IN CONCERT
What: Quinn Bachand’s Brishen with special guest Gwen Cresens
Where: First Church of Christ, Scientist (1205 Pandora Ave.)
When: Friday, June 21, 7:30 p.m. (doors at 6:45)
Tickets: $25 at Lyle’s Place (770 Yates St.), Nicholas Randall (2180 Oak Bay Ave.) and eventbrite.ca; $30 at the door
The vintage, monophonic sound of Tunes in a Hotel, the spirited new album from Victoria guitarist Quinn Bachand and his gypsy-jazz group Brishen, is what you get when you record an album in, well, a hotel.
There were stylistic reasons for recording the 10-song release in room 737 of a Sheraton hotel in Boston, Massachusetts, but, for the most part, it was done out of necessity.
The guitarist and bandleader was holed up in the hotel for three weeks last year after being displaced from his dormitory room at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, where he was a student. There had been a massive fire in the building next door to his residence while he was on tour. When he returned, his room was no longer habitable.
“My room on the top floor was the closest one to the burning building and, when the roof was collapsing next door, firefighters were using my room . . . to combat the fire,” Bachand said.
Smoke from the fire might have permanently damaged the cache of vintage instruments he kept in his room had 23-year-old Bachand not acted quickly. After receiving a call from the school, he immediately contacted a friend in Boston, who scurried over to Bachand’s room and rescued possessions, including a violin, sheet music and an electric guitar.
While the majority of his gear was either with him on tour or back at his apartment in Montreal, he was determined not to lose anything, as the type of music he makes with Brishen depends on instruments from a bygone era.
The upside is that Bachand came out of the experience with a snappy new recording. The third album from Brishen (a gypsy word for “bringer of the storm”) is a musical trip through the smoky swing-jazz clubs of 1930s Paris. The spare-sounding album was recorded onto a cassette tape in Bachand’s hotel room over a three-week period, and was loose by design, he said.
“I was running around aimlessly, not knowing what to do. So I stocked the fridge with a 50-pack of beer and set up a microphone, and asked friends if they wanted to come through. It ended up being really cool.”
Bachand made some ad-hoc adjustments during the recording sessions — including turning his bed mattress on its side to muffle sound — which helped the band of merry musicians escape the ire of the hotel’s manager. On the final day of recording, Bachand set up a Gibson amplifier from the 1950s and recorded all of his guitar parts, which eventually blew his cover.
“It was cranked really, really loud, but I was hoping the sound wasn’t going to be a problem for people. I did my final take on the last tune and got a knock on the door. Security was like: ‘Are playing in your room? You can’t do that anymore.’ So I just made it. Everything came together in time.”
Bachand will be joined Friday for his CD release concert at First Church of Christ, Scientist by Brishen bandmates Reuben Wier (guitar), Noah Gotfrit (bass) and Eric Vanderbilt-Mathews (clarinet).
The group has a busy month ahead, with stops in Cumberland (tonight), Duncan (Saturday), Mill Bay (Sunday) and Gabriola Island (Monday), before a high-profile appearance at the Royal Theatre on Tuesday, part of the TD Victoria International Jazz Festival.
Brishen and Bachand have earned five Canadian Folk Music Awards, two Western Canadian Music Awards and an Independent Music Award during their time together, a credit to their collective playing, but also to Bachand’s knowledge of and knack for the brand of Parisian jazz made famous by Django Reinhardt in the 1930s and ’40s.
The majority of songs on Tunes in a Hotel were made famous by Reinhardt and his contemporaries, Bachand said.
“Not a whole lot of people are recording this music in the way it was recorded in the ’70s, when there was a second wave of gypsy jazz,” Bachand said.
“No one is doing anything like that anymore. I just looked at this as an opportunity to take a snapshot of the end of my experience at Berklee with a bunch of my friends.”
