When Kirk MacDonald plays, it’s as if complex chord sequences lie down in sweet surrender as the tenor saxophone hero carves wending, highly charged, eloquent melodies.
The 54-year-old Torontonian has been an imposing figure in Canadian jazz for half his life, thanks to his virtuosic, high-energy playing.
So it was once more, Wednesday night on the TD Ottawa Jazz Festival’s main stage, when the spotlight was on MacDonald’s hard-hitting quartet.
One of the pillars of MacDonald’s playing is the music of John Coltrane, who shifted jazz’s paradigm in the 1960s by raising the bar for saxophone intensity and melodic possibilities.
So when MacDonald announced that he would play a song by one of his influences, it was no big surprise when it was Coltrane’s piece Lonnie’s Lament.
In MacDonald’s hands, the lament became rangy a mid-tempo swinger, with the saxophonist making it sound like every torrent of well-chosen notes was as natural as breathing.
The five other pieces of MacDonald’s set were originals from his most recent album, Symmetry. He opened the concert with the title track, a 5/4 romp through beautifully connected chords.
That odd meter, once a novelty but now part of the expanded bread-and-butter of contemporary jazz, reappeared with the set’s brisk closer, Mackrel’s Groove, which was a nod to Dennis Mackrel, the American drummer sharing the stage with MacDonald.
The quartet, which also included MacDonald’s fellow Torontonians Brian Dickinson on piano and Neil Swainson on bass, kept the focus and intensity high throughout its set.
It would have been a calamity otherwise, as MacDonald’s compositions seem built for exuberant, expansive expressions.
The closest thing to a ballad was MacDonald’s waltzing Shadows, which cooled the mood somewhat initially. But even then, by the time Mackrel was soloing, the music was near boiling again.
In some quarters, modern mainstream jazz such as MacDonald’s can seem a little passé, lacking the cachet of jazz with more hip-hop or heavy metal in it, or for that matter, bluegrass with no jazz in it.
But when you hear the sheer quality of what MacDonald and his A-list peers can do after spending their lives to become that proficient and personal at their music, you have to ask: Are you serious?