Matt Robert McLennan Quintet - J’Peux

 Released: February 6 

This little project out of Ottawa has a rather interesting approach to improvised jazz in terms of its instrument choices. Where you might normally hear a live drum set crashing and bopping along, there’s instead subdued bits of percussion from drum machines and a bit of static-y noises helping to fill out the soundscape. And while all this is going on, you’ll have the guitar come in and masterfully whip out some quick improvisational flinging up and down the scales  just for good measure, pun intended. This is where the album really caught my ear as it is able to blend these two world exceptionally well and making for something that comes across as quite novel for me. 

This album has a lot of percussion, and none of that percussion is really all that conventional either. IN many cases, it just comes off as a wild assortment of pseudo-distorted novices that form a very abstract soundscape that the guitar and bass subsequently comes and plays around in. On the second track, “dane lean, double organ,” the percussion makes something that feels quite industrial and noisy with scratching sounds and chugging feel. The guitar comes in and confuses things further as it rips up and down the scales and an overdriven bass guitar screams on. 

But the result, even if noisy, isn’t always aggressive. I found “mixed media marsoui” to be a textural joy in this regard as it keeps a quiet mood but is dense enough with activity that it avoids turning into an ambient track. The hyper-amplified tiny sounds ad to this quite well too, sometimes feeling adjacent to lowercase music. It’s a much more intimate track that feels like it was created in a small but airy space and it speaks to the range of the album itself.