No other Montreal media has as many human resources on hand for expert coverage of the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal. A number of us are scouring the outdoor site and concert halls : Jacob Langlois-Pelletier, Frédéric Cardin, Stephan Boissonneault, Michel Labrecque, Varun Swarup, Vitta Morales and Alain Brunet offer their album reviews, concert reports and interviews. Happy reading and listening!
The Place des Festivals was bursting at the seams on St. Catherine Street for a band that had made little or no impact in Montreal until the opening night of FIJM 2024. For the connoisseurs in the small minority on site, Hiatus Kaiyote is a flagship band in terms of soul/R&B, hip-hop, jazz, space rock and punk attitude. For the majority on site? Not likely, but… it’s to the Australian band’s credit that they’ve made it to the front door of Montreal’s biggest festival, taking over the TD Stage for the biggest free concert of their opening night .
Exemplary, the crowd listened respectfully to this most impressive performance, which was unfortunately punctuated by two inopportune stops when some festival-goers fainted at the foot of the stage, while the singer called for the intervention of the security service… At least 10 of the 90 minutes scheduled for the performance were lost, and the rhythm of the show was affected, with two songs on the program being cut.
It wasn’t a perfect evening, but it was an opportunity to discover one of the most powerful bands on the groove planet, in the same way as Outkast. Childish Gambino (with band), Janelle Monae, Kendrick Lamar (with band) and Anderson Paak have all made their mark on Montreal fans in recent years. Singer/guitarist Nai Palm is a supernatural creature: her vocals, timbre and power are simply incomparable, and the soloist pilots a finely tuned machine that alternates between silky melody and intrumental complexity, aided and abetted by two backing singers whose male representative is also a fine saxophonist (soprano).
Hiatus Kaiyote was performing on the eve of the release of a new studio album, Love Heart Cheat Code, of which 4 tracks were performed on June 27: the opus’ title track, the very airy Dream Boat as intro, the equally spacey neo soul ‘Telescope’ on 9 and the very jazzy-soul-funk ‘Make Friends’ as early conclusion.
From the album ‘Mood Valiant’ (2021), we were treated to the lion’s share of the concert: the mid-tempo song ‘And ‘We Go Gentle’, the rhythmically charged ‘All The Words We Dont Say’, the up tempo ‘Chivalry Is Not Dead’, shot through with mind-blowing instrumental bridges as is the case with several pieces in the repertoire such as ‘Get Sun’, then the very jazzy ‘Rose Water’ and the jazzy ballad ‘Sip Into Something Soft’ or the slow, sure, dirty groove of ‘Red Room ‘(interrupted by an initial mishandled incident).
From the album Tawk Tomahawk, the band covered the downtempo ballad ‘Nakamarra,. From the excellent opus ‘Choose Your Weapon’ (2015), Hiatus Kaiyote chose to chain ‘Molasses’, ‘By Fire’ and ‘Building A Ladder’, preceded by a pretty piano solo by Simon Marvin before hastily concluding.
All in all, a very fine performance from a strictly musical point of view, but one whose staging should have been refined in the context of a mass event.
crédit photo: @rousseaufoto pour le FIJM
