Whitehorse jazz-fusion ensemble Muster Point invites you to its weekly winter showcases with special guests each performance.
I’m always looking for ways to tie the music into the community and bring people together,”
Logan Bennett
Muster Point was named after a sign outside the band’s rehearsal space. They needed a name, and it had a nice ring to it – it was that simple. But as the band’s chemistry developed and they started working on more and more music, the name came to mean more.
“I’m always looking for ways to tie the music into the community and bring people together,” says bandleader Logan Bennett. “That’s kind of the Muster Point thing.”
The name suits the music too – most commonly referred to as a fusion project, Bennett says even that label doesn’t fully fit the band, whose sound exists at a crossroads between almost any style you could think of.
“We’re a mix of jazz, classical, and alternatively-trained musicians,” explains Bennett. “It goes through a lot of different styles, and usually the songs are longer pieces of music, so any tune could go through two or three different styles within one piece of music, so we’re trying not to get too pigeon-holed.”
Bennett, who plays piano, synth and trumpet, has been leading Muster Point for around a year and a half now. After cycling through a few different band members, he’s landed on a solid group with Wyatt Best on guitar, Jake Paleczny on bass clarinet, Ragn Royle on bass and Michel Vallières on drums.
At first, Bennett was writing a lot of music on his own, and multitrack recording it at home before presenting it to his bandmates. Over time, given the nature of the musical backgrounds he and his bandmates brought to the table, he began to write more loosely, leaving room for improvisation within the pieces, often ending up with something completely different than what he had envisioned at the start of the writing process.
“I am getting better at that,” Bennett says. “When we started, I created parts for everything and was nitpicking about every little thing. It was fun for me to write the music, but when we put it into actual live music, people felt pretty constrained by all the detail I had created. So now, in the second year of the band running, I’ve written a whole set of new songs that we’ve been playing, and I tried to keep a lot more open-ended parts in there for it to kind of evolve.”
The current lineup of Muster Point has been playing together long enough that Bennett says the members are comfortable flying by the seat of their pants, even adding flourishes and arrangements they hadn’t rehearsed during live shows.
“I am learning to be open and attentive to that input, rather than trying to be stuck in my own interpretation and my own ideas. I’m starting to be able to go into those first rehearsals and just see what happens,” he says.
“A lot of the tunes I wrote for this new series, I had only a vague concept of how they would go, more of like an intuitive sense of something. I gave it to the band and they took it in really cool directions. I’m learning to be more open to that, and I’m always surprised by what they’re able to bring to the table.”
Starting in early January, Muster Point has been playing a weekly concert series at Baked Cafe, which runs until the end of February. It is the band’s second winter showcase series at Baked, but the format of the performances is different this year than it was last year.
“We have a new guest artist every week,” says Bennett. “Last year, we had a guest who would bring their music and we would prepare their music and do a Muster Point interpretation of the guest’s songs. This time we are kind of twisting it around a little bit; we’re co-writing a piece with each guest and performing that.”
The idea to write a concert-ready song on the fly each week with a different artist was equal parts exciting and daunting for Bennett. Because of the number of people involved and the spontaneous spirit of jazz music, the band rarely has more than one rehearsal before any given show.
Starting the series off with Sarah Hamilton, Bennett told her she could bring some material to work on, or come with a clean slate and come up with something on the fly. Hamilton chose the latter option, and everyone was impressed with what the musicians were able to churn out together.
“Each guest will be different,” says Bennett. “Each guest will have a different level of comfort with that style of working and creating music. Some people really like to take their time, but I’m hoping I’ve reached out to musicians who are comfortable enough with that to make it happen.”
Last season’s guests were mostly musicians Bennett had already worked with, whereas this year he is adding another challenge by looking out for musicians he may be less familiar with.
“Maybe I’ll see someone in a show and like what they’re doing, or see a little video clip,” he says.
Muster Point performs at Baked Cafe every Thursday night from 6:30 until 8 p.m. No tickets or reservations are required, and seating is first-come-first-serve. The band asks that attendees make a donation of whatever they are able to give. Baked Cafe continues to serve drinks during the performances. Muster Point’s guest artists will be announced week by week.
“I think winter is the prime time for something like this – not that we’re having a winter right now,” Bennett laughs. “It is a really unique atmosphere in the winter.”
