Byron Wong

The busy Dominelli is an Edmonton jazz scene fixture

Sandro Dominelli Trio CD release
At the Yardbird Suite, Feb. 19 and 20

Funny that Sandro Dominelli should sound almost apologetic about the fact his latest recording has taken so long to come about. It’s not as though the Edmonton-based drummer, band leader and producer has been sitting around playing Xbox for the past four years.

Just take a look at the events section of his website and, starting with a photo of Dominelli with Joan Rivers, you’ll get a snapshot of the energy and adaptability on which Dominelli’s reputation as an artist and performer, now approaching its third decade, was built. Recent weeks have seen him zipping between gigs as sideman and leader up and down the province, and soon he’ll head off for a gig at the Vancouver Olympics.

At present, though, Dominelli’s mind is on his new album, the fourth released under his name and the first since 2006’s ambitious Passages. Recorded in New York City last fall, The Alvo Sessions unites the
drummer with guitarist Rez Abbasi and electric bassist Chris Tarry. But more than an inaugural meeting of musical minds, Dominelli says the the disc represents an exciting moment in his life.

“The inspiration was love,” says the gregarious drummer.

While getting ready to record in the Big Apple, Dominelli also got engaged and has since been married. He credits his spouse with encouraging him to go back to the studio as leader after a long stretch of contributing his talents to other people’s projects. The experience let him reflect on his musical struggles and triumphs and to feed off the tremendous energy of New York City’s jazz tradition.

“I chose to record later in my trip and the reason why is, I wanted to check out a lot of music, and that was very inspirational,” Dominelli says.

The Alvo Sessions’ eight tracks were captured in just two long days in the studio after Dominelli spent five months on preproduction in Edmonton. Though he’d played a few times with bassist Tarry, who also held down the low end for multiple-award-winning Canadian fusion supergroup Metalwood, the drummer had never shared a stage with guitarist Abbasi, known as a band leader and player with his wife, Punjabi folksinger Kiran Ahluwalia. Despite their lack of collaborative history, Dominelli knew he had the right players to return as a band leader.

“The music in my head was jazz meets Latin meets Indo-Pakistani music and I think at points we achieve that, then at times we sound like a straight-ahead jazz trio and at times like a progressive rock band. I’ve learned to accept that what I’m doing now is where I am today and where I’ll be in two years, I don’t know. But I’ve learned to accept it and embrace it.”

The album certainly reflects a diversity of influences and accomplishment of the performers, ranging over three Dominelli originals, two from collaborator Marc Beaudin, one from Tarry, one by Keith Jarrett and Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game.”

“Sounds like a band, eh? I’m pretty proud of that,” he enthuses. “But at rehearsals, we ended up doing more talking than we did actual playing. There’s a lot of commonality between us. We grew up with the same kinds of music and we’re around the same age, so we could talk Led Zeppelin or Madonna or Bill Frisell and all be on the same page. Maybe that’s why we sound like we’re a band.”

Dominelli says he’s looking forward to reuniting with his “band” for the CD release this weekend, with local piano phenom James Clarke and his trio in the opening slot. It’s particularly meaningful for the drummer to launch his new CD from the Yardbird stage, a site essential to his creative growth.

“The Yardbird Suite has been an amazing place for me and my peers for years and years. They bring in quality acts from all over the world and we get the opportunity sometimes to back them up. It’s the same language, music, but you learn, you know, Alberta compared to Newfoundland, there’s an accent, there are idiosyncrasies within that language, and that’s the beginning of us as Alberta jazz musicians, getting the experience to work with different artists.”

Dominelli is also pleased to be helping out the Youth Emergency Shelter Society by donating a dollar from every CD sold at the release party.