Like the Canada Day III and Canada Day IV unmastered editions, Canada Day II benefits greatly in this exclusive NativeDSD release of the final mixes. It’s significantly closer to the all-acoustic sonics captured in the recording sessions.

This is the second album (the first on Songlines) by drummer Harris Eisenstadt’s working quintet Canada Day, which was given its name by ex-Torontonian Eisenstadt for playing its first gig on Canada Day 2007. Harris has been based in NY for a number of years, and before that studied for his MFA in African American Improvisational Music at CalArts, where he also studied Ghanaian drumming and dance, following up with drum studies in Gambia and Senegal. His drumset teachers include Barry Altschul and Gerry Hemingway, and if this is a drummer’s record, perhaps it’s the buoyant, dancing quality of the rhythms that really signals it – how the bass and drums interact with each other and with the vibes and front line from tune to tune, the individual voices pulling against each other to cohere all the more.

If the band is known for the way it blends “a mid-60s Blue Note vibe with elastic post-rock grooves and subtle West African influences” (Troy Collins, AAJ), Harris is quick to point out that it also explores areas of improvisation that are outside of jazz, such as Nate Wooley’s dense, active non-pitched textures on trumpet. As Harris notes, “There’s something that the different strains of [new and free] jazz from the 60s share: a sense of adventure. All those musics are being renewed and updated today in endless different ways….I think [Nate] Chinen says it well: I do take a fixer’s approach to music making. I’m not a breaker. I’m interested in freedom and structure and different ways they can co-exist. As for ungainliness and grace, I find it exciting when an artist negotiates an ungainly task gracefully….I compose for the band members – their personalities come out in the arrangements – but no matter how detailed my scores are, the strength and vibrancy of the music comes from the band finding its collective voice through rehearsals and performances.”

Half of the songs were composed around the time of Harris’s son Owen’s birth: “My wife had just given birth and I was kind of floating along in a tired and sentimental way. I found myself writing simple songs…sketching straightforward harmonies on the piano or singing melodies in my head and then putting changes to them, in stark contrast to the way I’d formulated ‘To Eh,’ ‘To Be’ and ‘To See/Tootie,’ which were written before Owen was born.” The range of the material and its melodic and harmonic interest, the way the band rises to the challenges of the arrangements, and Harris’s fleet, substantial drumming make for a very satisfying listen.

Harris Eisenstadt – drums, composition
Nate Wooley – trumpet
Matt Bauder – tenor saxophone
Chris Dingman – vibraphone
Eivind Opsvik – bass