Saxophonist Jason Sharp Shares “Gates of Heaven” Single and Experimental Film

Montréal-based saxophonist, Jason Sharp is no stranger to the local experimental/improv scenes, mainly exploring eletcro-acoustic and durational music, plus a variety of jazz, avant and contemporary music ensembles. The artist’s new 18-minute-long single, “Gates of Heaven,” marks his first since 2018’s Stand Above The Streams and is accompanied by an experimental film by Guillaume Vallée.

Commenting on the news, Sharp shares, “this recording captures a solo bass saxophone performance in the Gates of Heaven, a small synagogue in Madison, Wisconsin. After an exhaustive recording session elsewhere, I visited the synagogue en route to the airport to quickly record a solo piece. The engineer and I had only a couple of hours to capture something before catching our flight home to Montreal. Microphones were set up at varying distances throughout the synagogue and I improvised a solo piece using the acoustics of the space.

We had just enough time to record what became an 18-minute multi-tracked piece. Each layer was a first take and a response to the previous. It began to rain heavily towards the end of our session audibly rattling the synagogue, we tore down the mics, and hurried to the airport. Taking this fleeting moment for myself to play in this beautiful resonant space was both nourishing and revitalising. I returned to this recording when the pandemic hit in mid-March as a way to focus my attention on something positive and future-driven. Listening back to this acoustic document during this unprecedented time, I once again felt the support this space had provided – and was reminded of the fragility that improvised music can often reveal and the strength it can restore.”

Guillaume Vallée adds, “along with the musical beauty of the piece, the context of recording was an inspiration to me. When Jason explained to me that he recorded the piece in a place of worship, I imagined something soft & dark, some sort of suggested figurative visual ambiance. After listening obsessively for days, I began to work on a three-part narrative structure that follows the music’s progression. Everything comes from Super8 images that I shot years ago and got processed and scanned during isolation. Flowers, walls from the Middle Ages, a church – in colour and black & white that have then been heavily processed through analog video tools. I wanted the images to be sculpted by the music, as a pure depiction of the emotional states of mind this piece puts me in.”

Artwork for “Gates of Heaven” by Jason Sharp