She has also made numerous appearances in North America as part of the Canadian Jazz Collective where she was joined on the front line by her tenor saxophonist father Kirk, a longtime fixture on the Toronto scene, and an obvious early influence.
“My dad had laid out a bunch of different instruments for me to think about choosing as my main instrument,” she said on a video call last month from her New York apartment. “Of course, there’s the option of saxophone. We had a piano in our apartment at the time. I think he had a flute. We had a guitar, maybe, but when I saw the clarinet, I was just like, ‘Oh my God, what is that?’ I just fell in love with it.”
Growing up in a musical household had other benefits, too. “I think that getting those opportunities to play next to my dad was something that really fostered my own voice and fostered my own musical development because he’s someone who, to this day, is always pushing to be better at his craft and to be better at what he does.”
While MacDonald’s instrumental voice is fluent and beguiling, it’s her range as a composer that makes the strongest impression on In Search Of… Six of the album’s eight compositions are hers, including a post-bop banger (“Last Call At Dimitri’s”), a driving, Coltrane-influenced vamp tune (“Hope”), an additive-meter workout “Eternal Return Of The Same,” and a balmy bossa (the title cut). MacDonald sails through them all with confidence and aplomb, and she seems not at all daunted by the high-octane band she assembled for the date: former Art Blakey pianist Geoffrey Keezer, bassist Ira Coleman and fellow Canadian Curtis Nowosad on drums.
“It feels for me, like a journey through time over the past decade of my life,” she said about the album’s compositions. “In terms of ‘Dimitri’s,’ that was a leaping off point where I was going to try to write what I hear—and I guess in a way that’s still what I’m doing.”
Saturday at BOP STOP, she will be joined by Alex Goodman on guitar, rising Philadelphia drummer Maria Marmarou, and Mark Lewandowski on bass.
The arrival of In Search Of… comes at an auspicious time, with the field wide open for a fresh new voice on clarinet. “I think there’s a tradition for more Dixieland or big-band swing styles of playing on our instrument,” MacDonald said. ”There’s not a huge tradition for people who are playing contemporary, maybe post-bop, styles of music.
Virginia MacDonald Quartet, Saturday, July 18, 8 p.m., BOP STOP, 2920 Detroit Rd., Cleveland. Tickets $25, available here.
In Search Of… is available from Bandcamp at this link.
For the most complete listing of jazz and jazz-adjacent events., look to Jim Szabo’s essential, weekly Northeast Ohio jazz calendar.
