Pluck, persistence have already paid off for Chickadee band leader

They talk about accidents of history and opportunities in crisis.

A memorable example of both from music: in 1928, an obscure French Romani musician named Django Reinhardt scorched his hand in a caravan fire, leaving two of his fretting fingers useless.

Doctors said Reinhardt’s days as a musician were over. Instead, he put away his banjo and reached for the guitar more often, focusing on single-note lines rather than full-fingered chords.

This is the mythical origin story of gypsy jazz — pioneering not just a new genre but the guitar as a proud lead instrument.

Fred Warner would shy from hearing such parallels drawn.

The 20-something Winnipeg leader of folky-jazz or jazzy-folk act Chickadee — which releases its debut EP Persistence Friday night — speaks with all-too-Manitoban humility.

“I kind of like recognize the immense chance that you’re taking by going fully into that life,” he says of his decision to pursue music.

“I’m nearing the end of my (education) degree, envisioning a life where I can spend part of my life teaching and part of my day performing music.”

But his origin story includes its own baptism by fire.

Warner was well on his way to becoming a classical musician. Practising six to eight hours a day, he was nearing the end of his degree in classical trumpet. Then, during the pandemic, he developed a spasm in his left ear whenever he played the instrument. It intensified his tinnitus so badly that he had to give up the trumpet and cut his dream short.

“I was feeling pretty lost. My dad had a bass in our studio, so I picked that up, started playing it,” he says.

He’d held a bass before, but never with any dedication. Within a few years of practising, Warner has grown into one of the city’s most called-on young bass players.

While an earlier incarnation (Freddy and the Fire Nation) of his current band stood more squarely in the jazz and fusion genres, Warner is now getting his toes wet in folk streams, too.

“I view the record as 40 per cent jazz, 40 per cent pop inspiration, 20 per cent miscellaneous things. There’s a lot of fiddle-inspired melodies,” Warner says.

If these are his base materials, the glimmering results bring to mind famed banjo player Béla Fleck’s alchemy of jazz and bluegrass.

Though unlike with Fleck — or early Reinhardt — there’s no banjo on Warner’s records, but there are plenty of genre-bending and golden moments for his collaborators.

Overstimulated, the EP’s fourth track, is a symphony of overlaid keys by Tirian Plett. Over a cushion of Steely Dan-esque Rhodes keyboard, a 1980s-style synth trumpets Warner’s soaring melodies, until Warner cranks down the pitch and speed, like a tape cassette running out of batteries.

Why Worry, the only vocal track on the record, features Argentine-Canadian songstress Gabriela Ocejo in a hip, moody ballad. The songwriting sits somewhere between Stevie Wonder and Antônio Carlos Jobim, while the production emanates the stylized lo-fi warmth we’ve come to associate with Canadian bedroom pop such as Cindy Lee and Men I Trust.

At heart, this is a band-driven record with production flourishes that exaggerate rather than hide its analogue and organic qualities.

“There was some cool stuff there,” we hear one band member tell the others at the end of Overstimulated, against a rising tape hiss.

This isn’t the only time we hear the band bantering between takes. Persistence sounds more professional than 8-track recordings, but uses a home-studio approach to cosy experimental effect.

While not all of this can be imported into tonight’s performance, live music, people making music and improvising in the same room, is where things start musically for Warner.

“It’s a space in which people can be together in community. I see (recorded and live music) like two different opportunities to say something artistically,” he says.

But for an artist who relishes the organic, Warner is also a disciplined, technical musician adventuring in exotic colours and soundscapes. Occasionally, this makes him feel out of step with the Prairie zeitgeist, but it doesn’t deter him.

“It’d be really nice if a lot of people listen to my music, but if they don’t, I’m still going to be satisfied with what I’ve done,” he says.

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