Winnipeg based drummer, composer and producer Esteban Seunarine releases his third album, ‘The Expanding Whatever,’ on September 16 through his own label, Rice and Beans, led by the single “Arts & Crafts for Robots.” The record exists because an entirely different one fell apart first.
Listen on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/album/23OSZqZooYY2DgKFrX2aeG?si=OvxRXgiRSmy2A2rsHnJwxA&nd=1&dlsi=9043936540c54efd
Earlier in 2026, Seunarine and longtime collaborator Ben Kensok were deep into a much bigger, more maximalist project, dense with jazz improvisation, programmed and live instruments, strings, spoken word and layered vocal harmonies, when honest feedback from their own team, friends and family convinced them to scrap it. “It was the first time in my writing life that I felt like I’d genuinely failed,” Seunarine says. Out of that anger, he stripped everything back to harmony, basslines and groove, and wrote an entire album in a week, sometimes finishing two songs in a single day.
‘The Expanding Whatever’ is a record about noticing, built around the idea that meaning doesn’t announce itself so much as sit quietly inside ordinary things, a garden, a guy in a hat on a street corner, a dog, until someone finally pays attention. Where most albums chase something big, Seunarine set out to find what was worth saying inside the monotonous, repetitive texture of everyday life. “I write jazz music for people who don’t like jazz,” he says, “and I should stop trying to fight that instinct.”
Check it out on Bandcamp here: https://estebanseunarine.bandcamp.com/
The band tracked the whole record in two days at No Fun Club in Winnipeg with engineers Riley Hill and Nika Atefi, recording live off the floor in one room with no headphones, essentially capturing a rehearsal in real time. Guitarist Adam Ciric pushed the band to cut three or four takes of every song regardless of how the first one felt, a call that paid off once it came time to choose takes for the final record. The sessions produced 11 finished songs, trimmed to 10 during mixing two weeks later, not because the cut track was weak but because it hadn’t reached the level of the rest. The album was mastered by Jon Kaspy in Montreal.
Seunarine assembled a new lineup for the record under the name Esteban Seunarine and The Kind Ghosts. Ben Kensok stays on tenor saxophone as Seunarine’s closest creative partner of the past few years, joined by upright bassist Aria Rempel, whom Seunarine overlapped with during his jazz performance studies at Brandon University without ever actually playing together at the time, and pianist Alanna Fast, a fellow Brandon University alum he met through Kensok. Guitarist Adam Ciric, whom Seunarine had only met once before the sessions, brought a wider musical palette from his own background in metal and recording engineering, and Seunarine credits him with keeping the whole record from sounding bland.
Two tracks deliberately break from the album’s live off the floor approach. “One for Lav” is a solo drum piece Seunarine wrote in tribute to his dog, who passed away shortly before the sessions, later layered with electronic textures by Hill and Atefi to pull it slightly out of the record’s otherwise acoustic world. “Varanda” features guitarist Emmanuel Bach, who came into the studio for about 45 minutes, cut a handful of completely unrehearsed solos, and left, a burst of pressure Seunarine says comes through clearly in the finished track.
Compositionally, the album marks a deliberate return to simple tools, triads and pentatonic ideas Seunarine had been drifting away from in pursuit of harmonic complexity. The band spent full rehearsals talking through how to use that simplicity to tell a story through soloing rather than simply navigate changes, a sharp turn from the raw density of his previous record, ‘What Blossoms from Bloodshed?’ While writing and recording, Seunarine found himself pulled between Aaron Parks’ ‘Little Big,’ a desert island record for him, and Styx’s ‘The Mission,’ with Todd Sucherman’s drumming leaving a few quiet homages tucked into the new songs.
Seunarine built this sound from a childhood shaped by Caribbean and Latin American rhythms and a musical education on the Canadian prairies, studying jazz performance at Brandon University under Eric Platz, Marika Galea and Greg Gatien. He has since shared stages with Grammy and JUNO winning artists including Sara Gazarek, Jason Palmer and Luis Deniz, and is the recipient of the 2026 SABIAN Dom Famularo SEN Mentorship Award. With ‘The Expanding Whatever,’ Seunarine lets his influences coexist rather than compete, jazz fusion and prairie folk, the grand and the mundane, in his most personal record yet.
Tour Date:
November 22, 2026, Fort Garry Hotel, Winnipeg, MB, Esteban Seunarine and The Kind Ghosts, part of Jazz Winnipeg’s Jazz at Fort Garry series