IN CONCERT
What: Busty and the Bass with Pierre Kwenders and Schwey
Where: Capital Ballroom, 858 Yates St.
When: Monday, March 5, 9 p.m.
Tickets: $18.50 at Lyle’s Place, 770 Yates St., and Ticketweb.ca
Montreal’s Busty and the Bass is an 18-legged party machine with the ability to play both large festivals and small clubs and deliver high-energy sets each time.
That’s a tougher task than it looks, especially when you consider the freewheeling nine-member group emerged from a university jazz program with an eye for tradition.
Busty and the Bass live well outside the box, with one foot in contemporary jazz and the other in soul music, but elements of hip-hop and funk are also prominent.
The sound, it would appear, is a direct response to the school program that spawned it.
Though they are products of the jazz studies program at McGill University, members of Busty and the Bass were united by a desire to be different, pushing the boundaries of jazz in the modern era.
“Jazz has a huge influence on the music that we write and the music that we listen to and the music that we play,” said singer-keyboardist Evan Crofton, a 26-year-old Victoria native who took part in the band program at Oak Bay high school.
“It’s always there. But I never think of us as a McGill group. I consider us a group of guys who met in Montreal and happened to study jazz together at the school.”
Busty and the Bass hasn’t lost its appetite for school — the group has taken to visiting students on its current tour, reconnecting the mid-twentysomethings with their roots as musicians.
“That’s something we’ve been trying to do more and more,” said Crofton, who performs under the moniker Alistair Blu.
“When we have a day or off or have time before a soundcheck, we’ve tried to showcase what we can do at schools and in places with people who can’t come to tour shows. We’re trying to inspire kids to be active in music, and to not take music so seriously at the beginning. It can be something that you might have fun doing, and will maybe do professionally one day.”
The band — which also includes trumpeters Scott Bevins and Mike McCann, trombonist Chris Vincent, singer-saxophonist Nick Ferraro, guitarist Louis Stein, bassist Milo Johnson, drummer Julian Trivers and pianist Eric Haynes — has made stops at several Ontario schools, although the goodwill music mission has been tougher to arrange of late.
The current trek to support the band’s debut album, Uncommon Good, has taken the upstart festival favourite to major markets in the U.S., from Chicago and New York to New Orleans and Los Angeles.
The hard work is paying off for the band, which formed in 2012.
“We’ve played so many shows and practised so much together, that has given us this tightness,” Crofton said.
“If you see a jazz show and the syncopation is not there, it’s likely that they haven’t really rehearsed it and gone over it a million times.
“But we’ve definitely done that, thankfully. We’ve had the time and opportunity and space to do that.”
Crofton said the tour that brings Busty and the Bass to Victoria for a show next week at the Capital Ballroom is making good use of jazz skills he acquired at a young age.
Before he studied jazz piano in university, Crofton was a student of Victoria teachers George Essihos, Brent Jarvis and Jan Stirling — mentors he holds in high regard.
“I listen to jazz every day. Having that basis of knowledge of harmony and theory, I just feel like it gives you an upper step, especially with modern songwriting. You can use that [knowledge] and write a cool soul song or write a cool hip-hop tune based on that jazz harmony.”
