Montreal drummer Mark Nelson wanted to musically illustrate all the “weird things” that exist beyond the earth’s atmosphere, far beyond, that is, into other solar systems and even other galaxies. It’s this idea that underpins the conceptual content of Postcards From the Cosmos, a jazz collection of impressions from far away, presented last night at Dièse Onze as part of OFF Jazz 2023. Interstellar jazz, philosophically speaking, but very little solar in its harmonic architecture. We find ourselves in a serious, complex sound universe, supported by an often insistent rhythmic drive by Nelson himself, of course, and the discreet but elaborate Levi Dover on double bass. The piano, in truth, is where it’s at. The excellent Andrew Boudreau builds a sophisticated constellation that oscillates between Webernian atonal and reasonable chromaticism.
In this journey, we land somewhere on a planet where it “snows” sunscreen (Kepler 13Ab – yes, yes, it’s true), and admire the so-called Sombrero galaxy (one of the most beautiful captured by telescopes) while trying to perceive the tenuous, highly abstract echoes of the song “Mexican Hat Dance” in the instrumental framework, and we hear a “weird blues” defining the asteroid Oumouamoua (which some have mistaken for an alien spaceship) and a vaguely Schoenbergian funk doubled by pianistic chords reminiscent of Messiaen tells us of a planet with two suns, like Tatooine in Star Wars. There’s even Pluto, nostalgically hailed as a former planet (it’s now a “dwarf planet”). Nelson obviously knows his stuff.
However, we would have liked a little more “sense of wonder” in this high-level music, to sometimes avoid the impression of cerebrality. The title track, “Postcards From the Cosmos,” arriving towards the very end, gave us a touch of that. It was a little late. Stars, galaxies, colourful nebulae, and eccentric exoplanets, were all imbued with a kind of visual and spiritual magic that we’d have hoped would be more faithfully replicated in the musical constructs. Nevertheless, the end result is ferociously intelligent, skilfully woven into several layers of harmonic and rhythmic discourse, and produced with musicians in great technical shape (once again, Boudreau, impressive. Fellow pianist Félix Stüssi was present and said the same thing). We may not have been amazed, but we were certainly impressed and jazzistically satisfied.
