Kelsley Grant & Andrew Scott - Horizon Song (2024) Hi Res

It is possible, if you live in a city, to go out on most nights of the week to witness live jazz. If the city you live in is of sufficient size, you’ll even have a range of options as to the kind of jazz you’ll get to experience. Go to a tastefully lit place on the first floor of a condo building in a formerly dodgy neighbourhood to watch five performers in tailored coats recreate, with note-for-note fidelity, the repertoire of the Quintette du Hot Club de France. Or go to a city-sponsored festival in a park and nod along to winding jazz-funk jams as toddlers dance around you. Or go to a basement bar that hosts PWYC free-jazz performances in which the performers compete with each other to see who can run farthest away from recognizable melody. Or go to a century-old concert hall to watch a buzzy octet burn through an original repertoire that somehow draws from all of these musical possibilities.

Jazz, which used to turn itself inside out every half-decade or so, has become a genre of music for which all of its moments of revolution exist simultaneously. It’s like a comic book multiverse, where the slim Batman of the 1940s battles Gotham’s underworld alongside the hulked-out Batmen of the 1990s and 2000s. Except in this case, Batman is wielding a sax, and his superpower is the ability to improvise solos in 7/8 time.

Andrew Scott and Kelsley Grant are very at home in this jazz multiverse. Not that they try to represent all the jazzes in these tunes, but rather see the myriad of possibilities and calmy select the sounds and moments that feel right. As both professors and students of jazz, Scott and Grant can recite the date of the session where Lionel “Skipjack” Dickens first wrenched overtones from his French horn on the third chorus of “Portabello Mushroom,” and the exact take in which it happened. (None of those things are real, by the way.) But Scott and Grant, the players, move past all this knowledge to where the sounds are sweetest. The music on Horizon Song is notable for its complete lack of anxiety, its dominant mode of cool. There is not a drop of sweat to be found on any of these tracks. Each one moves without haste through ear-candy melodies into deliciously tasteful and non-wanky soloing from Scott/Grant and their massively accomplished collaborators. There are touches of Bossa Nova and Bebop, both feeling somehow fresh and reverent at the same time. At times, it seems almost as though Scott and Grant are attempting a rewrite of jazz history that elides dissonance. Even the one up-tempo number, “Punctuality”, binds itself to a clean swing, and never for a moment uses skronk and distortion as an accelerant. But just as that thought arises in the mind, we suddenly get the sound of an electric piano — included, not as a nod to Herbie’s funk period, but simply because it sounds so good.

To make music so clean, timeless, and non-anxious in this cultural moment is evidence either of living in sensory-deprivation tank or of a firm (but non-dogmatic) belief that art can and should exist outside of history. And also that, while respect must be paid to history, artists should never be forced to carry it on their back like a burden. Instead, they should find the notes and modes they like best. The real legacy of jazz’s many, often musically violent revolutions is the freedom to pick and choose, to create the future out of a myriad of possible pasts. Horizon Song sounds as though it could have come out at any time since around 1963. That it is coming out 2024 is the Scott/Grant 5’s treat to listeners.

Nathan Whitlock is the author of the novels A Week of This, Congratulations On Everything, and Lump. Nathan’s writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books, the Walrus, Chatelaine, Today’s Parent, the Globe and Mail, Best Canadian Essays, and elsewhere. He occasionally plays the drums.