Ana Gavrilovska

University of Michigan jazz professor Andy Milne scores documentary about Black liberation and student protests in 1960s Montreal

MUSIC FILM & VIDEO PREVIEW INTERVIEW

Andy Milne’s powerful new album is the captivating soundtrack to True North: Canadian Myths and Black Power, a documentary that tells the story of the Sir George Williams Affair, the largest student occupation in Canadian history.

Through a combination of rare archival footage and new interviews with people who were there, the film sheds light on an important and under-discussed period in the global history of Black liberation movements by focusing on events in late 1960s Montreal. True North has its broadcast premiere on Monday, July 6, on PBS’s Independent Lens.

A two-time Juno Award winner, Milne is a Canadian jazz pianist, composer, and University of Michigan associate professor who was born in Hamilton, Ontario, and grew up in Kincardine and Toronto. True North (Original Motion Picture Score) is Milne’s second collaboration with Emmy-winning director Michèle Stephenson, with whom he previously worked on the CBC TV series Black Life: Untold Stories, for which Milne received a Canadian Screen Composers Award nomination.

True North is an expansion of one of the eight episodes produced for Black Life, in which Stephenson explored two era-defining Black empowerment events in 1960s Montreal, one of which was the Sir George Williams Affair.

“There was just too much to tell in the short version. So they brought me on board and said, ‘We’re going to work on developing this,'” Milne said. “The film is really a first-person account of a civil rights event, the protest that happened in 1969 in Montreal, at what was then Sir George Williams University. It’s now [a part of] Concordia University. A group of mostly Black students were in a conflict with the university around access to courses and a pretty racist professor.”

The experience changed many lives, and several of these people are still around to tell the tale. True North gives us their perspectives, not just recollections of the protest but also their lives as young people in the ‘60s, weaving together threads from Black families who had been in Canada for generations to the many immigrants who had moved there from the Caribbean.

Migration is a recurring theme in the film; for Milne, that resulted in the sound of the ocean becoming a formidable motif in the score. “Some of the pieces have that undulation that, for me, is tapping into the way the score can live in and embed itself in the soundtrack of the film at large,” Milne said.

One such piece is the textural “From My Window,” that sense of undulation elevated by La Tanya Hall’s voice, the ghost of a choir echoing against creaking that evokes a ship’s movement through water.

Milne employed three distinct forms of composition when working on the score: one is the aforementioned textural method, in which there is melody, but it’s more about creating sonic patterns with space to hold the film. The music is “driven to be there but not [necessarily] go anywhere,” Milne said.

The second is very melodically driven, with elements draped around the melodies, the closest to how Milne would compose a piece of music for a concert. The beautiful “Exhile,” which features Detroit-based saxophonist Marcus Elliot, is an example of this approach. It’s driven by a melodic theme, and Milne orchestrates around it in a simple but effective way. “I’m scoring the picture, but I’m [really] scoring the dialogue,” Milne said. “I tend to try to write in ways where the music breathes with the speaking.”

The third category is the most different from how Milne would typically compose a score; normally, he’d create the music, pass it to the director for their take, and then record it once approved, enhanced with other live players if necessary. But for some of the pieces, he had to create the source material first, then build upon those cues, resulting in a working style that felt more like collaging.

“In a way, they were samples,” he said. This method was employed with New York-based saxophonist Michaël Attias, a frequent collaborator of Milne’s who appears on nine of the album’s 23 tracks. “I had him play different things on the baritone saxophone,” Milne said. “A drone, or just an arpeggio. I would create all these different source ideas and then build pieces from those. I had all this stuff scattered across the session that I then had to go back and tie together,” he said.

“Afrikville” is a great example of this style, an atmospheric track composed of alternating bursts of echoing sound from Attias’ saxophone. Milne expected these might be the most challenging pieces to make it through the approval process, but in fact, most were accepted almost immediately.

Milne’s compositional imprint and voice are stamped on this score, a striking example of his ability to draw out what a film needs while also creating music that translates just as well on its own. The soundtrack encompasses a variety of genres, from the reflective adventurousness of midcentury free jazz to neo-classical piano, avant-garde expressionism, and even psychedelic blues rock. But it’s not just a straight expression of the score, music presented front to back as in the film. Milne carefully selected which pieces to include and rearranged them to tell his own sonic version of the narrative; in that way, it becomes a complementary experience to watching the documentary.

Overall, the album is a fascinating document of Milne’s collaborations, both with local musicians in the Ann Arbor and Detroit areas, as well as his New York connections, such as the aforementioned Attias, alongside soprano saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock and drummer Tom Rainey. Laubrock and Milne released a saxophone and piano duo album called Fragile in 2022; their song on True North, “Where’s That – Run Around – Due Process,” calls back to that collaboration with its tender and expressive avant-garde jazz.

The score is at its most free jazz on “Tinder Box,” which features prolific Detroit-based bassist Jaribu Shahid, known for his work with the avant-garde jazz band Griot Galaxy in the ‘70s and ‘80s and as a member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago since 2004, and percussionist Jonathan Barahal Taylor, who co-leads an impressive amount of creative music projects. Shahid and Taylor frequently play together, and their connection is clear on the track. “They just sizzled,” Milne said. The song opens with elegant, lyrical piano that gives way to a conversation between Shahid’s bass and Taylor’s drums, before Elliot comes swooping in to close out the piece with his incandescent saxophone.