Coastal Jazz and the TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival presents Ingrid and Christine Jensen with Ben Monder: Infinitude, June 26 at Performance Works on Granville Island. Doors: 8:30 p.m./show: 9:00 p.m. Tickets: $35, coastaljazz.ca.
While some sisters might fight over boys or clothes, Ingrid Jensen and her older sister bickered over who was going to play the trombone.
Their parents settled the dispute, on the advice of the junior school band director: Ingrid was going to play the trumpet.
Being a lefty, Ingrid clumsily stumbled through the notes while handling the horn. Her confidence took a hit. That is until she took a breath and just focused on listening to the music.
“At this point for me, it’s strictly more mental than physical. There’s this misconception that it takes a lot of strength to play it (the trumpet). It takes a lot of focus and using your ear and allowing your ear and your instrument to work together.”
By Grade 7 Ingrid was embracing the art of improvisation, thanks to a talented band director who taught her how to find the notes by ear.
Following close behind Ingrid was her another sister, Christine, who started studying the saxophone at age 12 and quickly grew to love it and “realized that she could create her own voice through that instrument.”
The sisters grew up near Nanaimo in the 1970s within close proximity to some of Canada’s finest musicians, including jazz pianist and singer Diana Krall, well-known saxophonist Phil Dwyer and blues guitarist, David Gogo.
At home in Cedar, a hippie village eight kilometres outside of Nanaimo, the girls would soak up jazz standards played by their pianist mother. Her jazz-laden record collection had all the greats: Oscar Peterson, the “First Lady of Song”
Ella Fitzgerald and famed trumpeter Louis Armstrong, “which influenced me directly of course,” says Ingrid.
As a teenager, Ingrid would pop a mixtape made by her band teacher into her Walkman, with “guys like Clark Terry and Freddie Hubbard on them,” and head on her horse into the forest or along a beach and let the jazz music overwhelm her.
Ingrid got accepted to Berklee College of Music at the right time.
“When I got there, there weren’t a lot a jazz trumpet players so I had a lot of opportunities to play,” she says.
Copenhagen came calling for Ingrid, after Berklee.
She describes the Denmark jazz scene back then as “amazing” and home to a lot of older jazz musicians she wanted to learn from. While there, Ingrid immersed herself in transcribing a lot of music – where she would take a box of cassettes and play along with the music and a variety of instruments to get the feel for the phrasing.
Ingrid toured with the Vienna Art Orchestra before moving to New York. She has made a home base in the jazz hotbed for 25 years, jumping from one collaboration or project to the next.
On the subject of a dream collaboration, Ingrid says many jazz artists she admires are getting older and the window of opportunity is closing.
“But I kind of hit my mark early when I got to play with (American swing and bebop trumpeter) Clark Terry,” she explains.
Nominated for several Junos, Ingrid, who was 23 at the time, nabbed the prize for her first album, Vernal Fields, which was a collaboration with a couple of her Berklee teachers.
Asked what the award was for, “Best … (she pauses for about a second) Mainstream Jazz Album,” says Ingrid, reading the inscription on the Juno resting within eyesight in her Westchester home.
She clearly remembers that awards night in Hamilton, Ont., in 1996.
“And you want to know something really hilarious – I had no idea who (“You Oughta Know” singer) Alanis Morissette was. That’s how in a bubble I was,” recalls Ingrid.
In October 2006, Ingrid performed on Saturday Night Live, as part of a band backing British R&B artist Corrine Bailey Rae.
“It was just one of the days you don’t forget because you see everyone running around Lorne Michaels,” she says of her stint on the iconic TV show.
One of Ingrid’s most frequent and closest collaborators is her saxophone playing, composer sister Christine. Her opus, Treelines, by the Christine Jensen Jazz Orchestra won her the 2011 Juno Award for Contemporary Jazz Album of the Year.
Christine has collaborated with a diverse array of musicians, is currently conductor of the Orchestre national de jazz de Montréal and teaches at Université de Sherbrooke and McGill University.
So where does Christine draw inspiration from for her compositions?
“I just want to dance, so rhythm from all over the world,” she says. “I also draw from my environment, relationships, and lots of fiction, along with political events. I believe that musicians have the freedom to raise their voices with causes that concern them. Nina Simone is my hero for that.”
Christine recently toured internationally, including India, with an eight-month-old baby in tow. Of all the places she’s performed, Mexico’s appetite for jazz music surprised Christine the most.
“Ingrid and I did a national tour in 2008, and we were overwhelmed with the love and joy we got back through the energy of the audience,” says Christine.
The sisters will reunite on the West Coast later this month for the TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival, as part of a quintet. They will be joined by Ingrid’s husband, Jon Wikan, on drums, renowned guitarist Ben Monder, and Fraser Hollins on bass.
The intimacy of those familiar relationships enhances the experience on stage.
“There’s so much history there between all five of us – we actually don’t have to say much. We really just listen and it actually comes down to who knows the music the best,” says Ingrid.
The audience can expect to hear songs from the new album Infinitude, described as having the “rare distinction of being able to simultaneously combine tranquility with rhythmic vibrancy, coalescing in a near hypnotic fusion of tone and colour,” according to AllAboutJazz.com.
No two executions of the songs are the same, thanks to the improvisational factor.
“Sometimes we play it and it’s soft and tranquil and sometimes we play it and it’s wild and crazy – depending on the audience’s energy,” explains Ingrid, who is excited to take the songs to “new places.”
