Kaputt-core

Zach Schonfeld on the Toronto indie scene that's making smooth-jazz sound radical.

In the late 2000s, Joseph Shabason was, by his own account, a self-loathing saxophonist. The multi-instrumentalist had studied jazz performance at the University of Toronto, but now he wanted nothing to do with the genre. He yearned to be in a successful band and play cool festivals. “I thought jazz was this thing that was stale and dead and not vital,” Shabason says. “The way forward was to go and play pop music.”

Then Dan Bejar, lead singer of Destroyer, invited him to play on the Canadian band’s landmark 2011 album, Kaputt. Bejar asked him to bring his saxophone to the studio, Shabason recalls, “and then essentially got me to improvise for, like, three hours.”

When Kaputt came out, it was unlike any previous Destroyer album: a glossy immersion in the jazz-rock and sophisti-pop textures of the 1980s. It sounded perversely, irresistibly slick, like its creators had found a Midnight in Paris-esque portal that lets you snort cocaine with Roxy Music in 1982, and Shabason’s sultry sax solos were central to this new sound, luxuriating in the velvety grooves of tunes like “Downtown” and “Song for America.”

At first, Shabason felt embarrassed at being an accomplice to such lite-jazz gaudiness. Then he toured the world with Destroyer, and critics and fans alike hailed Kaputt. “Slowly but surely, it allowed me to be honest with myself about what I really like, and that has led me to where I am now,” he says. 

Within a few years, Shabason was playing on another breakout indie record, War on Drugs’ Lost in the Dream. Elsewhere, the once-maligned saxophone reached new heights of image rehabilitation after M83’s “Midnight City” and Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Run Away With Me.” But lately, to my ears, the influence of Kaputt has been reverberating more keenly, and more interestingly, in the music emanating from Toronto’s indie community, where a thriving scene of musicians is embracing and arguably subverting the timbres of smooth jazz, New Age, and ’80s soft rock in an experimental context.

Nearly 15 years after Kaputt, Toronto artists like the composer Masahiro Takahashi, the choir-trained singer-songwriter Dorothea Paas, the endlessly inventive group Bernice, the supergroup Fresh Pepper, and Shabason himself are channeling unabashedly smooth, adult-contemporary sounds into music that feels creative and fresh. 

As critics, we have been conditioned to believe that regional scenes defined by distinct stylistic ideas are a thing of the past; that internet subcultures are the only musical scenes that now matter. But that’s not true. Even in a fractured world, community matters.

As a critic, as well as a fan, I’ve become fascinated by this music—its luminescent vintage glow; the way it flirts with the cheesiest textures imaginable and dares you to flinch. This is music that would sound equally at home on a meditation VHS tape from the early ’90s or during a Bandcamp deep dive in the 2020s. It’s a recognition that “cool” and “uncool” are not meaningful signifiers when you’re middle-aged and making music that you believe in. 

Shabason, who is 43, says he didn’t hear some of the foundational music that shifted his musical approach (Hats by the Blue Nile, Steve McQueen by Prefab Sprout, anything by avant-garde composer Jon Hassell) until his mid-30s. While making the Fresh Pepper album, keyboardist Thom Gill brought in an old Yamaha Motif keyboard from the ’90s, which helped breed the album’s vintage-lite sound. “When it felt right, it felt right,” Shabason says. “I think none of us were trying to be cool anymore.”

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