Murray F. Lightburn – Once Upon A Time In Montréal

27th February 2023 · 2020s, 2022, Jazz, Music

As a longtime fan of The Dears, I’ve always enjoyed the melancholy music and Bowiesque / Morriseyesque / Albarnesque croon of frontman Murray Lightburn. Even so, this is something I never expected from the creator of apocalyptic albums like Degeneration Street and No Cities Left.

His forthcoming solo album Once Upon A Time In Montreal is a smooth slice of lounge jazz, typified by this title track.
It’s an elegy for his recently deceased father, written while he was grieving for a man whom he describes as having been “almost a complete stranger” throughout his life.

Lightburn Snr was a jazz musician, whose ghost is conjured in this song with a soaring sax solo from Frank Lozano – one of an ensemble of Montreal jazz musicians playing on the album.

The youngest brother of three, Murray says his father “was almost a complete stranger to me. I could almost count the conversations we had, and none of them were very meaningful.

“I never knew how he felt about my career or the things I’d achieved – all of which I got from him.”

Lightburn’s Snr, who came to Canada from his native Belize to reunite with his teenage sweetheart, was a saxophonist who worshiped Coltrane.
He abandoned music when he became a born-again Christian but picked up his sax again in the 2000s to play on two Dears songs.

As soon as Lozano finished his solo, says Lightburn, “I knew at that moment how much my dad would love this record. Even if he never told me, I know that it would be on repeat in his car if he was still with us and driving around.

“That was my motivation—to make something I know he would love… not indie rock.”

As well as Lozano, the album features an array of Montreal jazz players alongside Dears drummer Jeff Luciani, distilling the passion and intensity of that band into gentle arrangements that feature an orchestral section, drawing on late-’60s, early-’70s folk/jazz/pop – Dionne Warwick, Nick Drake, Bill Withers, Serge Gainsbourg, Al Green.

After his father’s death, Murray’s 86-year-old mother started revealing tender details of their life together. “She painted a portrait of a man that I had never met in my life,” he says. “I then pieced the story together.”