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New Additions to my Christoph Erb MusicBox
The celebrated Orson Wells, US radio and film actor, director and celebrated loud-mouth with a wonderful baritone voice once, facetiously [and infamously] suggested that the only thing that the Swiss were famous for was the alarm clock. The fact that he called the damn thing “the alarm clock” and not a wrist watch might suggest that Mr Wells was both out of touch with [pardon the pun] his time as well as the fact that his history was flawed. [For instance: he did not seem to know that the all-powerful Celts, in all probability, first set up camp on Lake Geneva – which, Mr Wells – is in Switzerland]. Also – and this is not really Mr Wells’ fault – he was born too early to listen [in wide-eyed wonder] to be regaled by the artistry of the Swiss.
Many names of consummate artists come to mind: painter-poet Paul Klee [1879-1940], the label founder and producer of numerous seminal recordings on his pathbreaking imprint hatHUT, Werner X. Uehlinger [1935-], musicians Edwin Fischer [1886-1960] Paul Baumgartner [1903-1976], George Gruntz [1932-2013], saxophonist María Grand [1992-] … and, of course, the ineffably irreverent reeds and woodwinds meister Christoph Erb [1973-].
Whether the indomitable Mr Wells was being completely serios about the Swiss or not [somehow, I do suspect he – in a backhanded sort of way – that he was], my admiration for those more generous than Mr Wells.’ Certainly, the reason for my respect [for] Swiss musicians – especially Mr Erb – has much more to do with their make new music out of “mouthfuls of air” [the reference to modernity in poetic form is all due to Mr Ezra Pound I just stole it from him], to being bold rather than being “polite”, and uncommonly forthright of expression rather than “discreet.” [The latter two words appear to have been inspired by someone adapting an outdated edition of Debrett’s. Again, I just stole them.]
Jump-cut to the recent music of Christoph Erb. Hard on the heels of a prolific series of recordings came the cassette release Dinner Music. This marvellous release was sculpted by Mr Erb playing tenor and soprano saxophones, with pianist Magda Mayas and drummer and percussion colourist extraordinaire extracting music from a battery of unnamed objects, Gerry Hemingway. Of course he doesn’t stop there. However, this is where we must begin to view Mr Erb as one of the most restless and creatively questing musicians – quite like that Brasilian tenor saxophonist Ivo Perelman – is driven, and therefore prolific.
Christoph Erb’s horns are unique instruments of music. When he plays them – saxophonees or clarinets – they become gilded particle accelerators. Mr Erb is known to gulp down lungs full of air. Then, as he gently – or, often forcefully – expels the air through the moistened reeds he creates his unique, extreme kinetic energy, impelling with atomic force, the agitating musical notes, splitting them by intervallic values as if into protons and neutrons that come together and disperse in elliptical arcs. Thus he makes music that is at once powerful and imaginative.
The long crepuscular inventions of Dinner Music were beautifully and audaciously performed – and captured – with exquisite precision. The howl of the wind melds with tape hiss. Air from the gleaming tenor and soprano horns heats up the atmosphere – sometimes in legato – or punctuates the jagged musical lines with barbed utterings. Everywhere through three charts – [whimsically informed A Feast of a Decision, An Agreement of Palettes, and A Reason for Grappa] – the air is redolent of the spectral sounds of piano and percussion. Clearly though this is much more than a performance in [a] dimly lit club, amid the chatter of aficionados and quizzical listeners, it is a journey into the marvellously inebriated and creative world view of three musicians well-informed, yet restless musicians.
This was followed by a more enigmatic recording, a trio performance recorded and named after the performance space Spazio Elle [Veto Records, 2022]. On this performance, captured on vinyl Mr Erb – playing tenor and soprano saxophones – is joined by contrabassist Christian Weber and drummer Emanuel Künzi. The music comes from a forty-minute and fifty-second set. This is extremely catchy music; the architecture comprises main [and sub-] themes with musical gestures [from complementing instruments] providing ornamental gestures.
As always Mr Erb gives a fine account of virtuoso playing, which is exquisitely matched by the contrabassist and drummer. Among the highlights is a delightfully spirited pizzicato-infused variation [on the B side of the album], all instruments playing pianissimo, as is the move to odd-tempi that follows. The finale of the set is climactic in its own right. It’s a really classy live package that comes superbly mastered and pressed and is – as are all of Mr Erb’s outward-bound music – highly recommended.
Six recordings later, the reeds and winds specialist proffered two remarkable recordings – both released on vinyl – for my Christoph Erb Musicbox. The second of these under review here is Wabi Sabi [Veto Records, 2023]. This is a deep-dive into a Zen-like koan. Once again the creativity is unquestionably radical. This duo recording comprises Mr Erb playing bass clarinet and soprano saxophone, in a musical collision with Frantz Loriot who alternates between high and lonesome howls and audacious double stops, and ambient noise musical howls and sheets of sound woven into the canvas. Wabi Sabi is based on an interpretation of the koan as explained by the Zen Master Alan Watts, whose description of the mystical journey provides a palimpsest for Mr Erb’s and Mr Loriot’s musical collisions.
The vibrating sound is a fascinating journey – through nine stages of the koan – [on two sides of the vinyl] – from the sound of quietude and solitariness [Sabi] and the plunging of the two musicians’ spirits into the bottomless unknown, the emptiness of which is echoed in the sound of the duo capturing the experience of mystery, the likeness of which describes the opposite realm of the koan, which is wabi. This is one of Mr Erb’s most contemplative works. It is both haunting, and existentially exhilarating. It also takes that existential angst to a pitch at which even composers such as Shostakovich would have given up, and then, miraculously, resolves itself in the stunningly simple apoetheosis: Wabi Sabi.
It’s hard to keep holding onto one’s breath, awaiting what might come next from the reeds of Christoph Erb… and Co.
![Gerry Hemingway: Drums that Sing [A Different Kind of Drummer - Part 2]](https://i0.wp.com/thatcanadianmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Gerry-Hemmingway.jpg?resize=400%2C240&ssl=1)
![Gerry Hemingway: Drums that Sing [A Different Kind of Drummer - Part 2]](https://i0.wp.com/thatcanadianmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Gerry-Hemmingway.jpg?resize=80%2C80&ssl=1)
How one composer spent four decades forging a distinctly Québécois path through the experimental music landscape
When Joane Hétu picks up her alto saxophone, she claims territory. At sixty-six, the Montréal composer, vocalist, and saxophonist has spent forty years carving out space for experimental music in Québec, building institutions and communities that define the province’s musique actuelle scene.
Her latest recording, Elle a son mot à dire, captures Hétu leading Ensemble SuperMusique through thirteen of her compositions from across two decades. The album opens with “Elle n’a pas de mot” (She has no words)—a brief ambient piece that stacks wordless singing atop a chorus of “whirly tubes,” ribbed hoses spun above players that pirouette through the harmonic series. An apt introduction to an artist who has spent her career finding new ways to give voice to the unspoken.
Finding Her Voice in the Underground
Hétu’s path began in the early 1980s with avant-pop groups like Wondeur Brass, Justine, and Les Poules. These bands merged the pluralist ethos of New York’s downtown scene with European progressive sensibilities while maintaining something distinctly Québécois. “I was very young, in my twenties, and this fusion happened quite instinctively, without real premeditation,” she recalls. Through connections to figures like Zeena Parkins, Ikue Mori, and Fred Frith, and the Recommended Records network, these groups found their place in an international experimental music community.
Even while performing with these bands, Hétu was thinking beyond individual artistic expression. In 1980, she co-founded SuperMusique with Danielle Palardy Roger and Diane Labrosse. Eight years later, they organized a Festival of Innovative Women Musicians, devoted entirely to women’s groups working in avant-garde music—a radical curatorial gesture that signaled Hétu’s growing interest in building infrastructure alongside making music.
“We were connected to the New York scene,” Hétu explains, “but we wanted to create something here, something that would support the community we were building in Montréal.”
From Performance to Institution
The instinct to support that community would shape Hétu’s career as much as her compositions. By 1998, she had taken on co-direction of Ensemble SuperMusique, transforming the organization into one that explicitly welcomes “emerging artists, mid-career artists, and major figures alike.” Where many experimental music scenes fragment along generational lines, Hétu has consistently worked to bridge those gaps.
“This intergenerational cohabitation is a great richness for us,” she explains. “It opens perspectives, stimulates listening, and provokes essential exchanges.”
On Elle a son mot à dire, this collaborative philosophy becomes musical practice. In “Mot elle a,” vocalist Sarah Albu’s written part interweaves with improvised percussion, creating what Hétu calls “flexible, malleable” pieces that depend on interpretation. “For now, I only have one recording, but I hope it will live through other recordings and interpretations,” she says. “This is one of the objectives of open scores: to encourage multiple and living interpretations.”
[click on image to enlarge]
The Economics of Experiment
Running an experimental music organization led Hétu deeper into the infrastructure questions that determine which music gets heard and preserved. As founder and longtime president of DAME Records (Distribution Ambiances Magnétiques Etcetera), she took on the less glamorous work of documenting and distributing Canadian experimental music—a role she maintained for three decades.
“I’ve always had a passion for sound recording,” she reflects. “From 1985, I got involved in Ambiances Magnétiques, then DAME took over.” The work came with unexpected costs. “After my daughter’s birth in 1990, I was looking for a certain stability, knowing that tours would be more difficult. Naively, I believed that having a record label would offer a form of security. It was quite the opposite. This enterprise cost me a lot in creative time. Looking back, it’s perhaps what I regret most: having carried it for so long, for thirty-three years.”
Despite the personal sacrifice, DAME has documented a vital chapter in Canadian music history, providing a platform for artists like Jean Derome, Pierre-Yves Martel, Tim Brady, and dozens of others who might otherwise have remained unrecorded. “DAME documents this precious musical heritage and ensures that these musics are represented, supported, available, and that this artistic history is accessible,” Hétu explains.
Claiming Creative Territory
The questions of space and belonging that drove Hétu’s institutional work find their most direct artistic expression in her concept of territory. The idea runs through much of her work, most explicitly in her piece La femme territoire ou 21 fragments d’humus. For Hétu, territory encompasses everything from the intimate to the political: “the Earth, my room, Quebec, my soul—a woman who becomes vastitude.”
“In it, I take a position, as a woman, on my territory—intimate and collective,” she explains. “I doubted while writing it; I had trouble trusting myself. Today, I’m happy with the path traveled and with this work.”
The territorial thinking extends to her approach to voice and instrumentation. Hétu never formally learned to sing, drawing from influences like Tenko, Phil Minton, Jaap Blonk, and Paul Dutton. “I have a deep love for the voice and its noise-making potential. It’s visceral and fundamental to me,” she says. In her work with La chorale bruitiste JOKER, founded in 2012, she explores what collective vocal improvisation can accomplish using techniques like soundpainting.
[click on image to enlarge]
Seasons of Composition
Hétu’s relationship to place extends to her famous engagement with Québec’s harsh winters. Where others see obstacles to cultural life, she found creative catalysts. Her trilogy Musique d’hiver emerged from the practical reality that “January, February and March are rather quiet in the record industry, which leaves time to compose.” But the relationship between season and creativity runs deeper than scheduling.
“I love winter, I love the sound, the cocoon effect it produces,” she explains. The final piece in the trilogy, Récits de neige, focused specifically on snow’s geometry: “I hoped to compose 30 short pieces that musicians could amalgamate as they want, like snowflakes, which each have a different geometry.”
Building for the Future
Today, as Hétu approaches her fifth decade in music, she remains committed to the experimental principles that have guided her career while grappling with new challenges facing the experimental music community. “I believe the public has the capacity to welcome innovation,” she argues. “But it needs tools, which are becoming scarce: radio broadcasting, interviews, production support, and venues dedicated to new music.”
Her work with Ensemble SuperMusique continues to demonstrate that experimental music can build lasting institutions and communities. Recent projects include ongoing workshops in graphic scores and conducting gestures, international collaborations, and regular concert series that have sustained the musique actuelle community for decades.
“I respond to the call, to the impulse of the moment. I am still, fundamentally, the same composer,” Hétu admits. Viewed across four decades, her work reveals a consistent thread: the understanding that experimental music concerns itself with creating the conditions for a community of artists to flourish.
In an era when funding for experimental music remains precarious and cultural institutions focus on measurable outcomes, Hétu’s approach offers a different model. Her career demonstrates that sometimes the most radical act is creating space for other voices to emerge, building the infrastructure for artistic communities to sustain themselves across generations. After four decades, Joane Hétu still has something to say. She’s still creating spaces for others to find their own voices within the experimental music territory she has helped map. In Québec’s cultural landscape, that may be her most enduring composition.
“One of the most unforgettable moments of the Festival was the electrifying performance by Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue”
The Festival International de Jazz de Montréal took place from June 26 to July 5, 2025, in the Quartier des Spectacles. The 45th edition of the world’s largest jazz festival was a resounding success, attracting jazz enthusiasts from around the globe.
The Heart of the Festival
Located in the heart of downtown Montreal, the Festival site becomes a meeting place for jazz lovers worldwide for ten days. The area is closed to all vehicular traffic and remains open until midnight, allowing visitors to enjoy close to 150 indoor concerts and more than 350 free, open-air shows presented on the specially redesigned Quartier des Spectacles.
A Personal Journey
As a jazz fan and festival enthusiast, I had always intended to attend the Montreal Jazz Festival. Despite missing several chances, I finally managed to go this year, although for a shorter time than I would have preferred, from June 30th to July 3rd.
Arrival and First Impressions
I enjoyed a pleasant 5-hour Via Rail train trip from Toronto to Montreal, arriving around 2 PM. After settling into my Airbnb, I found the jazz festival site and met up with Danilo Navas, the editor-in-chief of That Canadian Magazine. We eagerly waited for the first act to perform on the TD Stage, a free concert by UK tenor saxophonist Nubya Garcia.
Garcia and her band delivered an energetic and incredibly enjoyable set that featured music from both of her recordings. This is an artist I will be watching more closely.
One of the most unforgettable moments of the festival was the electrifying performance by Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue. This mind-bending concert had everything thrown into the mix, creating an explosive fusion of world jazz, funk, and New Orleans soul.
The unbridled excitement and energy from the stage were infectious, drawing the audience in and making them an essential part of the show. The crowd danced, cheered, and grooved to the irresistible beats, unable to resist the magnetic pull of Trombone Shorty’s music.
After this exhilarating experience, the only thing left to do was find a chill spot to unwind and bask in the afterglow of this burst of New Orleans magic.
Canada Day Celebrations
On July 1st, Canada Day, I took a walk to Old Montreal to check out the celebrations. The area, reminiscent of Europe, was closed off to most traffic, allowing visitors to enjoy the numerous restaurants with patios and sidewalk cafes. I indulged in a coffee and biscotti at one inviting cafe before making my way back to the jazz festival area, with a brief stop in Chinatown for some delicious dumplings and soup.
Memorable Performances
This Canada Day was my most active in terms of concerts, with three free shows happening almost consecutively at outdoor venues.
The Sugar Darlings: Miche Love, a key figure in the Montreal blues scene, captivated the audience with her powerful and soulful voice, supported by the electrifying solos of Paul Lucyk on guitar and Kaven Jalbert on saxophone.
Julien Fillion Band: This lively quartet, led by the talented Julien Fillion on saxophone, guitar, and keyboards, delivered an energetic performance to a rain-soaked crowd. The show must go on despite the unpredictable weather challenges.
Endea Owens & the Cookout: Detroit-raised recording artist, bassist, and composer Endea Owens captivated the audience with her soulful singing and jazz and soul-infused playing.
My Last Full Day at the Festival
My last full day at the festival was spent exploring the grounds and soaking in the vibrant atmosphere of the Montreal Jazz Festival, discovering the many facets of this grand celebration.
Christine Jensen Quartet at Le Studio TD
One of the last jazz concerts I attended was at an indoor venue that offered a free performance by the Christine Jensen Quartet, which featured alto saxophonist Christine Jensen. This outstanding group of world-class musicians includes Jim Doxas on drums, Gary Versace on keys, and Adrian Vedady on contrabass. The quartet played tunes from Jensen’s latest recording, “Day Moon,” released in 2023, as well as selections from her other quartet albums.
A Memorable Experience
In summary, the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal is an excellent event held at a captivating venue, offering a wonderful experience with many free concerts and more. I look forward to returning and delving even further into the modern music of our era.
Editor’s Note: We will publish our photo gallery from the 45th Festival International de Jazz de Montréal in a separate post in the next few days.
Luminato at Harbourfront – June 15, 2025
Somd’agua: A Dance Migration Performance
A mesmerizing collaboration featuring Esie Mensah, Alex Oliver, Reimundo Sosa Reinoldes, and Adrianna Yanuziello, Somd’agua provided a profound exploration of Afro-Brazilian culture. The performance artfully depicted the sacred connection between the deities Oxum and Yemanjá through movement and rhythm.
The fusion of powerful singing, chanting, and dynamic Afro-Cuban and Afro-Brazilian percussion created an immersive backdrop for the dancers’ graceful movements.
As the river meets the sea, the performers wove their magic, creating a flowing exchange of energies that stirred deep emotions and evoked memories of distant lands.
The natural setting of Harbourfront Centre enhanced the experience, with the breeze from Lake Ontario and passing tall ships complementing the performance’s aquatic themes. The audience’s enthusiastic participation peaked during the climactic duet, where the dancers achieved perfect harmony.
Santé! By Cirque Kikasse
Quebec’s innovative circus troupe transformed a food truck into an extraordinary performance space.
Their show seamlessly blended fast-food preparation with spectacular acrobatics, showcasing remarkable athleticism and gravity-defying feats both on and above their unique mobile stage.
Musical Performances and Workshops
Afro-Indigenous roots of Colombia Cumbia workshop with Beny Esguerra
Beny Esguerra, the Juno-nominated multi-instrumentalist, delivered an engaging exploration of Afro-Colombian rhythms. Accompanied by his daughter, who acted as her father’s assistant. She helped distribute percussion instruments.
Esguerra created an interactive experience where the distributed percussion instruments became integral to the musical performance. It featured a fun and engaging demonstration that showcased the communicative power of drumming.
Kombilesa Mi
This vibrant Afro-Colombian ensemble brought the distinctive sounds of San Basilio de Palenque to life. Their dynamic performance merged traditional rhythms (Mapalé, Bullerengue, Son Palenquero) with contemporary hip-hop elements, performing in both Spanish and their native language, Palenque.
Formed in 2011, the group serves as a cultural bridge, connecting young people with their heritage while embracing modern musical expressions. The show was well-attended, and these fantastic entertainers had the crowd singing along, clapping in time, and seemingly having a joyful experience.
The festival experience concluded perfectly with an evening stroll along the Harbourfront paths. The day’s artistic celebrations settled into memory as night descended over Lake Ontario.
Photo Gallery: Adrianna Yunuziello Dance Migration performing Somd’agua
Photos by Paul J. Youngman [click on images to enlarge]
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