JAZZ FROST IS NIPPING
The Winter Jazz Festival offers a diverse nine-concert series, Peter Hum explains in Arts & Life.
OK, so what if Steve Martin and Robert Plant won’t be showing up? The Ottawa Jazz Festival’s second winter festival is still something to get excited about. Yes, the three-night event, which begins Thursday Jan. 31, lacks the beyondthe-jazz-bubble star power that drew huge crowds to Confederation Park in the last few years. It’s a more intimate, obviously all-indoor program of nine concerts, thick with top-notch jazz acts that should set rooms such as the NAC’s Fourth Stage and Dominion-Chalmers United Church thrumming with in-the-moment music.
Many of the musicians involved — including guitarist Charlie Hunter and pianist Fred Hersch, the event’s biggest names — are coming to Ottawa from New York. But one night of music will feature musicians with strong Ottawa connections bringing their best game, playing with special guests.
The mini-festival kicks off with a double bill show headlined by the always lyrical and adventurous Hersch, the 57-yearold New Yorker who gave a luminous solo concert at the Library and Archives Auditorium in 2010.
Hersch makes music that is both overtly beautiful and very much alive with risktaking. All the more remarkable about his art is the fact that he is making music again only after recovering from an AIDSrelated coma and AIDS-related dementia in 2008.
Opening for Hersch’s trio is the group of Vancouver-raised, New York-based saxophonist Michael Blake. Blake’s Variety Hour group will find the 48-year-old joined by three Vancouverites — trumpeter J.P. Carter, keyboardist Chris Gestrin and drummer Dylan van der Schyff. The band’s disc of last year, In the Grand Scheme of Things, is a canny combination of acoustic and electric sonorities, avantgarde impulses, spatial awareness and muscular grooving.
Friday’s three concerts at the NAC Fourth Stage boast Ottawa connections. The kickoff show at 5 p.m. features the Latin jazz quartet of pianist Miguel De Armas, who recently moved to Ottawa from Cuba. In his homeland, De Armas appeared on more than 50 albums and works by famous artists such as Chucho Valdes, Los Van Van, and Compay Segundo.
At 7 p.m. that night is the quartet of Ottawa-raised, Toronto-based drummer Nick Fraser, whose group includes the New York-based saxophonist Tony Malaby. Expect the 36-year-old’s group to use minimalist written materials as the basis for flights of free improvisation.
Brian Browne, who at 75 is the hard-swinging dean of Ottawa’s jazz pianists, gives the final show Friday night at the NAC Fourth Stage, leading a one-time-only group that includes Ottawa guitarist Roddy Ellias and the Ottawa-raised Montrealers Fraser Hollins on bass and drummer Dave Laing. This show will surely give priority to mainstream sounds and classic swinging.
Saturday’s shows feature the return of more New York area artists and different flavours of artistic edginess.
The Wee Trio is a youthful vibraphone-acoustic bass-drums outfit that last year released Ashes to Ashes, a collection of high-energy covers of David Bowie tunes.
Up next on Saturday is a strikingly different trio, led by the acclaimed 28-year-old pianist John Escreet. His group, which features bassist John Hébert and drummer Tyshawn Sorey, should challenge listeners with audacious and frequently hard-edged music that combines compositional rigour and unfettered improvising. Completing the night at the NAC Fourth Stage is the duo of guitarist Charlie Hunter and drummer Scott Amendola, stars in the jam-band firmament who played together in the band T.J. Kirk.
Finally, the jazz festival is also behind a Saturday night concert at the University of Ottawa, thrown with groove- and rock-loving students in mind. That double bill will feature the Montreal instrumental group Pawa Up First and the Toronto artrock group The Darcys.