Montreal Jazz Festival | Hypnotic Hiatus Kaiyote

It’s a departure for the Montreal International Jazz Festival, and among those to be remembered, Australian jazz-funk outfit Hiatus Kaiyote gave an electrifying kickoff on the biggest stage at Place des Festivals, Thursday evening.

Nothing on stage Thursday was more captivating than the presence and voice of Hiatus Kaiyote frontwoman Nai Palm. And that’s saying something, because the musicians (Paul Bender, Perrin Moss and Simon Mavin) who surrounded her were nothing short of remarkable. But everything about the singer-songwriter is mesmerizing.

A cap screwed backwards on her head, her face adorned with sequins, her long green hair falling down to her hips, tattoos everywhere, her appearance as phlegmatic as it was overflowing with charisma, she was without a doubt the coolest person on the Place des Festivals on Thursday. But well beyond her looks, it was her vocal performance that convinced us.

On a stage beautifully decorated with light structures and skillfully animated screens, the group was accompanied by three backing singers, who helped to start the show with an introduction during which the voices shone (with the piece Dream Boat). Which they then continued to do, joining in perfectly with the notes intoned by the musicians.

The rhythms dictated by Perrin Moss’s drums were, like Palm’s voice, completely magnetic. Always placed where you least expect it, its tempo is both destabilizing and captivating. On Love Heart Cheat Code for example, just after And We Go GentleMoss moves us in all directions, gives us no respite. He takes his time and yet the pace is frenetic.

You have to hear it to fully understand the genius of the Australian group’s instrumentation and arrangements. The synthesizers are imposing and often crazy, do not seem to come from the same universe as the celestial harmonies, and yet everything complements each other perfectly.

Categorizing the music of a band like this inevitably means diminishing the complexity of its offering. If we had to name genres, we would talk about jazz, neo soul, funk, electro and rock, but also a certain prog influence, ambient music and psychedelic music. Mix it all up, entrust the delivery of this eclectic mix to seasoned musicians and let the magic happen. That, in short, is what we were treated to on Thursday.

In the cold and the joy

It was unusually cold on Thursday. The wind tried to dampen the enthusiasm of the festival-goers who were sometimes far too scantily dressed for this cool evening. At 9:30 p.m., when the show had barely started and not an ounce of sun could warm the spectators even a little, they became even more numerous, blackening the floor of Place des Arts. The Quartier des spectacles was very much alive despite the somewhat hostile temperature.

Interacting little with the audience, Hiatus Kaiyote let the sumptuous music do its work. There was something very satisfying in the way the songs we were presented with flowed into each other, giving us little opportunity to come out of our hypnotic state (or even applaud). This is also the great skill of the band, who knew how to design a show where we are not simply served what the record already contains, but where we take this same music to another level.

Despite all the commotion caused by the instrumental complexity of his proposal, Hiatus Kaiyote seems to have lost very few spectators during the hour and a half that his performance lasted. The crowd remained compact, attentive. Herein lies proof of the power of his music. When did the trainer arrive? Telescope (this chorus!), after Sip Into Something Soft et Chivalrynotably, in the middle of the show, the audience was still crowded all the way to rue Sainte-Catherine far behind.

There were of course many admirers of the group in the audience. When Red Room started, the reaction of the crowd confirmed it to us. After many years without a show in Montreal, although the group’s notoriety continued to rise, Hiatus Kaiyote certainly pleased a lot of people.

The show was interrupted when Nai Palm spotted an audience member in need of assistance… but it at least allowed for a restart of that crowd favorite from the beginning and also for the realization that the singer-songwriter, while she prefers to concentrate on her singing, is a very entertaining hostess (and well-equipped with a few words of French).

The evening continued with fun Marked. A few words from one of the choristers were spoken to pay tribute to the indigenous peoples to whom the territory where the Montreal festivals are taking place this summer belonged, before a magnificent piano solo by Simon Mavin. The show unfortunately had to be interrupted again (and even cut short, with the encore cut short) due to another incident in the crowd. The groovy Make Friends was a nice conclusion to this chilly but hot evening.

At 11 p.m., when it was time to leave, our idea was made up: Hiatus Kaiyote is one of the most fascinating and solid groups of its kind (or rather… its genres).

Yaya Bey warms up the crowd (rather well)

American Yaya Bey, who released her superb album earlier this year Ten Foldhad the task of presenting him to an early evening crowd who were initially not very attentive, but ready to be convinced.

We wanted to be drawn in by the neo soul, funk and house tunes, but something was missing. It had little to do with the singer’s performance. Her deep, sensual voice, set against a bass melody, quickly attracted the festival-goers. Her singing, which sometimes flirted with hip-hop, then convinced the curious to stay, while the singer herself seemed to become more and more comfortable. But it wasn’t as convincing as we had hoped.

Our theory: Yaya Bey would have been better served by an indoor show; the Jazz’s big stage wasn’t quite adequate for this hushed performance.

On minimalist and catchy instrumental arrangements, Yaya Bey brought a much more jazz-based flavor to the stage than on record. Those who knew the album were surely happy to see Yaya Bey’s songs come to life in concert (even if we told ourselves that the album is better than the concert suggested). Many of those who did not know the artist they discovered on stage Thursday early in the evening probably had the opportunity to make a great discovery.

The 44^e Jazz Festival is officially launched.