The North Island Concert Society hosted an evening of Latin Jazz with Rachel Therrien at the Port Hardy Civic Centre on April 6.
Therrien is a French-Canadian trumpet player who hails from Gaspésie. She studied her craft at the Instituto Supérior de Arte, in Havana, Cuba twenty years ago and since has won major prizes such as the 2015 TD Grand Prize Jazz Award at the Montreal International Jazz Festival, the 2016 Stingray Rising Star Award and has been nominated as Best Jazz Producer at the Independent Music Awards 2018. She has also published 5 records and received rave reviews from magazines and newspapers all over North America.
I guess it’s a thing in the music world, that women don’t seriously play the trumpet. When she was studying, Therrien illustrated how she was discouraged from playing the trumpet because of her sex. Although she said she had great respect for her teachers, she was determined not to listen to them. It would certainly have been a great loss if she had.
The trumpet is generally associated with more forceful masculine sounds, such as in Reveille—that well-known song for getting soldiers out of bed—or, as in the introduction to Deep Space Nine with its shots of a gigantic space station near a giant wormhole in the outer reaches of space. Therrien’s handling of the trumpet, however, brings out the subtler, more complex, more flowing dimensions of the instrument, which may be the direct benefit of being played by a woman.
The sounds that comes out of her trumpet can range from being very mellow to being super intense, with all kinds of differing intensities in between. It's amazing that an instrument with only three little valves to press can produce such a wide range of sounds. It seems as if every little note matters with her.
Although Therrien’s trumpet was the centrepiece of her group, she didn’t need to “steal the show.” She could step back and allow the spotlight to fall on her bandmates from time to time who also seemed to have a similar type of sensitivity and mastery in their musical styles. Rather than simply being “background music” for Therrien, the personalities of the different instrumentation could all be “felt” in their own right. They intertwined in “eddies of sound,” mixing, intertwining, flowing together in one very complex compositional mix. The overall effect was of a laid-back but jovial “break out the bubbly” party atmosphere—which is wholly appropriate for Latin Jazz.
Therrien loves the trumpet, and it shows. The trumpet is like an appendage to her, a part of her body and soul. For the last piece, Therrien let her hair down and got a little silly. She was playing around with her instrument like a kid would, making kissing noises, making farting noises (to much laughter), even playing a bit of Reveille, and then playing while mingling with the audience. You really need to know what you are doing if you can “play around” with your instrument like that.
Therrien has an amazing ability to exploit the trumpet to its fullest potential.
