Jean-Michel Blais

April 28, 2027

Festival Hall

Doors: 7:00 pm; show 8:00 pm

Tickets: $35 adv/$40 door

 

Relentlessy creative pianist and composer Jean-Michel Blais’s projects are ever evolving, from electronic collaborations to orchestral compositions. The origins of his fourth album, mirador, are remembrances from childhood. As a musical kid and queer person, with Tourette's—Blais' basement was his imaginary lookout, his "mirador," from which he could dream the world. There, he'd browse in wonder through a Larousse encyclopedia; play with the family's cheap Hammond organ and endlessly replay the same cassettes.

 

The 2026 album mirador finds the Montrealer turning his gaze onto a wondrous world—exchanging contemporary minimalism for a light and generous maximalism. This odyssey spans choirs, strings, piano and the music of the Andes, from Spanish caves to Estonian forests and back to the basement in Nicolet, Québec, where Blais first imagined adventures. It unveils the epic daydream of a slightly different child, for whom the suburban playroom becomes a refuge, a chamber of possibilities and a lookout onto the world, where everyday objects awaken as gateways to imagined elsewheres, transforming the ordinary into the unknown and a fantasy born from the mundane.