Back to the source
Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007“I’ve never dug deeply into jazz as a genre. My dad is a trombone player who plays jazz, as well as in orchestras. I remember listening to him play at a very young age but any influences aren’t really conscious. We never listened to free jazz around the house; it was more along the lines of Miles Davis. Vocally I never dug deep into jazz history despite what people may hear in my voice, I guess I still have a lot to discover. I’m more interested in discovering older stuff these days than discovering new bands.” – Elsieanne.
“As a drummer you need a certain amount of technical ability to play jazz, you have to understand music as a language. I studied a lot of jazz rudiments on my own to make myself more ambidextrous as a drummer but I was never really into music theory. I just wanted to be part of a band and to play something that had emotion and that comes from the heart. I wanted to learn at least a little bit of jazz technique so I’d have more of a vocabulary and ability to play different patterns and make things interesting but really music needs to come from the heart to satisfy me. The music we do has a lot of rhythmic patterns – half jazz, half rock – but they’re always in support of the melody and emotion in a song. We like big, epic, lush orchestration.” – Stephane.
Elsiane are fans of Cinematic Orchestra’s evocative lushness and highly recommend checking them out at this year’s Montreal Jazz Festival. “I played their records so much that I destroyed them!” says Stephane.