Montreal pianist and composer Gentiane MG released her fourth album Can You Hear the Birds? on March 27 through Effendi Records, reuniting the trio format she introduced on her 2017 debut Eternal Cycle. The record arrives with a Montreal International Jazz Festival date locked in for June and a Quebec City performance at Palais Montcalm on May 21.
Gentiane Michaud Gagnon recorded the album with bassist Levi Dover and drummer Mark Nelson, the trio she has led since 2014. Dover has been part of the project from the start, while Nelson joined three years ago after the recording of Walls Made of Glass. The group works through collective improvisation and an ear-based process, letting compositions develop through listening rather than pre-set structure, an approach that has carried them through three previous records, OPUS Awards, a Radio-Canada Jazz Revelation prize, and JUNO and ADISQ nominations.
The album leans outward where her earlier work leaned in. Gentiane has described Can You Hear the Birds? as a record shaped by connection, to other people, to the natural world, to the creative process itself, drawing on experiences of friendship, grief, illness, forgiveness and joy. Her playing carries the classical training she brought to the Conservatoire de musique et d’art dramatique du Québec and later to a Master’s in Jazz Performance at McGill, and the writing sits at the crossroads she has staked out between contemporary jazz and impressionistic classical music.
Opening track Two Lives One Heart sets the record in motion, followed by Speak Up and Smile, where the harmonic writing thickens. Les tornades meurent toujours (Tornadoes Always Die in the End) arrived as the first single ahead of the album, a propulsive piece built around piano and drums that Gentiane describes as an acknowledgment of turbulence without getting stuck in it. The title track sits at the centre of the record as a meditative piece on forgiveness and memory.
Gentiane grew up in northern Quebec close to wilderness and solitude, an early sensitivity to sound and silence that still runs through the way she writes and plays. The move outward on Can You Hear the Birds? doesn’t abandon that interior space so much as open a door from it.
The trio brings the album to Palais Montcalm on May 21 before the Jazz Fest date in June.
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