Saturday 12 September | 4pm | Royal City Mission
John Buck . drums
Ethan Cohn . double bass
Claire Devlin . tenor saxophone
Jan Esbra . electric guitar
Jean-Michel Leblanc . electric guitar
photo by Evan Shay
The Plastic Waste Band is an experimental jazz group from Montreal, Quebec. This is a band in the truest sense: longtime collaborators who fly into psychedelic group improvisations on the wings of finely tuned compositions. Electric guitars, soaring saxophone, thumping acoustic bass, and big
drums evoke Led Zeppelin crashing a gig with the John Coltrane Quartet.
Trash Island (2026), their third album, envisions a post-flood future where all of humanity lives on a floating island of trash. Drawing upon the textures of psychedelic rock and the spontaneity of contemporary jazz, the album conjures a series of surrealist vignettes in ode to the climate crisis. Following the 2017 release of their self-titled debut, they chose to donate all proceeds from the album’s sales to charities dedicated to environmental conservation. Their second album, Crushed (Florafone, 2019), is centred on the issue of creating art in the face of humanity’s propensity for self-destruction. Revelations EP (Florafone, 2020) builds upon an apocalyptic theme, depicting the beauty that can grow between the bricks of a ruined city.
Since their first show as a band in 2016, The Plastic Waste Band has performed extensively, most notably at the Ottawa Jazz Festival (2026), POP Montréal (2025), Festival International de Jazz de Montréal (2023), l’Off Festival de Jazz de Montréal (2018, 2023), and TU Jazz Festival (2019, 2022).
theplasticwasteband.com
plasticwaste.bandcamp.com
@plasticwasteband