Hot spots and highlights of Montreal’s 39th jazz fest
Was that so hard?
In its annual closing news conference, Saturday, the Montreal International Jazz Festival did what neither SLĀV director Robert Lepage nor singer Betty Bonifassi appeared able to over the past two weeks: they apologized.
For more than 30 minutes, jazz fest president and general director Jacques-André Dupont sat before reporters, fielded questions, and admitted that mistakes had been made in the festival’s reaction to the uproar surrounding the controversial production.
The “theatrical odyssey based on slave songs,” featuring a white director and mostly white cast, drew charges of cultural appropriation and was officially cancelled on Wednesday.
It’s not every year that most of the jazz festival wrap-up session is spent talking about a single show. It’s usually a rather tame and convivial affair, with programmers touting their personal highlights and media lobbing softballs about attendance, and whether the musically diverse event can still be considered a jazz festival.
But this year was like no other in memory. SLĀV began its run on June 26, two nights before the beginning of the festival. And though it played for only three of the scheduled 16 performances, the debate surrounding the show extended right up to the jazz festival’s final day.
With a heat wave blanketing Montreal for much of the festival, it felt like the city was the setting for a reboot of Spike Lee’s 1989 film Do The Right Thing, in which racial unrest consumes New York on the hottest day of the year.
Dupont extended his support to Lepage and Bonifassi, but also expressed his and the festival’s understanding of the dissent expressed by Montreal’s black community.
He and the jazz festival’s VP of programming, Laurent Saulnier, emerged from a four-hour meeting with members of the black community on Friday with a greater appreciation of the latter’s concerns.
“We’re being told that the world is changing, that we should listen more,” Dupont said, “that some subjects we don’t understand well — that there are issues for Montreal’s black community that we don’t get.
“It was about having a real discussion. Some things that were said were hard, but at the same time, it was really constructive. I was really happy, because we want to do more, and I want us to do better.”
And with that simple mea culpa, Dupont and the jazz festival added welcome nuance to a debate that has too often been framed as an assault on artistic freedom.
The only hiccup in the festival’s stance was the admission that its real reasons for cancelling the show on Wednesday were Bonifassi’s injury — she broke her ankle after the third performance, June 28 — and public security.
Dupont did well to specify that the festival was concerned for the safety of jazz festival attendees, artists and “the people who come to protest on the site — the security of everyone.”
But he went on to single out the “aggressiveness” of some protesters, specifying that “though some people protested in an extremely correct, pacifist manner, some people were very aggressive, and the festival feared that if we con- tinued, there could be (incidents).”
While the broader safety concerns are credible, it is worth noting that the only violent acts documented during the protests occurred when an elderly white woman entering the theatre slapped a young black female protester on opening night; following which, police pushed away Montreal singer-songwriter Pierre Kwenders.
The 39th jazz festival came to a close Saturday night as throngs of music-lovers swarmed a packed festival site to take in the soaring sounds of Grammy-winning American rock band The War On Drugs.
This critic’s personal highlights included the infectious energy of Toronto R&B upstart Jessie Reyez, who headlined the mid-fest free outdoor blowout; the mischievous spirit of innovative American jazz vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant and the spell cast by Belgian chanteuse Melanie Di Blasio.
Among jazz fest VP Saulnier’s favourites were Seal, British saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings’ band Sons of Kemet, as well as a flurry of local acts including Montreal-Brooklyn collective Megative, Nomadic Massive and Haitian-Québécoise artists Dominique Fils-Aimé and Mélissa Laveaux.
Festival co-founder André Ménard’s list included Ry Cooder, George Thorogood, jazz fest faves Gogo Penguin, John Medeski, Montrealer Jordan Officer and New York’s Too Many Zooz.
Ménard also made a special mention of the emotional performance by veteran Montreal jazz singer Ranee Lee, who took the stage Friday evening at L’Astral despite having just lost her husband of 46 years and longtime collaborator, guitarist Richard Ring.
“Rather than stay home, she decided to do a concert,” Ménard said, going on to reveal that he invited Lee back, on the spot, to play next year’s 40th edition, June 27 to July 7, 2019, which will be Ménard’s last.