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The Sinistrio CD Release
Beat Niq Jazz & Social Club
Beat Niq Jazz & Social Club
Friday, November 9 - Friday, November 9 Saturday, November 10 - Saturday, November 10

More in: Blues / Jazz

Drummer John May has been busy since making Calgary his home a few years ago. Upon moving to Calgary, May made himself a fixture at the Broken City Jazz Jam every Saturday. It was while onstage that May inadvertently pieced together the members for his latest project, Sinistrio. Sharing stage time at Broken City with guitarist Jeff Drummond and running into organist Steve Fletcher at a Ryan Bourne show, May solidified an intention he had been talking about for a long time — forming a groove-based organ trio.

“I’ve always really liked the sound of organ,” admits May. “But in particular, there’s something about the left-hand bass. The tone that you can get out of it is lower than a regular bass, and it fills the space so much more.”

Interested in the particular texture that was created with an organ-based trio, May didn’t have to stray far from Calgary for like-minded musicians. Steve Fletcher is possibly best known to Calgary audiences for his work with Recipe From a Small Planet and, more recently, Jay Crocker and the Electric Apes. Though Fletcher’s playing certainly leads the group’s sound, it’s the groove created from the interplay of all three, with Drummond’s intricate guitar work and May’s subtle, understated drumming, that make what they do work so well. Their self-titled debut album, released on Chronograph Records, a new Calgary independent label run by bassist Kodi Hutchinson and Stephanie Wadley, certainly shows the influence of other organ-based trios like Medeski, Martin and Wood, and Soulive. At first conceived as a mere demo, it didn’t take long for May to realize that they had a full-fledged album in the works.

“We started playing together last fall and started to getting a lot of gigs,” says May. “At that point, I thought we really needed to get a demo done. Jeff had this old Tascam reel-to-reel 8-track. Steve had a friend that had a huge, open garage. We pretty much borrowed as much as we could and just sat down and started recording. It was completely live off the floor. No tape cuts, no edits. Everything you hear on the disc is exactly as we played it. We spent three days recording, two of which were spent getting the bugs out and then the rest laying it down. I was really surprised by how good it sounded, so we said screw it and released it as a full album.”

From the sound of the album, May had nothing to be surprised about. The calibre of playing and easy free-flow with which solos are passed around between the players speak of the perfect sum of all the three parts — that, and the fact that they speak each other’s language. May thinks of music as a universal language and particularly a language that all three understand intrinsically; knowing when to take a turn, when to step back and when to respond.

“I think Count Basie said it best,” says May, “that there’s two types of music — there’s good music and there’s bad music. No matter who you are, you can tell the difference between the good and the bad. Even if you can’t really appreciate something or it sounds weird, you can at least sit back and respect what’s going on. In some way it’ll make sense.”

May’s hoping that people will file Sinistrio under “good,” even if jazz isn’t their thing. Their CD release shows at the Beat Niq will showcase the group’s comfort playing in all genres, from Latin to groove to art-rock. Even their covers aren’t your standard fair (The Flaming Lips and Jimi Hendrix will both make an appearance).

“I’m one of those Calgary musicians who moonlight in tons of different groups,” admits May. “I play everything from folk music to hip hop and funk. It’s how I make a living. If I just focused myself on one genre of music then I’d be pretty much screwed.”