JAZZ
THE NATE WATERS QUARTET
For just over a year, saxophonist Nate Waters and drummer Bobby Wiens would get together in Nate's basement and play classic bop tunes as a minimal duo. For a winter residency, they added bassist Steve Shepard for weekly trio sessions at Calgary's Workshop Bar. These combined sessions inspired Waters to begin writing contrafacts, a supplanting of new melodies onto the extant chord progressions of classic jazz and songbook standards. Those efforts, along with the addition of guitarist Joel Untinen, culminated in the recording of the Nate Waters Quartet's Fact Contrafact EP. By manipulating the function of something familiar, Nate strives to educate listeners on the inner machinations of bebop while introducing them to his playful and off-kilter compositional and improvisational style.
You can purchase a physical or digital copy of Fact Contrafact at this link: https://bleedsweatcryrecords.bandcamp.com/
TRIBUTARY 4TET
The Tributary Quartet hail from Calgary, a city founded on the joining of two rivers. Not unlike their namesake, the group is a confluence of saxophonist Nate Waters and bassist Steve Shepard --who have been playing together in various iterations since 2008--with guitarist Joel Untinen and drummer Harry Faunt--who have been frequent collaborators since commencing their studies at Ambrose University in 2013. While all four of them contribute original music, their focus is on paying tribute to the legends of jazz that have come before them, with an emphasis on arrangements of standards from the Great American Songbook to bebop.