This CD of original music is complex, to be sure. And ambitious. But much to his credit, drummer Mike Essoudry has transcended technical hurdles to make highly listenable music.
Remembering is a roaming piece of melancholia that opens with Adam Daudrich's Fender Rhodes electric
piano swirling in and over Essoudry's drums. A middle section features three clarinets (Petr Cancura, Philippe Lauzier and Adam Kinner) and tails off in a stately dirge.
The Bridge features slowly unfurling layers of brass inspired by Björk's French horn arranging on Volta.
Passage is melodic, rich, sometimes light-hearted, often sombre, and always intriguing.
The Mike Essoudry Octet launches Passage tonight at the NAC Fourth Stage.
Doug Fischer
With his original music for octet, drummer Mike Essoudry mounts one of Ottawa's most ambitious jazz projects
By Doug Fischer, The Ottawa CitizenJanuary 8, 2009
Jazz drummer Mike Essoudry's new CD, Passage, is complex and ambitious but he has transcended technical hurdles with music that is highly listenable.
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When Ottawa jazz drummer Mike Essoudry gets talking about his music, the discussion tends to get technical.
"On that tune, I ended up with a linear horn sound which, I think, is better for me than vertical chord playing," he'll say.
Or, "I was messing around with a rhythm in 11/8 and it cycled through a certain set of notes and I thought, 'Why not stretch it into a long 22/4?'"
It's not surprising Essoudry describes his music that way. Passage, the new album he recorded with a superb octet made up mostly of old friends, can be challenging -- full of dense textures, crazy time changes and subtle interplay.
The drummer, 39, couldn't get the sounds or moods he wanted without a serious measure of "messing around" -- a phrase that pops up frequently when he talks about his compositions.
"There's no end to the ridiculous amounts of math you can do when you're writing tunes," Essoudry says. "Sometimes I have trouble knowing when to stop."
With Passage, it seems he picked his spots just right.
The album is complex, to be sure. And ambitious. But Essoudry has transcended technical hurdles with music that is highly listenable. "What I really wanted was to find sounds that people can grab onto and take a bit of a ride," he says.
Ottawa jazz fans can jump on board Saturday when Essoudry's octet performs music from Passage live for the first time at a CD launch at the NAC's Fourth Stage. The concert is sponsored by the Ottawa jazz festival.
Essoudry developed a fascination with the idea of composing for eight instruments while studying for his master's degree in jazz performance at McGill University in 2001. One of his assignments was to arrange a composition for a big band, traditionally made up of 15 or 16 instruments.
"It just wasn't happening for me," he recalls. "I'm a drummer and I had trouble voicing chords in the various sections for a group of that size."
But when he cut the band's size in half, he discovered he could tie the arrangements more to melody, and less to the colourings of chords. That freed him to write flowing lines of music, often more than one at a time, like complementary melodies.
"An octet can function as so many things," Essoudry says. "It's small enough to give you the flexibility needed to be a solo vehicle and it's big enough to act as an orchestral vehicle."
Many of the pieces Essoudry wrote for Passage -- he's worked on the music for about two years -- avoid the traditional structure of jazz compositions, which generally start and end in pretty much the same place, with soloing in the middle.
"I like to take my music to places you wouldn't expect based on where they start," he says. "That's where the idea of passage comes from."
Several pieces shows the spacious, unfolding orchestral influences of Maria Schneider and John Hollenbeck, composers and bandleaders Essoudry lists among his favourites.
Like them, Essoudry says he wrote with specific sounds and musicians in mind. "I could hear Philippe (Lauzier) or Petr (Cancura) or Pierre-Yves (Martel) playing in my head when I was messing around and putting this stuff together. And then when you actually hear them play it, it's amazing."
His choice of Adam Daudrich and his Fender Rhodes rather than a pianist was also deliberate.
"What I like about the Rhodes, especially the way Adam plays it, is how much ground it covers," he says. "It can fill in for a guitar, it's a very good melody instrument, it can be used to double up a horn line and it has a volume pedal that allows you to swell chords in and out. It's a fantastic sound."
Essoudry concedes the band found some of his compositions so complex, they were broken into pieces for the recording, and put together later in the studio.
But he doesn't expect that to be a problem when the octet performs the music live Saturday. For starters, he's scheduled a thorough rehearsal for tomorrow. But all the musicians now have a copy of the CD as well.
"There's no need to try to picture what I had in mind any more," he says. "It's all there for them. I know they'll play great."
© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen
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I was chiding my colleague Doug Fischer yesterday, as he missed a really good show on Saturday night by Mike Essoudry's Octet -- and that was after he wrote extensively about the Ottawa drummer and his group's debut CD, Passage,and even awarded four stars to the disc.
Simply for effort alone, Mike gets an A. He's poured tremendous time and effort into his composing. Having completed a batch of originals for a quintet, I'm especially impressed by what he's assembled for Octet. A while ago, Steve Boudreau and I were talking about a bandleader having so many sounds, combinations and variables to take advantage of with a sextet -- well, an Octet offered Mike so much more to work with, and he seized so many opportunities to make music that was both distinctive and ear-catching, continually commanding our attention with incremental changes, layering, interesting blends and breakouts. Mike's music is fully loaded -- each of his eight pieces was practically a mini-suite -- and I'd venture that most of the rest of jazz composers in Ottawa basically write less specific music for smaller groups -- basically, we're less ambitious.
Put another way, we're more practical.
The larger the ensemble, the harder it is for a bandleader to find work for it. Don't forget that most of Ottawa's jazz gigs are for duos and trios (although Michel Martin's Jazz Co-operative project last fall was brainstorming for a remedy to the cash-strapped status quo.) You have to give the Ottawa International Jazz Festival credit for getting behind Mike's music. The complaint's been made in the past the the OIJF can short-shrift local players deserving top-line attention, and if that's has been the case, then Mike's gig, and Petr Cancura's show last year, are certainly correctives.
Mike also raises the bar for himself and his band because he's called in firepower from Montreal to Brooklyn to execute his music. That's as it should be, because Mike's rhythmically complex and at times snakey melodies upon melodies demand because like-minded, high-calibre players that in same cases simply aren't in Ottawa. So, Mike's commitment to his music meant that for two days, he had four houseguests -- people who came for Friday's rehearsal and stayed for Saturday's concert.
I've been a bit hung up in a previous post or two on what you might pompously call the compositional imperative -- simply put, that we need to be writing more music rather than covering, covering, covering. Mike's efforts simply reinforce that notion for me. Frankly, after my composing travails last year, I was feeling a bit spent; I believe John Geggie is in a similar boat. Hearing Mike's accomplishments makes me want to get back to the keyboard, with my manuscript paper and sharpened pencils near by.
I have one quibble with Mike's concert: I wanted to hear more flat-soloing. The proportion of through-composed material to improvised solos seemed to me to be about 2:1. Everyone in the band got some time in the spotlight, with saxophonists Petr Cancura, Adam Kinner and Phillipe Lauzier most prominent. Trombonist Mark Ferguson, keyboardist Adam Daudrich bassist Zack Lober and especially trumpeter Andy King shone when they were featured, and we wouldn't have been tired of them had we heard more of them. Clearly Mike is bent on focusing on the attractive ensemble work, but if I were in the driver's seat, I'd air out the music a bit more with longer or additional solos.
Also, if there had been more soloing, then it would have stretched the material so that Mike would have had a tune left to play as an encore after his standing ovation. i'll end my negativity here, and just say that a musician could certainly have worse dilemmas.