Jaclyn Guillou and other Vancouver next-gen jazz artists build a coastal sound from sources old and new

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      It might seem odd to quote a ’60s rock band when talking about 21st-century jazz, but in the immortal words of the Buffalo Springfield, “There’s something happening here.”

      What it is ain’t exactly clear, but we can say this with absolute certainty: the local jazz and creative-music scene has never been larger or more vital, and a lot of that vitality is reflected in this year’s TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival programming. It’s not that the festival has been unsuppor-tive of the talent in its own back yard prior to this; far from it. But with the opening of Frankie’s Jazz Club, the hiring of former Cellar owner and saxophonist Cory Weeds, and the creation of an internship explicitly aimed at identifying and advancing younger artists, the presiding Coastal Jazz and Blues Society has unfurled a bigger tent than ever before.

      Defining what that marquee encloses remains difficult, however. “I just can’t really put my finger on it, because it’s just so wide-open,” says talent booker Cole Schmidt, who’s spent the last few months apprenticing with Coastal’s artistic director Ken Pickering and manager of artistic programming Rainbow Robert. Picked for his experience organizing weekly improv nights at small East Van venues, as well as for his stellar work with his Pugs and Crows band, the guitarist has a good overview of what’s going on locally—and it seems like anything goes.

      “Genre-blurring might be a good way of putting it,” he says. “But there are lots of people coming at it from a traditional way, and still getting their juice from Sonny Rollins records, you know!”

      One of those might be Vancouver-raised singer Jaclyn Guillou, although she’s just as likely to be listening to vintage Betty Carter and Carmen McRae discs as anything by the ageless colossus of the saxophone.

      “The one thing that I really recognize about where I feel comfortable in jazz right now is how much I love the tradition,” she tells the Straight from New York City, where she’s been studying with singer Kate McGarry and catching “three shows a night” at the city’s legendary jazz clubs. “I want to respect it, and understand it, and represent it in a modern way, but I’ve been a traditionalist in music since I was a child. I love old musicals and old songs. So I don’t know where all of this is going to take me, but I know I’m getting a lot deeper into jazz in my singing—the traditional aspects of improvising and phrasing.”

      After some promising ventures into writing her own material, Guillou recently showed off her more traditional leanings with This Bitter Earth, a string-laced tribute to the undisputed queen of bluesy jazz, Dinah Washington. It was, she said in an earlier interview, a chance for her to step back from songwriting—something she’s returned to with a passion since landing in the Big Apple. Paradoxically, it was also a way of “honouring what I really, really want to do”, she added at the time. And although she now says that she’s reconsidering all her options—to write, or not to write—the future will definitely hold more standards with strings.

      “I really don’t know what the next album is going to be,” she says. “I’ve had conversations with people in the industry here, but it’s going to be a surprise to me and to everybody else. The one thing I do know is just how much I love strings, so that is something that will definitely appear on the next album—or, if not, on the next album after that.”

      Whatever she does, there’s a good chance that the charismatic and driven Guillou will be Vancouver’s next jazz star in the mode of Diana Krall or Michael Bublé—a singer of swinging songs with mass appeal. What’s arguably more interesting on the musical level, however, is that our city’s jazz schools, most notably Vancouver Community College and Capilano University, are producing a crop of young musicians who have found a way to honour the jazz past while looking to the future. Consider Jeff Gammon, a 22-year-old bass prodigy who splits his time between learning on the bandstand with his elders and crafting elastic new sounds with his peers.

      “I think a lot of people overlook tradition, or think of it as something that’s been done and that should be done, in a way,” the Calgary-born Burnaby resident says in a telephone interview from his home. “Like, should be moved on from. ‘Why rehash the past? Let’s keep things moving; let’s keep new things emerging all the time.’ Which is great, but I think it’s so important to have people like Cory Weeds and [guitarist] Bill Coon and those guys who are cultivating that sort of tradition in this city. It takes a lot of time, effort, and skill to dive really deep into something like that. Especially with traditional jazz, there are thousands and thousands of standards that you’re expected to know, and different ways to play them. To get to the point where you can access all of that at any time is, I think, the true definition of an improviser, in a lot of ways.”

      Yet, at the same time, Gammon notes, “There’s definitely a new kind of musician coming about.” In jazz-fest-featured bands Only a Visitor and Hildegard’s Ghost, which owe as much to Björk and the Dirty Projectors as to Carla Bley and Wayne Shorter, the bassist is helping define a truly 21st-century aesthetic, one that takes full advantage of the dizzying array of sources available on the Internet. Neither act is “jazz”, in the traditional sense, but both depend on trained improvisers to bring beauty and strangeness to their sound—as do older songwriters like Veda Hille, Dan Mangan, and Destroyer’s Dan Bejar.

      “Modern jazz performers have adopted complex rhythms from other cultures, like India and gamelan music from Indonesia,” Gammon points out. “And then harmonically they gather more from people in classical music that are kind of stretching harmonic boundaries. So in both of those aspects, they’ve worked on their own understanding of those rhythmic and harmonic qualities, so they can apply that knowledge to other styles of music.”

      ElkHorn is one of the rising local bands that will perform at the jazz festival.

      This might be why it’s so difficult to define what, for want of a better term, we might call next-gen jazz: the style is so expansive, and its performers so musically inquisitive, that its sound is by definition amorphous. But in Vancouver one defining quality does seem to be emerging: a sense of the surrounding environment that is, ultimately, the source of so much of our region’s art. Violinist Meredith Bates, who’ll make jazz-festival appearances with guitarist Tom Wherrett’s band ElkHorn and with an improv supergroup featuring English saxophone pioneer Evan Parker, cites a kind of coastal perspective, and a propensity for music that unfolds at a leisurely pace.

      “I think it has to do with the temperate climate, in a way,” she says by phone. “I know that sounds lame, but it kind of does. And also the kind of people that we have here are both really mellow and cool, but also kind of standoffish. We’ve got a little bit of a wall up, so maybe that explains the long build, the slow-to-introduce kind of thing. Everyone tiptoes around for a little while, until you get into these massive, totally thick textural climaxes.”

      Schmidt offers another possible explanation for this phenomenon, which he’s also noticed: “The weed here’s so strong!”

      As a new mother, Bates is unlikely to partake of that substance, or any other. But there’s no denying that the new music emerging from Vancouver, even in its more traditional forms, is rich, intoxicating, and often mind-blowingly beautiful.

      For a full TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival schedule, visit the Coastal Jazz website.

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