No other media outlet in Montreal has so many people on hand to provide expert coverage of the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal. Many 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 bring you their album reviews and concert reports. Happy reading and listening!
Kenny Garrett’s first offering of 2024, Who Killed AI?, marks an exciting and unconventional venture for the now veteran saxophonist. Banding arms with producer Svoy, Garrett gives us his take on the timely theme of artificial intelligence’s role in creativity and society at large. But despite the weighty subject matter, he approaches it with some chutzpah. The opening of this album, ‘Ascendance’, epitomises the bold and playful spirit that runs its course here.
Certainly the combination of electronic elements and jazz instrumentation is not for everyone and while Garrett’s saxophone performance is as inspired as ever, we can’t let him entirely off the hook for some of the faux pas he commits here. The abstract jazz harmonies and sometimes downtempo, sometimes DnB inspired beats courtesy of Svoy do provide fertile ground for Garrett to soar over but nothing that results in something especially nourishing once the novelty has worn off.
Still, to take this album too critically would be to miss the point. With tracks like “Ladies” and just about the oddest version of “My Funny Valentine” you’ve heard, this record simply seems an outlet for Garrett to try something new and one has to respect that. In the end, Who Killed AI? is about more than just music; it seems to be about the unalienable right of humanity to find joy in creative expression, even in the face of advancing technology.
