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Since settling in Montreal in 2004, Pierre-Yves Martel has started an international career in both improvised and early music, working with musicians from diverse cultures and backgrounds. After several years of study and research on the double bass, he decided in 2008 to abandon that instrument to focus on the viola da gamba, an instrument rarely used in contemporary music today.
Described by American double bassist Mark Dresser as being a “highly personal, innovative, rich and diverse work of art,” his album for solo prepared double bass Engagement & Confrontation (2006) was named one of the year’s best recordings in the Coda jazz magazine. That same year, his Pure Evil Double Bass Quartet made the list of the Top 10 Concerts of 2006 in All About Jazz New York.
He is the founder and artistic director of the award-winning group Quartetski, dedicated to the reinterpretation of works by great composers in an improvised context. The album Quartetski Does Prokofiev was released in 2007, and was soon followed by projects by Érik Satie, Duke Ellington, Henry Purcell and, more recently, Tobias Hume.
Among his most recent projects are Sainct Laurens, a collaboration with Philippe Lauzier which has performed in Canada, France, Germany, Norway and Austria, and the trio XYZ: la formule xyz, a project conceived with Lauzier and turntablist Martin Tétrault.
Martel has performed and recorded in groups including the National Arts Centre Orchestra, Les Voix Baroques, Arion, La Nef, Le Studio de musique ancienne de Montréal and Ensemble Masques. In more experimental settings, he has been part of the Ensemble SuperMusique, Antoine Berthiaume’s Rodéoscopique, Isaiah Ceccarelli’s Bréviaires d’épuisements as well as Michel F Côté’s Mecha Fixes Clocks.
He has collaborated on music projects for film, dance and theatre with a number of composers including Robert M Lepage, Michel F Côté, René Lussier, Jean Derome, Diane Labrosse and Patrick Watson.
Since 2008, he is a member of the Constantinople ensemble, with whom he has toured extensively in North America, Europe and Africa. As a member of Constantinople, he has contributed to more than a dozen original projects, including Versailles à Topkapi, co-directed with Kiya Tabassian and featuring his arrangements of the music of Marin Marais.
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