Olive branches. Rays of light in woodlands. The smell of rained-on earth after a summer downpour. Each of the five virtuosos that make up ARTEMIS – an outfit so brilliant they’ve just topped ‘Jazz Group of the Year’ in the DownBeat Readers Poll for the second year running – had gone off, alone, to write new material. The compositions they then brought back for workshopping were thoughtful, compelling and utterly unique. But most of their titles, and all their sentiments, were rooted in nature. 

“Which isn’t surprising,” says the Canadian pianist Renee Rosnes, who founded the group back in March 2016 in Paris, originally in celebration of International Women’s Day. “All of us love being outdoors. Three of us come from the Pacific Northwest; we miss the ocean, mountains and forests. 

“We miss being among trees.” A smile. “Trees symbolise the potential of people to ascend to the higher reaches of the spirit. They’re reminders of the state of mindfulness that comes with being in tune with our surroundings.” 

They called their new glorious 8-track album “Arboresque”; that is, ‘like a tree’. It’s a phrase that – at least to this writer – implies something communal, embracing, warrior-woman-like. “I like that,” says Rosnes, talking to me on a screen backdropped by shelves crammed with vinyl (jazz, rock, classical, Brazilian; she’s a total Brazilophile) in the New York home she shares with her husband and collaborator, pianist Bill Charlap. 

“It’s fascinating to me that some languages have a single word to describe what in English might take several sentences. ‘Komorebi’, the composition by Noriko [bassist Noriko Ueda], is a Japanese word meaning ‘sunlight through leaves’. [Tenor saxophonist] Nicole Glover’s piece is titled ‘Petrichor’, for the aroma of soil when it rains during a dry spell.”

‘Olive Branch’, the tune written and arranged by Rosnes, is a Latin jazz-edged ode to the ancient, steadfast tree that features in Greek mythology (“Leto, the mother of Artemis and Apollo, gave birth to her twins under an olive tree”) and whose branches represent gestures of peace and friendship. 

“Last year we toured a lot through Spain and France and saw many magical olive groves,” says Rosnes of ARTEMIS, whose current incarnation also includes trumpeter Ingrid Jensen and drummer Allison Miller. The shows they played often included two of the three non-originals on the new album: Burt Bacharach’s ‘What the World Needs Now’ and Rosnes’s arrangement of Wayne Shorter’s ‘Footprints’, which references the way it was performed when she was part of his band in the late 1980s. 

Vancouver-raised, Rosnes has been a New York resident since 1985, when she arrived on a music grant from the Canada Council for the Arts then stayed put (“I was ecstatic to be in this scene with so many musicians of my age group and like minds,” she’s said). Having garnered a buzz playing late-night jam sessions at the Blue Note club she went on to sign to the label, releasing a clutch of solo albums on Blue Note and elsewhere (including the current, Brazil-informed “Crossing Paths” (Smoke Sessions)) and worked with a dazzling roster of greats: Shorter. Joe Henderson. Bobby Hutcherson. 

For a dozen years she’s been a key member of Ron Carter’s Foresight Quartet, investing the iconic bassist’s propulsive swing with her harmonic smarts and impressionistic flair. But the jazz great she wants to talk about today, a maestro she feels is yet to receive his flowers, is her friend, the pianist, bandleader and composer (and one-time Art Blakey Messenger) Donald Brown. Rosnes’s eponymous 1990 debut on Blue Note included a Brown piece titled ‘Playground for the Birds’, and “Arboresque” features ‘Smile of the Snake’, a slinky, darkly grooving piece that Brown wrote in the late 1980s. 

“Don is just a brilliant composer, and people are sleeping on him.” A shrug. “Maybe it’s because he lives in Tennessee and not in New York. I don’t know why. I’m proud to shine a little light on his genius.”

Talk of New York gets us hop-scotching onto the fact that Rosnes didn’t ever dwell on being a woman in a male-dominated genre until she landed in the Big Apple. “Female musicians from countries other than the States seem to have less of a hurdle here,” she says. “Of those from Canada, like Diana Krall, Jane Bunnett and [pianist] Kris Davis, or me and Ingrid [Jensen], a lot of us grew into jazz music from high school band directors who were knowledgeable and passionate about what they did. 

“It was never [New York] musicians or audiences with any attitude,” she says, “but the business end, especially festival producers who hired one token female pianist and think they’ve done their duty.”

She’s encouraged, however, by the international success of Grammy-acclaimed musicians such as Chilean-born tenor saxophonist Melissa Aldana and French American jazz vocalist Cecile McLorin Salvant (“She’s one in ten million”), both of whom guested on ARTEMIS’s self-titled 2020 debut. Indeed, as she is by the sheer numbers of younger female musicians who message the band: “They tell us how inspired they are by us, how they’ve never seen a group of women working together with that type of power. We get wonderful emails from young men as well,” she continues, “who maybe previously thought ‘Yeah, women can’t play’. So maybe we’re changing some minds.”

But at the end of the day, as the sun disappears behind hilltops, as leaves close and forests darken into mystery, ARTEMIS do what they do for the music. “Our goal is to make honest music that touches people,” says Rosnes, “and our chemistry deepens the longer we play together. 

“The positive energy we exude onstage comes from being great friends offstage. We like hanging out.”

In nature? Another smile. “When we can,” she says, “in nature.”

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Jane Cornwell is an Australian-born, London-based writer on arts, travel and music for publications and platforms in the UK and Australia, including Songlines and Jazzwise. She’s the former jazz critic of the London Evening Standard.

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_{Header image: ARTEMIS. Photo: John Abbott.}