| Jazz |
Composer, singer, and multi-instrumentalist Don McDonald is, above all else, a poet.
On his new album he offers ten short stories—fragments of life that sometimes amuse, sometimes darken, always rendered with a painter’s eye for detail. Interwoven with these original pieces are three covers of well-known songs, each reimagined with a sensitivity that makes them feel not borrowed but inhabited. McDonald reshapes them with quiet authority, soft edges, and a warmth of phrasing that keeps his voice squarely at the forefront. His music radiates intimacy: part blues grain, part rhythmic subtlety, and part the lucid storytelling of a seasoned troubadour. Whether he is breathing new life into Bob Dylan’s One More Cup of Coffee or sketching the somber contours of Fall From Grace, McDonald’s artistry is both technically assured and emotionally unguarded. His arrangements sparkle with harmonic invention and rhythmic interplay, daring yet never alienating, accessible without being obvious.
That sense of balance owes much to his other life as a composer of film scores and choral works. Here, too, McDonald thinks in terms of landscapes, backdrops that set the scene for voices, characters, and moods. There is even, in his vocal delivery, a faint glimmer of Chet Baker: that mix of tenderness and melancholy, of poetic phrasing brushed with resignation. It’s a style that will resonate with jazz devotees and perhaps even with blues listeners, so deeply does he draw from multiple traditions. A consummate multi-instrumentalist, McDonald performs professionally on saxophone, violin, and voice, each discipline enriching the others. His lifelong devotion to choral music, cultivated from his earliest years, permeates these songs with a structural elegance and a sense of collective breath.
McDonald’s career in the choral sphere has been formidable: the two-hour opera KHAOS; Tabula Rasa, which won the Da Capo Chamber Choir’s competition for new works; and High Flight, a six-movement commission from Chor Leoni during his three-year tenure as composer-in-residence. His choral compositions have found their way into the repertoires of internationally renowned ensembles, Lyyra of the Voces8 Foundation in the UK, Finland’s Rajaton, the Vancouver Chamber Choir in Canada, the Nordic Choir of Luther College in the United States, and Cantus, also in the US. These credentials anchor his songwriting in a discipline that is at once classical and exploratory.
Yet this album feels closer to musical theater than to choral loftiness. The songs unfold like stage scenes, images unspooling in the listener’s imagination. McDonald occasionally sheds the role of singer altogether, stepping instead into that of actor, embodying the story rather than merely narrating it. The result is a collection of ten tracks that are both vibrant and timeless, their acoustic instrumentation ensuring that time will skim lightly over them without leaving a trace. His accompanying musicians perform with conviction and finesse, lending the record a consistency of tone and a richness of texture.
If there is a quibble, it lies in the production: a mix that leans a little too heavily on the low end, sometimes burying McDonald’s voice when it most deserves clarity. A gentler hand in the engineering might have allowed his vocals to rise with the nuance they so often suggest. Still, that imperfection hardly overshadows the whole.
In the end, what McDonald delivers is a deeply satisfying album, one that invites you in, keeps you listening, and leaves you, finally, with the impression that you have not just heard music but witnessed a life expressed in sound.
Thierry De Clemensat
Member at Jazz Journalists Association
USA correspondent for Paris-Move and ABS magazine
Editor in chief – Bayou Blue Radio, Bayou Blue News
PARIS-MOVE, August 23rd 2025
Follow PARIS-MOVE on X
::::::::::::::::::::::::
Musicians:
Don Macdonald – Voice, Violin, Alto Sax
David Restivo – Piano
Mike Rud – Guitar
Jill McKenna – Bass
Joel Fountain – Drums
Allison Girvan – Voice (4, 10)
Kiyo Elkuf – Tenor Sax (3, 7)
Track Listing:
Sofia’s Coming Out
Nobody Knows you You’re Down and Out
Fall From Grace
Invisible
Clementine
Sonny’s Bridge
Fate
One More Cup of Cofee
Stormy Night With You
I Cover The Waterfront