Christine Jensen

By: James Hale

The ability to take the familiar, process it through your own sensibility and experience, and rearrange it into something new in visual art or music, the art of collage has its own power and beauty.Those who dismiss jazz as moribund at the end of its first century negate the effect that a fresh ear and new voice can create.

At age 30, Christine Jensen brings both to her debut recording, and while listeners will find echoes of earlier sextets Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and Herbie Hancock’s mid-’60s bands are obvious touchstones Collage crackles with a vitality that is unique to its time and place. The place that inspires two of the compositions here (“Sylvan Vale” and “Half Tide”) is the area south of Nanaimo on Vancouver Island where Christine and sister Ingrid, four years her senior, spent their formative years. Pianist Glenn Gould always maintained that Canada’s rural areas engendered a distinctive sense of space in the work of artists; you can hear the tranquility of the place in these pieces. “Camel Trot” is informed by a more exotic, and less tangible, locale: director David Lean’s epic setting for T.E. Lawrence’s journey across the Arabian desert. “I wrote this while attending a composing residency in upstate New York,” says Christine. “I let my imagination run wild and it’s a fun piece to improvise on Indeed, Christine, Ingrid and tenor player Joel Miller stretch out with abandon over the loping pace, with Ingrid taking a brash solo reminiscent of Lee Morgan and Woody Shaw in its swaggering authority and elodic inventiveness. As well as contributing a number of exceptional, varied solo statements, Ingrid played a key role on a number of the pieces. She urged her little sister to include “A La Jay,” the oldest of Christine’s compositions on Collage, and contributes to a powerful trumpet/alto dialogue. The basic feel for “Summer Night” adopted from a Renee Rosnes arrangement was developed during a 1997 tour by Ingrid’s band, and Christine was inspired to pen the Kenny Wheeler-esque “Sweet Adelphi” during a stay at Ingrid’s Brooklyn apartment. And then there’s the sisters’ delightfully coy cat-and-mouse approach to Tom Harrell’s “Duet,” which flows seamlessly into Christine’s “Marsh Blues” with its bracing second-line drumming by Karl Jannuska.

To bring the sibling bond full circle, “Marsh Blues” voiced somewhat differently was Christine’s contribution to Ingrid’s first recording on enja, the Juno Award-winning Vernal Fields. The decision to include Ingrid on Collage was a natural one for Christine, although she says that their musical collaboration doesn’t go back as far as one might think. “We didn’t really start playing together until I started my formal jazz studies at McGill University in 1990,” says Christine. “Even then, it was very informal jamming. We didn’t really start working together until about three years ago.

It was Ingrid who suggested fellow trumpeter and British Columbia native Brad Turner to fill the piano chair on the session. Turner is a rare musician who doubles effortlessly on diverse instruments, and his deft use of Fender Rhodes throughout Collage reflects his deep love for the late 60s work of Hancock, Chick Corea and Joe Zawinul. “Brad’s concept of space and melodic development is beyond where I imagined that my music could be taken,” says Christine, touching incidentally of the strength of her writing. Her artistic achievement here is in preparing a canvas upon which her band can shift familiar elements into new forms of expression. James Hale Regular contributor to Down Beat, Coda and The Jazz Report

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