Gentiane MG – Walls Made of Glass (2022) [FLAC 24bit/88,2kHz]

Gentiane MG - Walls Made of Glass (2022) [FLAC 24bit/88,2kHz] Download

Gentiane MG has established herself as an important voice as a Canadian jazz pianist and composer. She made a powerful impression on Montreal’s jazz scene with her two albums for piano trio, Eternal Cycle (2017) and Wonderland (2019). MG is releasing her third album with this ensemble, Walls Made of Glass, on September 23, 2022.MG has received several awards for her works, including theOPUS Award for Discovery of the Year (2020), the CBC/Radio-Canada Jazz Award (2018) and the François-Marcaurelle de la GMMQ Award (2017). Eternal Cycle was highlighted by CBC Music as one of 10 outstanding Canadian jazz albums of 2017. She has toured around the world performing at festivals and venues including the Montreal International Jazz Festival, Ottawa’sNational Arts Centre, Germany’s Jazz ahead Festival, China’s Mercedes BenzHall, Africa’sMASA Festival, and Mexico’s Festival Internacional Jazz UV. She’s played alongside musicians such as Christine Jensen, Andre White, Chet Doxas, Yannick Rieu, Jim Doxas, Jeremy Pelt, Jean-Michel Pilc and Ira Coleman, and released a duo album entitled Convergence with saxophonist Frank Lozano.

MG’s music reflects her development as a classical pianist and improviser, incorporating the aesthetics of impressionism with the rhythmic sensibility of contemporary jazz. These influences come together in a deeply personal universe shaped with contrasting colours and memorable melodies that bring imagination and mystery to a compelling acoustic landscape. MG is joined by bassist Levi Dover and drummer Louis-Vincent Hamel who contribute their original voices to her music. Over several years of performing and touring together, the band has developed its own language, transcending genre ands triving for creative freedom.

“Walls Made of Glass” was released on September 23, 2022.

Montreal-based pianist Gentiane Michaud-Gagnon, aka Gentiane MG, got her start in music with the classical side. It was Bill Evans’ Portrait In Jazz (Riverside Records, 1960) that nudged her in the direction of the possibilities that improvisation offered. With this in mind, it seems fitting that the cover art for her third album release—Walls Of Glass—features a photo of a serious-looking artist gazing… where? Inward? Outward? Maybe both at the same time, as it was with Bill Evans on the cover shot of his influential Portrait album.

That influence can be felt on Walls Made of Glass, with a delicacy and precision of touch, a feel for melodies within melodies, subtle shifts in dynamics and unapologetic beauty throughout. Gentiane MG composed all eleven tunes here, but they sound like Keith Jarrett in his later career short improvised pieces; not quite composed, not quite totally improvised, with, largely, a “pulled from thin air, in the moment” feeling, bolstered on Walls Of Glass by the sometimes understated, sometimes assertive wizardry of drummer Louis-Vincent Hamel and bassist Levi Dover.

Evans’ specialty—and to some extent Jarrett’s—was an embrace of the Great American Songbook. Gentiane MG chooses to go her own way.

“What’s so special about instrumental music,” says Gentiane MG, “is the attraction that comes from the absence of words.” The interpretations fall to the listener. With that in mind, call her sound (for one interpretation) “Walls made of softly luminescent, diaphanous curtains.” It seems not like glass we look through, but Gentiane MG’s pastel, or maybe watercolor interpretations of the beauty of existence. All kinds of beauty—melancholy, lightness, darkness, the unseemly, the holy, the exalted, the tentative, the bold.

Tracklist:

1-01. Gentiane MG – Prologue (01:11)
1-02. Gentiane MG – Flowers Laugh Without Uttering a Sound (05:07)
1-03. Gentiane MG – Walls Made of Glass (02:19)
1-04. Gentiane MG – The Moon, the Sun, the Truth (05:22)
1-05. Gentiane MG – Mésanges (06:45)
1-06. Gentiane MG – Un pied en dehors du nid (04:37)
1-07. Gentiane MG – Contemplating Joy (04:49)
1-08. Gentiane MG – Little Tree (06:52)
1-09. Gentiane MG – Burning Candle (04:45)
1-10. Gentiane MG – Epilogue (02:14)

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