AST was originally conceived as
Atlantic Standard Time in 2001 to play
ambient jazz for corporate events and parties. The group
reached the apex of its career in the business background
music scene when it performed at the media launch for a new
shopping centre in Dartmouth (a performance we all remember
fondly).
Playing live muzak was not without its own unique rewards,
but eventually one of us snapped -- or maybe it was all of
us -- and we started playing covers of certain pop tunes
that we each liked. The floodgates first opened at an
Art Gallery of Nova Scotia gig during
which we spontaneously played the jazz ballad I Should
Care as a Steely Dan-inspired blues-rock shuffle. Not
long afterward, we added Radiohead’s Airbag to our
repertoire. Then came tunes by Ron Sexsmith, Hawskley
Workman, The BeeGees, and Leslie Feist. One of us also kept
bringing in vintage funk and hip-hop tracks, and this
eventually led to our covering some Herbie Hancock and
Stevie Wonder from the 1970s. From there, it wasn’t such a
big leap to covering modern-day rappers like Common and Mos
Def.
AST is a bit unusual in that we generally
rehearse weekly, year-round. Most of the music we’ve
composed has come out in those sessions. When we’re not
playing our own tunes, our musical objective is to develop
original renditions of our favourite music generally,
regardless of its originating genre or provenance. We
consider ourselves to be true to the essential tenets of
the jazz tradition: we take well-written tunes from the
current popular music repertoire and we rework them into a
jazz context. We also record live as a group in the studio
and we improvise on every tune we perform. But because we
play with electric instruments, our music has a heavier,
funk sensibility. It’s more reflective of the electric
jazz/funk/rock sound of the 1970s and early 1980s, as
opposed to the classical acoustic jazz/bop sound of the
1950s and early 1960s.
Audience response to our music continues to be favourable.
