Archive for category: Music

Allen approaches songwriting—and co-writing—holistically. She prefers to come up with the melody, lyrics and chords all at the same time, rather than try writing to somebody else’s track. “It feels like the emotion has been taken out of it,” she admits. “For me, in some way, I know people that are great at doing that, and they can write great, great songs that way, but my entry point to writing a song is finding the emotion in it from the very beginning. I have to story-tell from the early seed and then build everything around it.” Allen cites someone like John Prine as a guiding songwriting force, given how his stories are so concise and “each line needs to be there for the next one to make sense.” “And if one line was taken out, the story wouldn’t be conveyed,” she continues. “That’s how important each one is. Each part of it is so important to me that I like to be on the ground floor of it.”

Canary Islands is an archipelago of seven islands off the Atlantic Sahara coast, only one hundred miles away from the African continent, however its people and culture has greatly influenced by its strategic geographical position, halfway among three continents. Its importance as a shipping route between Europe and America has a very long history: Christopher Columbus provisioned water and food in the Canary Islands on his voyage of discovery of the New World.

Ingrid Jensen (left) has been blazing a path in the jazz world since before she even graduated from Montreal’s McGill University in 1994. While completing her undergrad studies in jazz performance, the saxophonist and composer penned songs for the debut album of her sister, trumpeter Ingrid Jensen, and the resultant Vernal Fields won a Juno Award. The sisters continue to feed off one another’s creative energy, as evidenced on the Christine Jensen Jazz Orchestra’s recent release Harbour (Nettwerk/Justin Time)