5 Dan

Le coeur de rockeur de Dan Bigras ne cesse de s’attendrir au fil des années. Voilà qu’il lance maintenant Duos de la tendresse, un disque sur lequel il reprend ses succès, bien entouré de 13 voix féminines. De Marie-Chantal Toupin à Ginette Reno, en passant par Lise Dion et Marie-Mai, Dan Bigras n’a pas eu peur de donner de toutes nouvelles directions à son oeuvre en faisant appel à des artistes de tous les horizons, sans oublier les femmes déjà présentes dans sa vie artistique telles Laurence Jalbert et Luce Dufault. Lui et ses musiciens ont dû faire preuve d’une grande polyvalence pour s’adapter à chacune d’entre elles.

Drummer Dan Brubeck, son of the late Dave Brubeck, pays homage to his parents in a most appropriate way. He puts the proper frame around the songbook created by his mother and father over their 70-year performance career. Using the saxophone quartet format his father blazed jazz trails with, Brubeck leads his quartet through 14 Brubeck originals at Vancouver's Cellar recorded in August 2013. Bassist Adam Thomas proves to be a fine vocalist for the special material, never obscuring the pieces with technical attempts to impress. Urbane and amiable, this collection has been a long time coming and now that it is here, we can fully appreciate the art of Dave and Iola Brubeck.

Give Jim Belushi and Dan Aykroyd credit for at least one thing: the subtitle of "Big Men - Big Music" to their 2003 album, Have Love Will Travel, is pretty fun, and partially accurate. The two comedians-cum-retro-bluesmen are indeed big men, and they at the very least have a big band: the back cover features no less than 12 musicians, including the duo, begging the question of just how much does the Have Love Will Travel Revue actually pull in per gig. That's a question better settled by accountants and auditors, of course, but a lot of musicians does mean that the music at the very least sounds busy, even if it doesn't necessarily sound big. But that's really no change from Aykroyd's previous musical excursion, the Blues Brothers, who always utilized a big band to make faithful music.