Christine and Ingrid Jensen, guitarist Ben Monder find Infinitude

Montreal Gazette | 16 June 2017 | by T’Cha Dunlevy

Montreal jazz festival: The sisters’ latest collaboration takes them into uncharted territory alongside the renowned jazz guitarist.

Christine and Ingrid Jensen caught the improvisation bug early, growing up in Nanaimo, B.C. Their music teacher mom enrolled them in piano lessons from the time they entered grade school; then around ages 11 or 12, each picked up a horn — Ingrid the trumpet and Christine, a few years later, the saxophone.

“We had this great band teacher,” Christine said, sitting in her St-Henri apartment on a recent Thursday afternoon. “We all had to play horns in band; that was the rule. He was a jazz fanatic. He loved dixieland, and he fed us the jazz idea of improv. That’s a big one, finding people that get you to improvise in the moment and not be self-conscious. And it just kind of grew, like in a garden.

“He and other teachers in Nanaimo, who were also teachers of Diana Krall, were just like, ‘You can do it, just try to use your ear. Don’t use the page all the time.’ It’s a big lesson for young players. It’s amazing how it frees you up.”

Decades later, the Jensens are still exploring that freedom. Ingrid is an acclaimed jazz trumpeter based in New York City, while Christine has an expanding international profile as a big band composer and arranger on her own Juno-winning albums and with the Montreal Jazz Orchestra.

The sisters’ latest collaboration, Infinitude, takes them into uncharted territory alongside renowned American jazz guitarist Ben Monder, who has been a red-hot commodity since playing on David Bowie’s final album, Blackstar, in 2015.

Released in February, Infinitude was a critic’s pick in the March issue of jazz authority DownBeat magazine, which gave the Jensens a two-page spread, putting their names above the masthead on the cover. The publication’s 2016 year-end critics poll named Christine a rising star arranger and the Christine Jensen Jazz Orchestra a rising star big band. Downbeat had previously made her 2010 album Treelines its lead review, following with a five-star assessment of her 2013 album Habitat.

“DownBeat’s been good to me,” she said.

Marked by strong melodies, sweeping textures and vibrant interplay among all parties (the lineup is rounded out by Ingrid’s husband Jon Wikan on drums and Montrealer Fraser Hollins on bass), Infinitude is the result of a musical exchange that began in a live setting and is ongoing.

“It came from gigs, if anything,” Christine said, “gigs with Ben. I heard Ingrid play with him a lot in the mid-’90s to the 2000s with other people’s groups, and sometimes she had him on a few (of her own) things. I just loved his modern approach mixed with her modern approach, where electric and acoustic come together. To me this feels like more than a quintet. There are so many sound areas we can go into.”

Monder’s effects-laden electric guitar sears — and sometimes skips, or gently drifts — through Infinitude, layered in combinations of feedback, reverb and filters, courtesy of a range of pedals he brings wherever he goes.

Ingrid, who first played with Monder under American composer and big-band leader Maria Schneider, has a similar arsenal of gear to expand her instrument’s scope. She sees her and Christine sharing billing on an album with the guitarist as a milestone.

“You kind of have to have some stuff together to hang with where Ben’s music goes,” she said, joining her sister and me via speakerphone. “I have always felt extremely inadequate playing around Ben. He’s just so incredible. At the same time, he brings out things in my technique I didn’t even know were there.”

“He draws us in with his choice of harmony and melody and rhythm,” Christine observed. “There’s something you want to bind to with this guy that makes it a really in-the-moment collaboration, which is the jazz part of it to me — because we can go anywhere. He can play two notes and Ingrid and I can go in a thousand directions.”

Fittingly, for an album that was inspired by sparks on stage, and recorded over two days during the 2015 Montreal International Jazz Festival, the songs on Infinitude have continued to evolve during the rare occasions since in which the five players have reconvened for performances. The album launch at New York’s Jazz Gallery in February remains a standout moment.

“It felt like we were building new chapters,” Christine said, “new directions in terms of where the music’s going; and it happens every time we collaborate with him.”

Infinitude isn’t the only album Christine has on the go. This month, Justin Time released Orchestre national de jazz de Montréal’s Under the Influence Suite, which she composed and conducted.

Featuring the agile contributions of Juno-winning vocalist Sienna Dahlen (who also sings on Dream Cassette, the latest album by Christine’s husband, saxophonist Joel Miller), the dynamic song cycle is divided into five movements, dedicated to five artists who have inspired Christine: Kenny Wheeler, Jan Jarczyk, John Coltrane, Lee Konitz and Wayne Shorter.

(In a serendipitous bit of programming, the Orchestre national also performs at this year’s Montreal International Jazz Festival, conducted by drummer, composer and McGill prof John Hollenbeck with guest vocalist Theo Bleckmann, both of whom Monder has collaborated with.)

Between a Canadian jazz festival tour for Infinitude later this month and a European tour in November, Christine will be hitting the road with the Orchestre national while juggling invitations from abroad to guest-conduct orchestras performing her compositions.

“That stuff’s happening all over the place, like crazy,” she said. “I can’t really keep track right now. It’s amazing. … (Composing for large ensembles) has gotten me further than I ever expected.”

Adding another feather in her cap, the Montreal International Jazz Festival recently announced it is giving Christine this year’s Oscar Peterson Award for her contributions to jazz in this country — a welcome bit of recognition from an event she has played more than any other over the years.

Prodded as to what it is about her work that is attracting so much attention, she hesitated.

“I’m the last person to know,” Christine said. “Maybe it’s that I take risks with the idea of presenting music that engages the listener from a melodic standpoint. I think that gets lost in serious music. We get so tied up in other aspects that we’re working on that we don’t think of storytelling through melody.

“That’s why the Oscar Peterson Award is so fitting. It was the first jazz I heard where I was like, ‘Why is that so gravitating?’ I wanted to play piano like Oscar Peterson, and I quickly realized how hard that would be. My mother was a pianist and she had all his records, and that’s really the basis — this happy, beautiful music.”