Elastic label: Michael Davidson, Dan Fortin, Bryn Roberts

Let's take a stroll through parts of Elastic Recordings, the Toronto-based indie jazz label by vibraphonist Michael Davidson and bassist Dan Fortin.

I more or less called éclipse by Aline's étoile magique (rec. 2022) my favourite album that I covered in 2023. It's on Elastic, Davidson and Fortin are both in the band, and leader Aline Homzy brought them to our jazzfest that year. Davidson also came to IronFest IV at Ironworks a few months later – presented by Coastal Jazz, who hired me to host both evenings – to play in Josh Cole's Kind Mind. You start to get a sense of the generation of Canadian creative musicians that Elastic is one of the very best labels at highlighting.

Clock Radio (rec. 2017) started Elastic's public journey with its release in the spring of 2019. It's a duo between Davidson and Fortin, playful like Gary Burton and Chick Corea but with the grounding of upright bass instead of piano. Check out the reverse-like effect in "Berlin VII". The bass sound is pure, the vibraphone mostly unadorned other than that – they're just playing in a room, and it's sweet.

There's also the synths that soar on "A Lift Above".

Elastic have released eight albums this year. Farahser features drummer Nick Fraser as the de facto leader of an exploratory duo with pianist John Kameel Farah. On "Insect Mountain", Farah and Fraser dance in swirls and even briefly march or dip under the water of synthesizers.

"Waltz" is anything but its straightforward title, a soundscape full of glitches having all the fun of an 8EAST set but the pristine sonics of a Pyatt Hall:

(It's not always that way; the next one, "Dirge", is indeed a dirge.)

While designer Yesim Tosuner is probably the most frequent Elastic visual artist, Farah did the art himself for this release. Both improvisers came to town this fall; Farah performed solo at the Annex Theatre presented by VIM House, while Fraser joined Brodie West's quintet for IronFest V (where Coastal Jazz again hired me to host).

Bryn Roberts' Aloft (rec. 2022) might be the most straight-ahead Elastic album. Roberts is from Winnipeg, lives in Portland, and has previously lived in Montreal and New York City. He recorded this piano trio album in Brooklyn with two excellent contemporaries: NYC-based bassist Matt Penman and drummer Quincy Davis, who is American but joined the Winnipeg extended jazz family through the University of Manitoba faculty.

Roberts orchestrates the piano trio smartly. Track one starts things off on a heady note with a straight-eighths groove; "Steen's Scene", named in tribute to Portland drum legend Ron Steen, has the pianist's expert touch all over it.

The title track is the most tender track overall, and then the standard "My Ship" has an achingly soft, deft bass solo moment from Penman. Davis emerges from his wonderful timekeeping to go for it at the end of "Stevedore Cosplay", which must have something to do with either the dockworkers' strike or the Portland hipsters in full Carhartt who buy $7 coffees on the regular. "Amaryllis" has no connection to Mary Halvorson's work of the same name but does remind me of the feeling from "Help Me", track one off Jodi Proznick's Foundations.

Cole Porter's "You Do Something To Me" closes it out and is a highlight, with the left-hand block chords giving way to a graceful descending line and then the tight bass / left-hand riffing that marks so many great 21st-century swinging styles. Roberts' solo takes flight and digs in with Davis' drum comping:

For something completely different, Fortin just released the expressive, electric Cannon, which he assembled over a period of more than two years. Like West Coast vocalist Viviane Houle's Infidels Jazz project, Cannon brings in a cast of Fortin's collaborators alongside his bass (almost no upright), synth, and field-recording parts. There's Karen Ng from the aforementioned Josh Cole's Kind Mind, Philippe Melanson from the also-mentioned Brodie West Quintet, Thom Gill from Homzy's band, and more; it's a party of everyone you'd expect at Ironworks for the nights that bring together improvisation-minded people. Some of the works sound bass-driven, coming out in shapes that fit nicely on the bass guitar and accent its sonic signatures. Some are overdubbed, like "Minty", which Fortin recorded first then sent to Ng to play atop.

Fortin and Davidson reconvene as a duo on one track, "Allium Tower" – except Davidson plays no vibraphone. Chopped and screwed, the track's wandering synths plane up and down, and left to right in your ears, as the bass is the gentle voice. Vancouverites, it's like if We Are The City had gone full Innovation Series.

After that, the introduction of Chris Donnelly's piano brings the album back to earth for a moment. (Donnelly is the pianist from Myriad3, a trio with Fortin and with drummer Ernesto Cervini; all three of them also play on Nicky Schrire's Nowhere Girl, another of my favourite 2023 albums.)

Fortin went the extra mile with collage artist Andrew Zukerman on Cannon's vinyl release: 50 of the record jackets have one-of-a-kind artworks. They're not yet sold out. The least charitable reading of this fact would be as an indictment of marketing strategy. That'd be short-sighted, though, in my opinion – those LPs will be valuable for your entire career, and release dates are less and less important with each passing year.

Here's some more: Fortin's first album as a leader for Elastic is a solo bass album, The Latest Tech (rec. 2019). Alex Fournier, who plays with recent Vancouver visitor Dan Pitt, cut two conceptual albums for the label from a single 2021 weekend session with his group Triio: Six-ish Plateaus and Magnetic Direction.

We didn't talk about every Elastic record, but this stroll contains what came to mind for me at the end of 2024.