The result is a serious groove

The Montreal trio Byproduct is experimental enough to attract a young audience without compromising the essentials of jazz

Paul Wells
Monday, April 28, 2003

MONTREAL - Except for its wood-burning oven and irresistible marinated chicken, there's never been much to distinguish the Bistro Duluth from a dozen other quiet neighbourhood hangouts in Montreal's bohemian Plateau Mont-Royal. Until Byproduct set up shop there.

Byproduct is the Wednesday-night band at Bistro Duluth, but its reputation is starting to extend well beyond the Plateau.

Its members -- the brothers Jim Doxas on drums and Chet Doxas on tenor saxophone, along with bassist Zack Lober -- started playing there when they were still undergraduates in McGill University's jazz program.

Over the past two years they've become a formidable trio, and now there is documentary evidence. For months the guys sold copies of their debut CD, Byproduct for $10 a pop out of their instrument cases. But now it's distributed by Fusion III and available at finer record shops across the nation. It is an extraordinarily assured piece of work.

Sonny Rollins essentially invented the modern tenor-sax trio during a night at the Village Vanguard in 1957. (The results were released by Blue Note under the handy title, A Night at the Vanguard.) The sound he heard -- boisterous, irreverent, harmonically liberated because there was no pianist on hand to frame the chords -- has become a robust lineage in the hands of Joe Henderson, Dewey Redman, Joe Lovano, Branford Marsalis and others. It is high but accurate praise to say you can hear echoes of all those men when Chet Doxas plays.

On a recent Wednesday night at the Bistro, Byproduct also extended a flirtation with electronic instruments that's barely apparent on the CD. There's hardly room for the three musicians on a makeshift bandstand at the back of the room, but Chet Doxas added a rack of effects, knobs and pedals. Between solos, he'd tune in a phantom talk-radio signal, heavily distorted, that served as a spur for brother Jim's drum grooves. During some of his solos, he'd channel his sax through the effects, splitting his notes, creating repetitive loops like the tortured ghost of a big-band horn section.

For one tune Jim Doxas picked up an aluminum baking tray with a guitar pickup taped to the bottom. He drummed with his hands while his brother distorted the signal from the tray with his rack of effects. The result sounded less like pop music than the experiments of mad doctors toiling in basement labs, and it would have been horribly contrived if it didn't maintain the groove that makes Byproduct such a satisfying band.

That groove is the work of Lober and Jim Doxas, and they take it seriously. "They practise playing time a lot -- no solos, just time," the saxophonist said of his bandmates between sets.

Lober is the easiest guy in the band to miss, because he's not part of a brother act and because he takes care of the music's bottom, not its surface. But he is as impressive an addition to the Canadian jazz talent pool as the brothers: A resolute advocate of the bass's big low notes, with a minimalist bent influenced by Charlie Haden and a rolling, implacable insistence in his quarter-note line that recalls Ron Carter.

Without compromising the essential sound of jazz, Byproduct maintains an irreverence and experimentalism that make the band accessible to the young audiences at the Bistro. The Montreal Jazz Festival has got the message: Byproduct will be playing an indoor concert at this summer's edition. So have my colleagues at the Globe, Toronto Star and La Presse, who were singing the CD's praises even before it was widely available. I like to be first with the news, but just this once there is something quite satisfying about hopping on to a critical bandwagon.