Textures in tandem

By RUPERT BOTTENBERG / Montreal Mirror

Karkwatson is two bands, two tongues and two songbooks at once

Reaching Montreal’s Patrick Watson abroad is generally an easy thing—unless he’s recording. Repeat calls to his recent session in Paris were answered by befuddled French techs, promising he’d finish a particular passage in two minutes, then four, then six…

But quality demands dedication, as Watson proved with his band’s debut album, Close to Paradise. He says the next record will be very different, and describes the studio across the Atlantic where he’s laying down some tracks as being “in this kinda weird old mansion-house here. It’s kind of a trippy thing.”

As the album will be, no doubt, but the pressing matter at hand is the trio of concerts—two here, one in Quebec City—that his band and locals Karkwa are playing together. By “together,” I mean literally. Nine musicians on stage, jamming on tunes from the catalogues of both bands plus a pair cooked up specifically for these gigs under the joint moniker Karkwatson.

“We’re all friends and have done a lot of gigs with them,” says Watson of Karkwa. “They’re really good musicians, so it should be good news. We just thought it would be fun, you know, no big deal. We’d put a show together and try it for fun—nothing too crazy. We’ve done a radio show together before.

“We have two days of crazy rehearsals to orchestrate it. Probably the best parts of the stuff is the two drummers and a percussionist, which means we can open up to having marimba in there and stuff like that, which is fun. It lets Robbie’s hands get free, he can jump on the marimba or whatever. Having two drummers and a perc really opens up the arrangements. Also, the piano players in the two bands are really similar, so we can do Philip Glass-type dual-piano stuff.”
The similarities between PWB and Karkwa are striking. With a piano as the foundation, both acts are expansively emotive, accenting texture, tone, atmosphere and scope as much as the math and mechanics of melody. The distinctions, though, aren’t negligible.

“Karkwa is definitely more of a rock band than we are, I think. Their songs are more of a rock thing, and obviously they’re French as well. There’s also the musicianship—the drummers in both bands are very different. Karkwa’s drummer [Stéphane Bergeron] really holds it down while Robbie [Kuster, of Patrick Watson Band] is a bit more loose and crazy. Pretty different feels in those types of zones.”

At le National on Friday and Saturday, June 13–14, 9 p.m., $25