Dream come true

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This article was published 23/06/2023 (1120 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Will Bonness is living the dream.

A year’s leave from the University of Manitoba’s Desautels Faculty of Music, where he’s a professor in its jazz studies department, has led to his fifth album, Is This a Dream?, which gets its official release tonight at the Royal Albert as part of the Winnipeg International Jazz Festival.

The pianist put the time away from university to good use, spending most of the year in Toronto, where he delved into the city’s jazz scene.

His connections come to fruition on the new record, which explores various emotional states and includes five new compositions and interpretations from three of the genre’s most celebrated songwriters: Hoagy Carmichael, Cole Porter and Billy Strayhorn.

“I met a lot of great musicians there and we got along well musically and personally so I wanted to combine some of those musicians with people I love to play with here and make a new record, so that’s how it got going,” Bonness says from his home in Winnipeg, where he was packing for a trip to Medicine Hat to begin a cross-country festival tour.

He welcomed two Toronto woodwinds performers, clarinetist Virginia MacDonald and saxophonist Allison Au, and bassist Dan Fortin to Winnipeg, where they joined his regular bandmates Jocelyn Gould and Fabio Ragnelli for the recording, and they created a tone that is playful at times, and at others filled with grief.

“It’s a somewhat unique combination of instruments. We have voice and clarinet as the front line, although the instrumentation varies from track to track,” Bonness says. “It definitely gives it a different flavour when you play with people from other places.”

Is This a Dream? follows on the heels of Bonness’s 2021 critically acclaimed album Change of Plans, which earned him a Juno and Western Canadian Music awards. That previous success has given him the freedom to pursue the music instead of accolades, he says.

His attitude matches the famous words from composer George Gershwin: “They can’t take that away from me.”

“I think getting an award like that — maybe this is different for other people — but I feel like it took the pressure off, to be honest,” he says. “I’m just trying to make some new music and move on to the next phase.”

That phase includes working once again with Gould, who is Bonness’s partner on and off the stage. She leaves her guitar in its case for Is This a Dream? but adds vocals on three of the tracks, including a bittersweet rendition of Carmichael’s I Get Along Without You Very Well.

Even though the 1939 song has been recorded by some of jazz’s greats over the years, including Frank Sinatra, Chet Baker and Diana Krall, it remains a deep track from Carmichael’s rich catalogue of standards.

Bonness enjoys digging deep into the songbooks of legends who were pop titans almost a century ago and encouraging his band to put their own 21st-century spin on them. Instrumental versions of Porter’s Don’t Fence Me In and Strayhorn’s Blood Count are also part of the new record.

“There’s some really beautiful songs from that period. It was a golden era of songwriting. I know they’ve been done a lot in the history of jazz music, but I like to find some that are maybe not as commonly played, that have a good melody and have an interesting structure to them and speak to me in some way,” Bonness says.

MacDonald, Gould and Ragnelli join Bonness on the Royal Albert stage tonight with another Torontonian, Jonathan Chapman, who is playing bass on the pianist’s Canadian tour, which has them playing six jazz festivals in nine days.

Expect many, if not all of them to join Winnipeg saxophonist Jon Gordon, a 2021 Juno Award nominee and another U of M jazz studies prof, when he plays his jazz fest set at the Albert at 7:30 p.m.

“It’s pretty much my favourite time of the year,” Bonness says of Canada’s summer festival circuit. “Sometimes you get to catch some of the other shows or go to some jam sessions and meet a bunch of other musicians. You often see other bands on the road, people that you know, so you can hang out.”

alan.small@winnipegfreepress.com

Twitter: @AlanDSmall