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RJ LeBlanc’s HEYDAY at The Cove

February 9 @ 7:00 pm - 11:00 pm

$80

Enjoy the music of one of Canada’s greatest treasure, Remi-Jean LeBlanc and his newest project, HEYDAY from Montreal! This will most surely be a musical night to remember!

Montreal based Rémi-Jean LeBlanc has been active on the Canadian music scene since 2005 and has collaborated with an array of musicians in Montreal and in Canada including Yannick Rieu, Jean-Michel Pilc, Marianne Trudel, Steve Amirault, Carol Welsman, Elizabeth Shepherd, the CNJO, and l’Orchestre national de jazz de Montréal. RJ has also toured extensively with different groups in Europe, China, Japan, Mexico, the US, and Canada and has performed with international artists such as David Binney, Seamus Blake, Greg Osby, Terri Lyne Carrington, Jeff Ballard, Ari Hoenig, Gilad Hekselman, Ben Wendel, and Billy Hart. RJ has been on faculty at McGill University since 2017.
HEYDAY is RJ’s 4th album and was released in December 2022. The band features some of Montreal’s most versatile and prolific musicians; Erika Angell on voice, Jérôme Beaulieu on keyboards, Kevin Warren on drums and Nicolas Ferron on guitar, and RJ LeBlanc on bass. A wide range of influences characterizes the repertoire, hailing from post-rock to RnB and beyond while tastefully keeping the spirit of jazz as a common thread. It is an eclectic and highly energetic band that mixes finesse and feel-good in a beautiful way.

Dinner and Show 7-11pm! Call 613.273.3636 or email thecoveinnwestport@gmail.com for reservations!

From www.thewholenote.com:

Heyday
RJ LeBlanc
MCM; Bent River Records; Diese Onze Records (rjleblanc.bandcamp.com)

The embodiment of smoothness, Heyday has the fluidity of a living organism, with nary a transition feeling contrived and a staggering level of sonic detail. Into The Sun is a composition that takes calculated risks while never coming across as arrogant. Each metre and tempo change is seamless, without clear delineations necessary in terms of solo sections versus premeditated grooves. In the track’s third and fourth minutes, the synth ostinato slows to a halt, but the momentum of the music isn’t compromised, as it either punctuates a backdrop of thunderous percussion or brings the song to a close.

Montreal bassist RJ LeBlanc as a session leader is dazzlingly adept at precisely that: taking one simple musical element and finding a thousand different uses for it. In a less overt way, the way LeBlanc incorporates harmonics on his bass in the mesmerizing emotional core track Chanson pour Marguerite is quite fascinating. Extended passages employing harmonics are used in the beginning as a means of introducing the primary melodic figure, used as an interlude connecting sections, and then underneath the guitar (Nicolas Ferron) to create a climatically uplifting ambient soundscape. Meanwhile, this album perhaps shines brightest when LeBlanc brings along the entire ensemble, with Saturnales in particular being a dizzyingly dense achievement of married sound. The track, like the album itself, is an exploration of ingenuity and how invigorating it can be to have friends to realize your ideas.

 

https://rjleblanc.bandcamp.com/album/heyday

Venue

The Cove Inn
2 Bedford St
Westport, Ontario K0G 1X0 Canada
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Phone
(613) 273-3636
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