Skip to content

Elizabeth Shepherd takes musical journey through Montréal

Musician spent several years researching history of city's neighbourhoods for project

The idea of home and a sense of belonging is at the heart of Elizabeth Shepherd’s latest project, MONtréal.

The notion of being attached to a specific place is something that has been on the musician’s mind for some time. Despite growing up in various locations and touring extensively throughout her career Montréal is the place she always seems to return to.

“Montréal has this gravitational pull and feels like home for some reason,” she says. “In spite of that I still feel a little outside. People say, ‘Where are you really from?’ My accent is not Québécois and so I started out wanting to investigate this idea of home. Who feels at home here? Do other people who claim that Montréal’s their home also feel a little bit on the outside? I was curious about that and I guess I was somewhat motivated by my own desire to find a home.”

Shepherd, usually can be found sitting behind a keyboard on stage, combining structured compositions with hard-driving improvised music. She’s recorded an album of jazz standards (Rewind) but most of her music is original material. Her last release, The Signal, was nominated for the Polaris Music Prize as the Best Canadian Album of 2014.

MONtréal started off as Shepherd’s “next album” four years ago but over time evolved into a much more ambitious project involving a book and film as well as the music.

She started doing interviews to learn more about the culture and history of the city. Each song on the album is a poetic portrait of a specific neighbourhood based on research and interviews she did with people connected to the location.

After she was well into the project Shepherd realized that the songs were all within a five-kilometre radius of each other.

“If you put them on a map you could actually walk through the city in real-time with a pair of headphones listening to them.”

The opening song, “Tio’tia:ke,” (the Mohawk word for Montréal, “where the currents meet”) serves as an introduction to the entire project with the lyrics naming regions of the city in an introductory mantra:  “Homa, Jean Talon, The Point, Mile End, Le Plateau, The Ghetto, Le Village, Ville Marie, Verdun, Outremont, The Main, NDG, Park Ex, Chinatown, Ville Emard, Little Burgundy. Moniang, moniang  Dénommé Tio’tia:ke.”

The album is bilingual but most of the tracks are sung in French, a first for Shepherd on record.

In telling Montréal’s story she wanted to go off the beaten path of tourist brochures and official history to focus on less well known areas.

 

 

“I’m not a historian. I’m a people person and I’m curious about oddities rather than historical facts,” she says. “I interviewed people on my phone as voicemails or I would just take notes at other times. I had reference points and then from there I chose 10 of the most compelling stories and decided to write a song for each.”

Most of the interview subjects were chosen at random although there were a few people and places that were specifically sought out.

“For the most part it was, ‘I’m just going to go talk to someone and then trust that it will lead to something else,’ and sure enough it did. One person I wanted to speak to was Oliver Jones because I wanted to know more about the jazz scene from back in the day. A lot of the songs and a lot of the walk move through Little Burgundy – which is the heart of English black Montréal where jazz really started.”

 It wasn’t until near the end of the project that Shepherd finally got her chance to talk to Jones. For whatever reason there was always something that came up but one morning she got on a plane for Montreal after a gig in Toronto and ran into the jazzman by accident.

“I got on the flight the next morning and walked to my seat and sitting in the seat next to me was Oliver Jones. It was just wild, I had goosebumps. He said, ‘I wasn’t even supposed to be on this flight. I just caught the last seat on the flight this morning I had to get home for an emergency.’ The flight was delayed and it ended up being a two-hour discussion and he was incredibly generous. I took so much away from it but the thing that really stayed with me was that he only started doing his own music when he was in his 50s and prior to that he had done all kinds of other things that were music related like MCing for a dance band and things like that so it just felt like I needed that moment. He had no idea how much he encouraged me, in every sense.”

In speaking with Jones and other elders of the Anglo black community Shepherd learned the significance of the Union United Church and the Negro Community Centre as cultural hubs in Little Burgundy. There was sort of a saints and sinners duality in the neighbourhood between the church-going community on the one hand and jazz club culture. People usually stayed in one camp or the other but there were a few who crossed over from the church like Jones and Oscar Petersen. They learned music at the church and the NCC and then ended up going to the clubs at very young ages to sit in with bands at the after-hours clubs. The Young Petersen would sneak out of his bedroom on the second floor and scale down the pipe at the side of the house to go to the jazz clubs. The after-hours clubs were like a jazz school, the best kind of school, the real deal.

The saints and sinners dialectic of Little Burgundy plays out in Shepherd’s tune “The Good Lord’s Work.” 

There was no set formula during the research phase of MONtréal the only real parameter was to talk to people.

“La Boxe” was initiated after Shepherd learned that historic Atwater Market in Le Plateau-Mont-Royal had been through many transformations over the years. At one point it operated as a boxing ring and Shepherd contacted boxer Deano Clavet to learn more about its history.

MONtréal was released digitally on Nov. 16 with the book, film and a vinyl edition of the music scheduled for release on Feb. 8, 2019. Last month Shepherd took the new material out on the road with her band including a gig at Lions Bay House Concerts on Nov. 20. The tour included the first time they had performed the music with the videos live. Not all of the videos are used in a live performance although they all are part of the composite film.

“We have about eight videos that we perform with,” says Shepherd. “A few of them include me singing. We didn’t want to be married to a format – as jazz musicians that can get tricky and not much fun, so we don’t perform with those ones. I’ve also found it’s a little too much sometimes to be dividing our attention between the band and the screen so we sort of intersperse moments of video with moments of just music.

“I thought initially we would just play the album start to finish and realized that gets boring for jazz musicians and I think if an audience sense that it’s boring then you’ve lost them so we switch up. I want to tell stories between so there’s that pause between songs to frame everything and contextualize and then continue.”

As they toured across Canada the set order changed each night. Technical difficulties meant they couldn’t show any videos in Ottawa but they were part of the mix the next night in Montréal.

“If you change the set order you have to change the videos too in advance just to make sure they all line up. We’re experimenting with stuff like ‘does the trumpet player oversee the video or do I do it?’ The guys are really involved and are all onboard with the project. They’ve been super helpful just overseeing and managing the whole visual component. We’re not dealing with a team that will look after the technical aspects. We’re doing it ourselves, so it’s a bit of an adjustment but it’s great. It’s really fun.”

Every week until the official launch date in February 2019 a new video from the MONtréal project will be released online. “Jedilka” the third in the series came out this week. Shepherd will return to the West Coast for a show at the Murray Adaskin Salon in the Canadian Music Centre on March 10, 2019. For more information visit elizabethshepherd.com.

 

Elizabeth Shepherd Discography:

Start To Move (Elizabeth Shepherd Trio, Do Right Music, 2006)

Besides: Remixes B-Sides (Do Right Music, 2007)

Parkdale (Do Right Music 2008)

Heavy Falls The Night (Do Right Music, 2010)

Rewind (Pinwheel Music/Linus Entertainment, 2012)

The Signal (Linus Entertainment, 2014)

MONtréal (Pinwheel Music, 2018)