Maude Fortier drives across Canada

Alto saxophonist and composer Maude Fortier is about to begin a 14-date Canadian tour that she booked herself in support of her debut album.

Echoes of Change features Fortier's quartet with August McKinney on piano, Juno Hamilton on bass, and Julian Ferrer on drums. Fortier, 24, graduated from McGill in May 2025 and recorded the album in December.

The quartet played a newly-opened Montreal venue called L'Entracte on Sunday night, May 17th. The first stop on their tour as advertised is a local show Wednesday at Le Balcon, a hall on Sainte-Catherine Street in Montreal. They also played an album release show there on March 25th.

"It was great. My family was there. They drove from Quebec City to come to Montreal to see the show," Fortier said in our videocall interview about the release show.

After that first date on Wednesday, the quartet will drive through Toronto, Hamilton, Sudbury, Winnipeg, Edmonton, and then into BC through Revelstoke and Kaslo. They arrive on the coast and conclude June 12th with a show at Tyrant Studios, which at publication time has yet to go live with tickets on Tyrant's website. (A Victoria date remains uncertain due to the situation at Hermann's; it will likely happen at a different venue, though possibly not on the originally-booked night of June 10th.)

But who's driving? "We're very lucky that August and Maude have the patience they have to drive us across Canada," Hamilton said in a separate videocall interview, laughing about not yet having a full licence.

Fortier credits Hamilton for the initial motivation. "I was writing the music and everything, and Juno was like, we should do a tour. We should just drive across Canada, you know? Why not? And I was like, sure, yeah, why not? Afterward, I was like, you're crazy, that's never gonna happen. And then I was like, I'm gonna give it a shot."

"So you book one or two venues, like one in Winnipeg and one in Vancouver, and then you're like, what do I put in between? That was the real puzzle. But I had people who were so generous with their time and really enthusiastic about the project, so I just kept on making calls trying to book stuff."

"It was designed in small, small steps that Maude would do every single day for a year to put this together," Hamilton said, noting that many of Canada's major jazz clubs now have 12-to-18-month lead times in booking.

McKinney is American, from Minnesota; Ferrer is from Vancouver, where Hamilton had also been a high-school jazz student, though they didn't get to know each other well before Montreal. As McGill classmates, the four played early gigs in different configurations and had mentors in drummer Darryl Green, saxophonist Camille Thurman, bassist Ira Coleman, and trumpeter Kevin Dean.

"Jackie's Way", track four on Echoes of Change, is a minor blues that Fortier wrote.

"I was playing with Kevin Dean a lot, and he loves Jackie McLean," Fortier said. "He would bring charts, while we were playing sessions, of Jackie Mac. I was like, oh, that's something, and I just started listening to it a lot. I love the way that he writes blues."

Fortier cited the McLean album Bluesnik, recorded 1961 for Blue Note.

In a review of Echoes of Change at sortiesJAZZnights, Christophe Rodriguez noted the influence of veteran saxophonist Rémi Bolduc on Fortier. She agreed: Bolduc's name was already a draw to her as a CEGEP student. "I really knew I wanted to go to Montreal or go to McGill, because Rémi Bolduc was a saxophone teacher [there], and I was looking up to him a lot," she said.

Hamilton, alluding to their three-plus years of growth since our first interview in 2022, mentioned Coleman's influence as a bassist. "To this day, I feel like I don't really have a full grasp over the incredible things that he's done in his career, what he's accomplished. I mean, he was on Tony Williams' last record with Mulgrew Miller." That album is Young at Heart, recorded 1996 in Japan and released after Williams' passing.

In recent years, Coleman has also played bass on the albums of young Montreal bandleaders, from Jacob Wutzke to Valérie Lacombe.

Most of Echoes of Change falls in this tradition. In terms of standards, Fortier wrote "Lennie by Starlight" atop "Stella" and included a duo take of "My One and Only Love" between her and McKinney. She plays soprano saxophone on "Better Luck Next Time" in a straight-eighths arrangement along the lines of "Nica's Dream", while "Uncertain Times" is a piece of 60s Herbie-esque uptempo swing. The ballads "Réverbère" (alto sax) and "Inner Voice" (soprano) represent sensitive contemporary jazz, like what I imagine Fortier would bring to the session if she were a member of the Ostara Project.

But the opening track, "Memories of BSP", departs from that tradition.

Hamilton's opening bass riff, the melody's vocal-like cadence, and McKinney's precise piano voicings take the arrangement into pop-tune territory. Ferrer guides it through multiple stages with his dynamic moves and approach to the snare drum, from rim clicks to harder hits.

BSP refers to Baie-Saint-Paul, an hour's drive from Quebec City limits. Back home, Fortier started playing saxophone around age 11. "My father and my grandfather are both musicians," she said, "a saxophonist and clarinetist, so my grandfather taught me at first." They had played in military bands.

As the most enthusiastic musician among her high-school peers, Fortier refused to back down from the intraprovincial language challenge that Montreal, and McGill in particular, posed. "You could clearly hear that I was a francophone," she said. "In some of my history classes, I would have to be like, okay, I'm gonna Google Translate this."MEREDITH 2nd

"I had to really perfect my English. It was very a challenging time, but also so motivating. I was really... I wanted to be there."

Fortier had opportunities in Baie-Saint-Paul to play music and hang out on the weekends. "It was such a nice time to be out of school and just have fun with my friends. I went back there with a friend last summer while I was writing the music, and all the memories came back to me." In returning to those memories, she wrote a defining composition for her already established quartet.

The plans for Echoes of Change got in motion around the same time as the tour, in the summer of 2025. Fortier secured a grant from Programme Jeunes Volontaires to support her work on the project over several months.

A road trip of the size Fortier is about to undertake is almost unheard of among the young generation of jazz artists, especially outside of the highly-choreographed summer jazz festival touring window. Speaking before the tour but after the planning, she conveyed gratitude while seeming to dispel any thought of it being insurmountable.

"The members of my band, we're all in our early twenties," she said. "We're like, let's do a tour. Let's just try it, you know? I have musicians who are really willing to go on the road with me and who just love playing music, and so I was like, let's do it. Like, why not?"

Hamilton couldn't wait for what next month in Vancouver promises. "I mean, no better place to end the tour, right? We're so lucky that Vancouver is such a great scene. Every year I think it just gets better and better. You see people like Lucas Dubovik, now he’s like, I see him playing all the time. I see Karl DeJong, I see Rick Son, Gordy Li. There's so many. That's just scratching the surface of great musicians. But every year, I feel like I reflect on Vancouver's scene, and I'm amazed by the level of care that's put into it."