazzy hip hop beats are a new phenomenon (consider the work of Flying Lotus, Swiss beat producer Chief, or the varied releases from Jellyfish Recordings and Phonographique).
In a similar vein is the recently released debut by Falcon Punch, a self-proclaimed fusion/idm/electronic trio also from the Toronto area. While Falcon Punch takes a unique electronic approach to the jazz genre they also maintain an era of the new traditional with rhodes piano led tracks (compare their "Stars In Daylight" to BBNG's "Fall In Love").
While not a definitive introduction to the myriad ways electronica and jazz can be easily integrated, Falcon Punch's debut is strong addition to the jazz conversation.
Also worth noting is the debut from Vancouver's Whiskey Chief, an album that unities the improvisational spirit of jazz with the horns and groove of funk (the resurgence of contemporary funk is also no new phenomenon, as evidenced by Five Alarm Funk and Abbotsford's tragically disbanded Cinnamon Toast Funk).
Taking a more mischievous (I'd go as far to say "nerdy"- which I use in the endearing sense) approach is Edmonton's Secretmen. They seem to garner their inspiration from campy 80's soundtracks. In other words if Beverly Hills Cop or Ghostbusters had jazz soundtracks they would sound eerily similar. The percussionist does his damnedest to steal the show on several of their tracks in true Holy Fuck fashion, as if the band's interaction was more an argument than an improvisation.
Elsewhere on the spectrum is, for lack of a better term, free-jazz from Colin Stetson and Dixies Death Pool. Stetson's is a classically trained approach that favors highly innovative placement of mics, vocal techniques, and percussion. The Dixie Death Pool approach to jazz constructs highly renegotiated or altogether disregarded song structures of the avant-garde movement (one good example of avant-gard is Vancouver/Calgary label Unit Structure). Further complicating genre classification is the garage-inspired sound employed by Dixie's Death Pool, using considerably less polished recording techniques to produce an ironically brilliant sound.
The true essense of garage music can be attributed to the shitty sounding recordings, it can be said. If garage bands produced their albums in high end studios the result would be awkward and uncharacteristic. The recordings sound amazing because they sound kind of shitty. Classic examples range from The Sex Pistols to the Ramones and Nirvana to Rancid. A few of the innumerable contemporary examples I've come across most recently are The Shimmering Stars, Odonis Odonis, The Famines, and Fist City. I would argue that FIDLAR is the mainstream equivalent, a marketable garage band. Not that this is a bad thing, just that it is a reality.
Canada’s small venue scene and scene supporters, particularly in rather jazz-starved regions like the Fraser Valley, would be wise to join in the trend and start actively promoting Jazz. In Nanaimo, where I’m from, high school band programs would actually book shows for their jazz bands in malls and at civil events. This is the very least the cities of the Fraser Valley could be doing to support jazz, and it would be relatively easy.
At this point there are no excuses for treating jazz like a novelty, if not ignoring its necessity to cultural identity completely.
