About the Record
Written by Nidal Eradi
I see you made it to the story about the monster album.
As much as I want to talk about this record, I feel like I need to share a bit of my own musical background for it to really make sense.
I arrived in Montreal in 2017. At the time, I was hitting every jam session and open mic I could, trying to connect with musicians and understand the scene. I remember carrying my heavy guitar case through the cold for a solid 45-minute commute from Côte-des-Neiges just to make it to Maison 2109 on Bleury on Wednesday nights — which later migrated to Saint-Denis and became what we now know as The Growve.
Then there was the wildest one of them all, which unfortunately doesn’t exist anymore: the Urban Science Jam, also known as the Cypher, at Bootlegger Whiskey Bar on Saint-Laurent.
Those two jams gathered almost the same community, but the energy was different. Thursdays felt like the arena for the veterans — musicians who had been at it for years. Wednesdays were more for the new generation of highly proficient players coming up.
Both stages were a huge discovery for me.
I came from a pop/blues background — think John Mayer, Eric Clapton. I knew my jazz chords, sure, but the way people were using harmony, reharmonizing on the fly, and soloing at these jams completely blew my mind. Sometimes I’d get overly jazzy and complex just trying to keep up. The level was elite. Nobody sounded like a joke.
That period pushed my musicality to its peak and opened my ears to entirely new grooves, voicings, and ways of approaching the instrument.
A couple of years later, I met Lee (L.Teez) at the weekly Monday open mic in Parc Jeanne-Mance. We vibed instantly. We shared similar backgrounds — he’s half Algerian, I’m Moroccan — so naturally, there was a lot of laughing matter involved.
But more than that, you could tell right away that Lee knew exactly what he wanted.
When he started describing the vision for Studio Blue, I got it immediately. I’d been showing up to the same jam sessions he was in every week. I knew the musicians, the sound, the language. I understood how he wanted to merge that Montreal jazz essence with his style of rapping.
For our first session at the studio, we started working on “I Need You.” I was so happy — right out of the gate, it already had that essence. We were playing as a band in the living room while he was rapping, me on bass. We came up with that crazy bridge, and things escalated very quickly.
Man… I still get shivers thinking about those days.
Most of the other sessions happened at Indica Studios, where some of Montreal’s most elite musicians showed up. It was an absolute honor to sit in a room and arrange songs with them in real time.
We had ups and downs throughout the entire process, but we never got discouraged. That was only natural — we were trying to do something that hadn’t really been done before: capturing the essence of Montreal’s jazz scene and translating it into a recorded body of work.
And we succeeded.
I’m incredibly proud to have participated in capturing that sound and very proud of Lee for standing on business and making it happen . It would’ve been a shame if it had only lived in jam sessions and late-night stories instead of being documented and shared.
So if one day you’re feeling lazy, it’s cold outside, you don’t feel like going to The Growve, but you’re still feeling jazzy… you know what to do.
Stay home.
Make yourself a nice cup of tea — or open a good bottle of red wine.
Put on Studio Blue.
I have no doubt it’ll do the job.