One of the most exciting drummers of the new generation of Montreal jazz, Jakob Wutzke makes numerous appearances on the stages of the City (Upstairs, Dièse Onze, and quite often at the new Cabaret Jazz L’Entracte) with a wide array of collaborators. At the end of 2025, he had offered us an excellent quartet album, Pedalling Falsehoods, tinged with well-educated but also inspired Hard Bop.
Here, it is in the saxophone-drums duo format, a less common pairing, that he propels his creativity in pleasant symbiosis with that of his equally eloquent Vancouver-based accomplice Lucas Dubovik.
Free but structured improvisation
In a Montreal studio, the two artists arrived without prerequisites, with the simple intention of exploring the most unexpected regions of their automatist inspirations. One might think that a spontaneous improvisation session would lead to an Albert Ayler-esque free jazz, atonal and arrhythmic. But no. This Double Down by Messrs. Wutzke and Dubovic is surprisingly melodic and pulsating. The boys are well-educated classicists of Hard Bop who find their bearings in structures (architectural, harmonic, and rhythmic) that are understandable, albeit scholarly.
But it is only once these markers are established that they know how to veer into more astonishing areas thanks to surprising impulses, all with great ease and a lot of intuition. Their almost quantic entanglement coordination attests to a long-standing camaraderie, just as solid as it is respectful.
Two surprising covers
Of the seven tracks, five are on-the-spot-improvised compositions, and two are equally unique covers (Good Bait by Dameron/Basie, and Jingles by Wes Montgomery). Good Bait retains the stomp of the Count’s music, but stripped of its more ostentatious embellishments. Naturally, since a saxophone and a drum set have to play the role of a big band. It works surprisingly well.
For its part, Jingles de Montgomery adorns hitself here with colours and rhythms that merge bossa and Arabesque orientalism. A total and brilliant transformation.
An album of organic and intuitive musicality.
Lucas Dubovik // saxophone
Jacob Wutzke // drums
