Led by the award-winning composer and arranger Aaron Jensen, a cappella group Countermeasure is a unique blend of voices coming together to form some of Canada’s top young talent.
The lively group will be coming out to the Mary Winspear Centre March 15 to perform some original and cover music with a new, cool jazz infused pop style.
“It’s a mixture of the old style jazz with very complex harmonies and rich thick vocal tradition combined with sort of a newer approach of pop and funk that infuse our music with energy and excitement and really heavy rhythm …” said J-M Erlendson, general manager for the group.
The sound, he said, is unique in Canada and fairly unique for their genre, as it’s difficult to find around the world.
He said the audience too gets a chance to be part of the fun, as they like to have a big party, including them in the show.
Based in Toronto, the group formed in 2010. With there being 14 in the group, which just so happens to be the amount of letters in the name Countermeasure, it’s also a part of their first album, 14 Characters.
“We’ve got folks from all different types of professions and passions that came together. The one thing that brings us all together is our love for music, in particular our love for a cappella and jazz a cappella,” said Erlendson.
He said the idea of Countermeasure is that it’s everyone’s first love, but not necessarily their first profession.
“We really rehearsed with these people very hard and we’re very proud of the music we were able to make and particularly the combination of really inventive cover and brand new music in Canada that really drives us to be there.”
The people in the group come from all fields like teaching, software development, management consulting and more.
“It’s one of those things where if you take a slice of the population and you find the common theme of talented musician and lover and passionate music maker, you can get all sorts of folks who come from that space,” he said.
Their most recent album is Made to Measure, which Erlendson said is a conceptual departure.
He said it’s a question of what they would do live and what their show sounds like and what are the edges of what’s possible with their voices.
They worked hard with producers and engineers at Keen Music in Toronto. Erlendson said they took the edges of vocal percussion, tight harmony, cool funk and jazz riffs they could imitate with their voices and bodies pushing to the edge of what they thought was doable with a cappella.
“What we got as a result are tunes that kind of sound like James Brown,” he said.
He said the first album they were focussed on covers, while the second was very much original pieces.
Erlendson said there’s a lot of new Canadian works on their album by their resident composer, Jensen.
“A lot of the tunes on the new album are brand new Canadian compositions, but you’d never realize that they’re compositions because they sound like songs that you know and love and things that you would recognize.”
Countermeasure will perform March 15 at the Mary Winspear Centre. For ticket information call 250-656-0275.