by RUPERT BOTTENBERG | More Jazz Festival: Nicolas Repac » Four Tet » Paul Anka

“If I hadn’t gotten that commission, even though I’d always wanted to do a jazz album, who knows if it would ever have come out.” Montreal composer/producer Ramachandra Borcar, aka DJ Ram and the mastermind of Ramasutra, is talking about Steel and Glass, his soundtrack to the documentary Regular or Super by Joseph Hillel and Patrick Demers.

“It’s not necessarily a documentary on Mies Van der Rohe, the architect, but more on his buildings and how people perceived them. He did the gas station on Nuns’ Island, so there are interviews with people who work there and live around it. Then it goes into these montages of particular buildings, and that’s where the music is predominant.”

Van der Rohe’s stark and distinctive aesthetic—Westmount Square’s “big black cubes” offer an example—has held up well since his heyday in the ’50s. “His philosophy was less is more, so I knew that somehow I had to go on the minimal side of things. The obvious thing would be a Philip Glass or minimal tech-house thing, but I felt that the way it was filmed, it had a little more hipness to it.”

Thus the cool, smart jazz of the Blue Note label was the musical touchstone, though Van der Rohe apparently detested the stuff. “It wasn’t in the film, but they had an interview with one of Van der Rohe’s students, who said he’d asked Mies about going to a swing concert, and Mies said, ‘You have to be very careful about improvisation.’ It was the same thing for me—some parts were improvised, but it was still within a specific framework, because if it was too free, it wouldn’t have fit with his really meticulous organization.”

Though clearly a Borcar record, with hints of surf, Brazilian and film noir music sneaking in, Steel and Glass is a solid jazz exercise. In fact, his band for the project, the Stacked Deck, includes a host of Canadian jazz luminaries such as Frank Lozano, Jeff Johnston, Aaron Doyle and Thom Gossage. “It was pretty much first takes with these guys. It was the easiest studio sessions I ever had, and the hardest in the sense that everybody played so much cool stuff, in the end, I asked myself, ‘Who do I keep where?’”

At le Spectrum on Saturday, July 9, 9:30 p.m., $29.50

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