Jazz Fest swings with the times
Festival swings into Waterloo this weekend
When you consider the number of musical genres represented at the Uptown Waterloo Jazz Festival, you can be forgiven for thinking that jazz in the 21st century is anything but pure.
To steal the promotional taglines from the festival’s website, if you like Run DMC, Sun Ra or The Beastie Boys, you’ll love The Shuffle Demons.
If you like Diana Krall or Ella Fitzgerald, you’ll love EmilieClaire Barlow.
If you like video games soundtracks or “all things Nintendo,” you’ll love The Koopa Troop.
And if you like Michael Bublé and Harry Connick Jr., the website strategically notes, you’ll love Matt Dusk.
Reached at his Toronto home, Dusk laughs into the phone.
“If you enjoy Steve Lawrence and Jack Jones, you’ll love Matt Dusk!” he jokes before a comedic pause: “Steve who? Jack what?”
“I know Jack Jones,” I interject. “He sang the pre-Women’s lib anthem ‘Wives and Lovers’ with its hilariously chauvinistic refrain “For wives should always be lovers too, run to his arms, the moment he comes home to you ... I’m warning you.”
“I may do a cover of ‘The Love Boat’ theme,” chimes in Dusk, referencing another Jones hit, but immediately backs off this plan when I pretend to take it seriously.
“Every music genre has its cheese element,” he concedes graciously. “In rock and roll, it’s mullets. In jazz, it’s schmaltzy crooners.”
Dusk, in the affable manner of all great entertainers, is a jokester, a guy who doesn’t take himself too seriously and is well aware of the challenges of marketing old school jazz in the digital age.
“The reality is, every single person who’s ever had a career is based on someone else,” he notes bluntly, happy to be lumped in the Bublé/Connick camp.
“Frank Sinatra had a poster of Bing Crosby on his wall.”
Despite the fact he’s only 38, Dusk doesn’t fit with the edgy newcomers sprinkled into the jazz fest mix to draw a more youthful audience.
“Justin Bieber is gonna open for me!” he quips, never one to miss a punchline. “I definitely draw a younger demographic — under 60!”
Back at the festival’s central
command, issues of young vs. old are nothing to snicker at as the venerable institution grapples with changes taking place literally outside its door.
“The growth in uptown Waterloo in the last five to eight years is unprecedented,” notes Patti Brooks, the festival’s artistic director and executive director of the Uptown Waterloo Business Improvement Area.
“A lot of that is due to the influence of the tech sector.
“We started talking about bringing the age demo down 10 years ago.”
If it was a no-brainer then, it’s even more so now as this midsized metropolis completes its transformation from staid insurance capital to the focal point of Canada’s tech triangle, a fertile seeding ground for startups that has earned it the moniker Silicon Valley North.
With that, of course, comes a youthful, hipster demographic that has little use for traditions of old.
“Jazz is like art,” notes Brooks, noting attendance has grown from a few hundred in 1993 to 30,000 plus today.
“It’s in the eye of the beholder. We had to move with the times.”
Which is why the festival — with 21 acts on two stages over three days — is determined to push the envelope with each succeeding year.
“We program all kinds of genres of jazz: funk, pure, Latin, swing, crooners,” says Brooks, who strives for a balance between old and new, hip and hep, tradition and change.
“We want to make sure younger people are engaged as much as possible.”
The beat-crazed hepcats with ascots and cigarette holders nodding in silent concentration are no longer the majority.
Young people today are “all about experiences,” notes Brooks.
They grew up with social media, are more group-oriented than their boomer predecessors and view the world, including jazz festivals, in an entirely different way.
“I see it 100 times a day,” she notes.
“(Tech firm) Shopify moves in and suddenly, we look at things differently.”
Dusk, straddling the line between generations, thinks it’s all great.
“Anything that gets people into live music is good. For us as artists, the one thing we live for is creating and performing. Anything that gets us on that stage is good, as long as it’s outside, on a beautiful night.”
Let it not be said the wily veteran, who will bring an eight-piece band and duet partner Florence K to perform songs from his last two Juno-nominated albums, is taking anything for granted.
“Every time we play there, we get to the end of our show and say ‘OK everyone, this brings us to the last song,’ and everyone heads for the exit and tries to beat the traffic. It’s a mass exodus.”
He laughs. “So this year we will not be saying anything.”