Photos by Kort Woycheshin

Answered by Bassist Matthew Erdmann

1. Your sound blends classic free‐jazz influences like Sun Ra and Pharaoh

Sanders with modern voices such as Nate Smith and The Bad Plus. How do you balance

honoring those traditions while still pushing into new territory?

I've always enjoyed things of the past more than the present, sometimes to the point where I

feel out of touch. The reason I enjoy it so much is that you can see the moments where artists

made decisions that defined genres and styles, eventually leading to where we are now. I like

studying and reverse engineering these decisions by bringing them to the present, because

sometimes ideas that I really like get lost to time. Everyone has their own set of influences they

really like and contribute to our sound by borrowing from all eras of music. A lot of the modern

jazz influences come from the rest of the band, so they balance out my hyperfixations very

nicely. The traditions of jazz give us a good place to ground ourselves to, especially since we're

all really comfortable in jam settings. We've gotten to the point now where it's less about just

writing jazz music but using jazz as the medium for creativity with the sounds we can use. We've

done it before using different instruments like the kamale n'goni and tanpura just like how Don

Cherry and Pharoah Sanders used them in the past, and now lately we've been experimenting

using more electronic sounds. I've really been into the PC Music catelog lately. I think hyperpop

is the future of music, and I want to add those sounds to free jazz in a way that makes sense for

us as live performers.

2. Midnight Channel began as an accompaniment to the Nikka Yuko Japanese

Gardens. How did performing in that environment shape your early musical identity and

improvisational approach?

It gave us a sense of community immediately. Our first jam session at the garden was

very well recieved by park goers and that gave us a good reason to keep meeting. It was

a low pressure thing too since we didn't want to call ourselves a band yet, we were just a

rotating series of musicians who played standards in the park. Eventually we wrote our

own songs and played more local shows and thats when our lineup solidified.

3. Your debut album Gemini Sunrise reached #10 on the National Earshot! Jazz

Charts. How did that early recognition influence your momentum as a rising force in

Canada’s jazz scene?

It was really nice to know that people liked the album enough to get it there. It's hard to

know when you've been working on something for so long if it's actually good or if you're

just telling yourself that because of everything you've invested, especially for that first

album since it was entirely produced in my basement. Reaching the national charts

proved to us that we had to be doing something right, and that really got us excited for

our tours and our second album Alien Love Songs.

4. What does your writing process look like when crafting music that leaves so

much room for improvisation?

Usually we'll write sketches of songs individually and work out more details on how we'll

perform them at practice. It goes back to the tradition of playing of jazz standards, where

you follow the skeleton of the song and fill in all the details together as you play. We all

figure out our individual parts on our own just as a result of these practice runs. Most

songs have set pieces we agree to play together, while other parts are a lot more

malleable and we can explore more freely live. Some songs, like Alien Love Song and

Quick Blues took of years of practicing and reshaping before we agreed on how it should

definitively sound. Even to this day we still add new sections to our songs that weren't in

the studio recordings.

5. What do you aim to create emotionally for audiences during your shows?

My goal is to hypnotise as much as we can and challenge them a little. We always joke

that every show will be the one to finally scare fans off, but so far people have been really

enjoying it from what I can tell. The things we thought would be alienating would actually

be appreciated, and that was a pleasant surprise. When we formed I wanted us to have

the same energy live as a punk band and I think that was confusing to a lot of people at

first, but now we're able to get the audience moshing and dancing to our songs with the

same energy and thats always really cool to see. I think we give listeners enough melody

and “song-like” things to grab on to, and from there we can take them into places that

might be normally too avant-garde for a lot of people like free-jazz and noise.

6. Your first vocal track, Must Be Nice, explores themes of longing, romantic

frustration, and being overlooked. What inspired you to introduce vocals into your

previously instrumental catalog?

Even though almost all the music I write is instrumental, I usually give them showtune

lyrics. Although no one will ever know what they are, it helps me keep the phrasing in

check and gives me more of a reason to write better melodies. It was Stu, our Tenor sax,

who said the song sounded like it should have words to it, to which I revealed that it

already did. We wanted our second album to be more of a pop album so we figured it

would be a nice surprise to have both versions of the song, one instrumental and one

with lyrics that would reprise at the end. Thankfully we knew a great singer, Geneva

Murphy, who did an excellent job on the song.

7. Midnight Channel’s music incorporates elements of post‐bop, Japanese

fusion, and neo‐soul grooves. How do these diverse influences find their way into your

arrangements?

I think all of us have a deep love for Japanese Fusion like Casiopea and T-Square that

influence our initial performances, but we all listen to pretty different kinds of music

outside of jazz. I think the influences comes in pretty naturally just with everyones playing

and individual explorations, and we can make something that blends into music that is

unique to us. Everyone is really good at knowing their roles on their instrument without

stepping on anyones toes, so theres a lot of room for experimentation not just with the

notes we play but the sounds we use as well.

8. You’ve been described as an unpredictable free‐jazz collective with both

structured compositions and rapid‐fire improvisation. How do you maintain cohesion as

a group while embracing that level of unpredictability?

I'd say every one of our songs has moments and spots where we can veer off and make

something new with it live. We can all listen off eachother and adapt live to what's going

on pretty quickly in a similar way to how we work out our songs in practice. When you

jam with people for a long time you can pick up on their tendencies and use them as

signals for what you should do next. When everyone in the group can pick up on these

signals, we can make pretty big decisions live on where to take a song. At the end of the

day we know what we need to do to start and end a song, and everything in the middle is

up for grabs.