Search - Chris Gestrin :: Stillpoint (Hybr)

Amazing sounds, solid concept from emerging Canadian keysman

Jan P. Dennis | Monument, CO USA | 02/26/2003

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Chris Gestrin has made quite a debut with Stillpoint. On the Canadian jazz scene for about a decade, the (mainly) acoustic pianist makes a strong impression with his first release. Part of the credit must go to Songlines, that innovative, avant garde Canadian label, pioneer of Sony's Direct Stream Digital recording methodology, which transforms the traditional CD format by employing an extended dynamic range and clarity of presentation unavailable to the ordinary CD.Since Gestrin enhances his sonic palatte with discrete electronics and extended pianiastic techniques, he is a perfect candidate for such high-tech recording procedures as DSD. Indeed, the clarity of sound and imaging is nothing short of spectacular. And he's assembled some of the finest players from our northern neighbors: Dylan Van Der Schyff on drums and percussion and Brad Turner on trumpet and flugelhorn. The other players, Jon Bentley on saxes and Andre LaChance on bass, I am not familiar with, but each fits perfectly into these proceedings.The music is a little hard to describe, there being no clear antecedents (at least to these ears). Part ambient, part new music, mostly jazz, there's something genuinely new going on here. Take the cut "Words Along a Wire," for example. It starts simply enough with what at first seems like random electronic noise, augmented by trumpet meanderings, tasty percussion stylings, and piano fragments. Things begin to clarify around some ambient trumpet/sax dual long tones combined with what sound like sampled electronic loops. Out of this somewhat unlikely matrix emereges an electronic motif that sounds uncannily like "words along a wire," as if one has tapped into a renagade telephone transmitter that is sending encoded electronic messages in an alien tongue.Probably not for everybody (it sounds like noise to my not musically unsophisticated wife), this daring, diverse jazz/electronic soundscape will reward carefully listening to those whose ears are sufficently opened to new sounds."