Harry Bartlett Trio - Wildwood (2022)

Canadian guitarist and composer Harry Bartlett is originally from British Columbia, but now lives and works in Toronto, Ontario. However, Harry works not only here, tirelessly touring in various parts of the country and performing at various jazz festivals. In 2018, he founded a trio that also included bassist Caleb Kluger and drummer Harry Vetro. In the same year, the band released their debut EP, The Harry Bartlett Trio. The premiere of Bartlett and his trio's new work, the album Wildwind, which preceded the release of two singles, is scheduled to take place in mid-November 2022 in Toronto.
Work on this album went on for six months on the small secluded island of Gambier, located near the largest city of British Columbia, Vancouver. The beautiful natural views and a certain isolation from the outside world created ideal conditions for working on the music that Bartlett composed for this project. Since childhood, folklore trends in music have been close to him, which, combined with a jazz improvisational basis, formed the foundation of nine compositions included in the Wildwind program.
The sound space of the album is as spacious as the sky above Gambier. Bartlett is nowhere chasing the number of notes per unit of time. The opening piece of Burgess Falls sounds solemn, like a kind of chorale in a temple of nature. The fabric of the music in The Incident at Blood Bay is equally delicate and delicate, where the leader's guitar line is delicately tinted by Kluger's bass line. But there is a place in the album for plays of a different nature. Circle of Moss and Fire Smoke is designed in much more energetic tones, and in the short Sailing Over Troubled Waters (the title inevitably recalls the classic work of Simon and Garfunkel), after a stormy intro of percussion, the guitar dynamics seemed to reach the climax of the entire program. By the way, Harry Vetro got a good opportunity to demonstrate his drumming technique in another piece: Queen of Surrey. But in the final piece of Lachesis, a modular synthesizer, at which Caleb Kluger was sitting, sounded more appropriately than anywhere else in a duet with a guitar. If we try to briefly characterize the style of Wildwind, I would call it jazz impressionism: quite unlike the music of Debussy or Faure, the music of Harry Bartlett is just as imaginative and emotional.