(Modern Creative, Piano Jazz, Avant-Garde, Contemporary, Mainstream) [WEB] Chris Gestrin (Andre Lachance, Dylan van der Schyff) - Trio {Maximum Jazz} - 2000, FLAC (tracks), lossless

Biography:
Chris Gestrin
Since graduating with a Film Scoring degree from the prestigious Berklee College of Music in 1995, Vancouver native Chris Gestrin has become an integral part of the Canadian music scene. As a versatile pianist and multi-keyboardist, composer, engineer and producer he has appeared on almost 200 albums covering a wide range of musical styles. From avant garde electronic improvisations to greasy soul organ music, introspective piano jazz to top of the charts rock and hip-hop, Gestrin is in high demand for his eclectic talents and ability to bring a high level of musical inspiration to any situation. 8 Juno awards, 3 West Coast Music awards, 2 East Coast Music awards, Aboriginal music awards and a Canadian Folk Music award are just some of the accolades from the numerous projects he has been involved with.
As a jazz artist, Gestrin has performed on and off the stage not only with his great Canadian colleagues, but with a who’s who of the Jazz world. Gary Peacock, David ‘Fat Head’ Newman, Kenny Wheeler, Mino Cinelu, Jerry Granelli (Vince Gauraldi Trio), Petra Haden, Duke Robillard, Dave Douglas, Ben Monder, Michael Blake, Peter Bernstein, Jimmy Green, Ralph Bowen, PJ Perry, Red Holloway, and producer Lee Townsend to name a few. In the more mainstream music world, Chris has had the pleasure of working with a large number of prominent artists including Randy Bachman, D.O.A., Colin James, K-OS, Swollen Members, Jim Byrnes, Steve Dawson, Nickelback, Kelly Joe Phelps, Loudon Wainwright III, Long John Baldry, Alvin Yongblood Hart, Coco Love Alcorn and Jeff Healey.
Chris's original music has been featured in numerous television shows including The Dead Zone, Dark Angel, The L-Word, The Outer Limits, Crash Test Mommy, and Rob Feenie's New Classics. In 2007 Chris collaborated with Ocular tip media and film makers Jeff Carter and Diarmuid Conway to create a beautiful pairing of images and music in the 24 minute film ‘Inside Passage’, which was featured in film festivals throughout Canada and the United Sates. His recording, 'Stillpoint', on the Songlines label was listed as one of the best albums of 2003 in Downbeat magazine.
Currently Chris performs regularly with locals such as The Hard Rubber Orchestra, N.O.W. Orchestra, Kate Hammett-Vaughan, Peggy Lee, Brad Turner, Cory Weeds, The Night Crawlers, Jim Byrnes, and Steve Dawson and is hard at work in the studio producing new recordings for various artists across different genres including ‘AstroPop Revelation’, a new duo project joining Gestrin with Canadian vocal great and long time friend and musical cohort Denzal Sinclaire.
André Lachance
Born in Québec City, bassist André Lachance has been living in Vancouver since 1990. He has been touring and recording with Ian McDougall, The Brad Turner Quartet, Kate Hammett-Vaughan, Mike Allen and the Hard Rubber Orchestra, among others. He is also a member of the Chris Gestrin Trio and Soulstream. He has been a part of numerous CBC radio and television shows as well as theatre and film productions. He has shared the stage with Lee Konitz, Clark Terry, Benny Golson, Kenny Wheeler, Joe Lovano, Kenny Werner, Gary Bartz, Seamus Blake and Claude Ranger.
Originally from Québec City, André Lachance has been based in Vancouver since 1990. He has been a member of the Brad Turner Quartet, the Peggy Lee Band, the Guillaume Bouchard group, the Bruno Hubert Trio, the Ian McDougall Quartet/Sextet, the Chris Gestrin Trio, the Hard Rubber Orchestra, the Kate Hammett-Vaughan Quintet, Stillpoint, the Kevin Elaschuk Quartet and many more ensembles, as well as leading his own group as a guitarist, Quatuor André Lachance, with Chris Gestrin, Brad Turner and Joe Poole.
As a acoustic bassist, electric bassist and guitarist, André has toured extensively both nationally and internationally as well as recording for various labels such as Songlines, Cellar Live, Maximum Jazz, Justin Time, Spool and for the CBC and Radio-Canada. André is involved in projects in jazz, musique actuelle, funk (notably with Soulstream), pop music and has also collaborated with various dance and theatre companies. Teaching both basses and guitar at Capilano University's Bachelor of Jazz program since 1996, as well as being on faculty at the Banff International Jazz Workshop in 2004, he has also been an educator in many workshops in various high school band festivals and music camps across the country. He has also worked as a sound engineer for Radio-Canada FM in Vancouver.
Aside from being a multi-talented musician and educator, André has often had the honour of accompanying visiting international musicians, such as Joe Lovano, Lee Konitz, Benny Golson, Kenny Wheeler, Frank Morgan, Clark Terry, Harold Mabern, Dave Douglas, Julian Arguelles, Roy McCurdy, Jon Mayer, Kenny Werner, Jason Moran, Gary Bartz, Claude Ranger, PJ Perry, Phil Dwyer, Seamus Blake, Michael Blake, the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra and the NOW Orchestra with George Lewis.“Mr. van der Schyff spins out essayistic passages of texture.“ 

– New York Times
“…a master manipulator, tests and expands common notions of timbre…”

– Down Beat
- “…van der Schyff exemplified creativity in simplicity, working solely with a traditional drum kit… He remains deeply in the pocket of the great jazz drummers…”

– Musicworks
- “One of this countryʼs finest musicians.”
– Kenny Werner
Dylan van der Schyff was born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1970. He now makes his home in Vancouver, Canada, where he lives with his wife, cellist Peggy Lee, and their two children. Van der Schyff attended the schools of music at the University of Victoria and, briefly, McGill University; and he studied military drumming while with the Band of the Ceremonial Guard in Ottawa. He received his MA from Simon Fraser University and is currently engaged in graduate research in music psychology at the University of Sheffield in the UK.
As a performer and producer, van der Schyff has appeared on close to 100 recordings spanning the genres of jazz, electro-acoustic, improvised, experimental and new music; he has performed in almost every major centre in Europe and North America including international festivals in Berlin, Lisbon, Stockholm, New York, Chicago, Montreal, Trento (Italy) and Molde (Norway); and he has collaborated in numerous interdisciplinary projects involving theatre, dance and film. A partial list of notable performance and recording collaborators includes: George Lewis, Joelle Léandre, Dave Douglas, Mark Helias, Peggy Lee, Eyvind Kang, Nicole Mitchell, Brad Turner, Tony Wilson, Wayne Horvitz, Marilyn Crispell, Torsten Muller, Robin Holcolmb, Michael Moore, Ellery Eskelin, Sylvie Courvoisier, Rob Mazurek, Talking Pictures, Ken Vandermark, Paul Rutherford, John Butcher, Tobias Delius, Louis Sclavis, Evan Parker, Mark Dresser, Fred Frith, and Gary Peacock. Van der Schyff has also performed as a sideman with Roswell Rudd, John Zorn, Butch Morris, Misha Mengelberg, Georg Graewe, Oliver Lake, Wadada Leo Smith and the Kenny Werner Sextet with Randy Brecker.
Van der Schyff has served on the music faculty at Capilano University in Vancouver, Canada, since 2009. He also served on faculty at the Banff International Workshop in Jazz and Creative Music between 2002-2005, and at the Vancouver Institute for Creative Music in 2006. Additionally, he has given seminars and workshops at the University of Indiana and at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. Van der Schyff has appeared on Austrian television and Swedish radio as well as NPR, the CBC and Radio Canada. Articles about his work as an improviser have appeared in publications such as Downbeat, Jazz Times, The Globe and Mail, The New York Times, The Village Voice, The Chicago Reader, The Wire, Coda, and MUZIK.
SELECTED ARTICLES ABOUT
- Warburton, D. “Dylan van der Schyff: Back Seat Driver” in The Wire, June, 2008
- Gilbert, A. “Dylan van der Schyff: Toys R Him” in Jazz Times, November, 2005
- Jenkins, T. Free Jazz and Free Improvisation: An Encyclopedia, Volume 2 (p.365) Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004
- Hale, J. “Young Drums: 13 Who Set the Beat For The Future” in Downbeat, 2003
- Corbett, J. “Dylan van der Schyff” in The Chicago Reader, October, 2001
- Miller, M. Miller Companion to Jazz in Canada. Toronto: Mercury Press, 2001
- Buium, G. “Peggy Lee and Dylan van der Schyff: Common Language” in Down Beat, July, 2001
- Miller, M. “The Globe and Mail Young Leaders.” In The Globe and Mail, July 1st, 2000
SOME NOTABLE RECORDINGS
- Way Out Northwest, with John Butcher, Torsten Muller **** 1/2 stars All Music Guide
- Mountain Passages, with the Dave Douglas Quintet **** stars Down Beat
- The Definition of a Toy, with Michael Moore, Brad Turner, Achim Kaufmann, Mark Helias **** Jazzman, France
- Bow River Falls, with Dave Douglas, Louis Sclavis, Peggy Lee **** stars Down Beat
- Floating 1…2…3, with Peggy Lee, Michael Moore **** stars Down Beat

CD Baby:
Modern piano-trio jazz.

December 2002
Chris Gestrin
By Russell Carlson
Chris Gestrin / Rosina Li
If a pianist’s treatment of “’Round Midnight” can act as a barometer, carefully gauging a player’s actual worth on a tune impossible to fake, consider Chris Gestrin worthy. The Canadian pianist dropped Monk’s homage to the witching hour two years ago on Trio, his second disc for Maximum Jazz, and successfully tapped the standard for all its playful loneliness.
Knowledge of Gestrin’s ability to handle a standard ought to keep naysaying trad-jazz champions quiet when they hear the pianist’s debut Songlines disc, Stillpoint. Electronically generated atmospheres swell and fade as Gestrin finds his way through its dozen tracks with help from a band as reluctant to play too many notes as Gestrin himself. With its Moogs, samples and many-millisecond delays, Stillpoint sounds spacious, a quality further enhanced by Songlines’ SACD/CD hybrid pressing. And because the album lacks the head-solos-head arrangements of Gestrin’s earlier efforts, listening sort of puts you in the director’s chair. “It’s like a soundtrack to a film that doesn’t exist,” Gestrin explains. “I want people to be taken on a journey into their own imagination, and Stillpoint will be the soundtrack.”
Gestrin’s musical journey started at age six with organ lessons. “At the time I thought the piano was boring because it only made one sound,” he admits. It wasn’t Jimmy Smith’s sound Gestrin tried to coax out of the organ, however, it was the sound of German art-rockers Tangerine Dream. “I was actually into electronic music before I knew much of anything about jazz.” Gestrin, 30, discovered jazz in high school, realized that the piano is anything but boring and, upon graduating, crossed the continent to attend college at Berklee. Now back home in Vancouver, Gestrin is one of Canada’s in-demand players. Were he to move to New York City, he could make it big uptown or downtown, as his discography proves his ability to play inside or out.
But leaving home would mean leaving his Stillpoint cohorts behind and disbanding a quintet able to mix electronics and jazz in a surprisingly natural way. Witness how reedist Jon Bentley’s explorations into late-era Coltrane territory and Gestrin’s Evans/Jarrett/Ellington ruminations blend with the electronic atmosphere and you’ll be hard-pressed to deny that the band has drawn a blueprint for all other ambient jazzers to follow. Gestrin’s sparse sound spooks.
Source: http://jazztimes.com/articles/19716-chris-gestrin

Review by Scott Yanow
Pianist Chris Gestrin leads a Canadian trio a bit reminiscent of Bill Evans' groups. Bassist André Lachance is quite active in the ensembles, offering constant commentary, while drummer Dylan van der Schyff is both subtle and stimulating. The emphasis on the 11 songs of Trio (with a few exceptions) is on ballads with close interplay, introspective sections, and a feeling of near-equality between the three musicians. In addition to Evans, one hears bits of Keith Jarrett and Brad Mehldau in Gestrin's playing although he does have his own individual voice within that style. The musicians listen to each other very closely, react instantly to new ideas, and speak with one voice. Recommended.