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Watching bassist Carl Mayotte play Sunday night at the Imperial Bell Theater in Quebec City, you would probably have concluded that he was the happiest guy in the room.

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Not that the full house of the closing concert of the Quebec Jazz Festival in June is to be unsatisfied. The high-energy electric group from Mayotte has delivered melody after melody a fusion cuisine as refined as it is punchy.

It’s just that Mayotte, who dominated and directed the show from the center of the stage, was the visual example of a musician who hadn’t performed in front of a live audience since spring 2020 due to the news. coronavirus pandemic.

He was clearly thrilled to be playing, taking over for every musician who had been told he or she should smile more. It seemed like second nature for Mayotte to add the physical flourishes of a rocker to the presentation of its original music, which combined snap backbeats and sizzling guitar with the sophistication of jazz improvisation.

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At the time of the announcement, Mayotte unsurprisingly cried out in gratitude at the prospect of performing again. Listeners who listened to his music undoubtedly felt as grateful as they cried out in appreciation for the young hometown hero and his band.

It was only thanks to the achievements of Quebec in the fight against the spread of COVID-19 and the courage of the festival organizers that the event, which took place from June 17 to July 4, was able to present its edition. 2021, during a festival season where most Canadian jazz festivals have decided to take back a pass.

After debuting with an explosion in 2019 and pausing shows last year during the first COVID-19 summer. the Quebec City festival may well have been the first major Canadian jazz festival to host a series of live concerts in 2021, as the country struggles to put the worst of the pandemic behind it.

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Although 2020 has been fundamentally a Annus horribilis for musicians who have seen most of their concerts disappear into the abyss of COVID-19, Mayotte received a huge honor last year, when it was chosen as Radio Canada’s Jazz Revelation of 2020.

A graduate of the jazz programs at Laval University and McGill University, Mayotte enthusiastically waves the flag of a particularly Quebecois version of jazz-rock fusion, winking not only at the supergroups of the 1970s Return To Forever and Weather Report, but also and perhaps mainly, to the Quebec phenomenon of the 1980s Uzeb.

His show at the historic theater in the St-Roch district in Quebec City, which usually seats 450 people but was limited to 150 jazz fans seated at tables during the festival, was a non-stop spectacle of virtuoso and groove fusion. Mayotte and its core quintet performed material they had recorded on their Fantosme and Pop de Ville Vol. 1, but outside the confines of the studio, the music became more gritty and punchy, especially thanks to the double-drum barrage of his Mayotte counterpart Stéphane Chamberland and special guest Paul Brochu, the drummer who propelled Uzeb to fusion glory in the 1980s.

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Mayotte and its musicians are about half the age of Brochu. But they followed the province’s fusion-drum legend, excelling on the very detailed music of Mayotte, which they had clearly internalized.

Guitarist Gabriel Cyr was a particularly poised and sizzling soloist. Of course, he never eclipsed Mayotte, a continual center of attention as he anchored the music with bouncy Jaco-esque basslines, interspersed with finely crafted melody snippets often in unison with one another. musician, and solo with the joy and abandon of a musician having the time of his life.

The day before, it was singer-songwriter Lucie Roy who won the hearts of the Quebec crowd.

Roy was bringing her back to the stage after not only a COVID-induced hiatus but, indeed, years away from creating music. The occasion was all the more special as Roy and his band performed a set of original compositions from his 2020 album What We Share, a collaboration with Montreal author and jazz radio personality Stanley Péan, who contributed to the English lyrics Roy defined. to pop music.

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During a set that prioritized Roy’s expressive delivery and Péan’s confessional lyrics, open-hearted songs such as Don’t Say You Loved Me and I Don’t Scare Easy were highlights. The most moving were Song For My Daughter, which recognized the plight of women in rape culture, and Some Other Kind of Blue, a tribute to the late American jazz trumpet star Wallace Roney, who lost his life to of COVID-19 last year.

After Roy’s set there was a powerful concert by the CODE Quartet of Montreal, a collaboration of friends and peers who could also be rightly considered a star Canadian jazz group.

The group is made up of alto saxophonist Christine Jensen, trumpeter Lex French, bassist Adrian Vedady and drummer Jim Doxas – all players of exceptional imagination, energy and clarity.

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The premise of the quartet is simple: the absence of a piano or guitar, which jazz groups use most often to ensure harmony, is a plus rather than a minus. Jensen and French traced harmonic trails without any help, thank you very much, and could also move away from the chords written on the scores of their original compositions for zesty and catchy starts. Longtime rhythm partners Vedady and Doxas provided an organically evolving groove that made each piece a multi-chapter short story.

Songs such as French bluesy Tipsy, Vedady’s urgent and poignant Watching It All Slip Away and Jensen’s Wind Up made for a concert filled with varied moods and impressive moments. O Sacred Head, Now Wounded demonstrated that a 21st century jazz band could sing a captivating new song from a 16th century hymn.

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All of these pieces appear on the band’s first record, Genealogy, and were familiar to its most ardent followers. The concert ended with Jensen’s aggressively styled, yet unrecorded Blues 2020, which Doxas on mic said was a celebration song, not a depressing one. As a reminder, the group arched it with a fiery but measured run through Thelonious Monk’s Let’s Cool One.

On several occasions, while addressing the audience, Doxas effusively stated how grateful he and his bandmates were to perform for the people again. But most certainly, the gratitude went both ways and was deeply felt by a festival audience welcoming live jazz into their lives after 15 months of silence.

Peter Hum participated in the last week of the Festival Québec Jazz in June as a guest of the festival and of Bonjour Québec – Tourisme Québec.

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