Posted by I’ve seen a whole lot of concerts. I suppose that goes without saying, but it’s fun to say and it’s something I don’t go around saying all the time. I also don’t go around saying “I love peanut butter” all the time but I should because I do love peanut butter, and I’m talking a lot. Oh my gawd, I could go on and on about peanut butter but doing so makes me crave it and there is only so much weight my legs can bear. Which is truthfully the only reason that I am not eating peanut butter all day long. Ah, but I pre-digress.
I started retroactively realizing a long-regretted missed opportunity several years ago when I started writing down my memories from these shows; how years of hindsight has ultimately positioned these concerts against the backdrop of my life. In doing so I found it helpful to catalog the concerts in a calendar-like fashion which revealed a whole lot. Like that as of this writing there are still thirty-six days on the calendar on which I’ve never seen a concert (well, thirty-five days if you don’t include February 29th). A dozen of those days are in December and none of them are in the summer – go figure.
And so one might conclude that I’ve been to over three hundred shows, and that would be correct. But it would also be correct to say that I’ve been to over eleven hundred shows as, I’ve written…lessee now…1,065 of these things so far and I still have more than a hundred left to write (again, as of this writing).
And that’s because there are many, many dates on the calendar upon which I’ve seen multiple concerts over these nearly forty years. The busiest day of the year seems to be July 6th, a date that has seen me take in a major show sixteen times (half of them at the Ottawa Bluesfest) starting in 1987 with a Nazareth concert in Saint John.
To put a finer point on it, let’s examine today’s date a little closer. Along the way I have found myself at a concert eleven times on different June 29th’s. The first was in the mid-80’s when I sat outside a Phil Collins concert at the CNE because I couldn’t afford a $23 ticket (I got inside for the encore). Then after a ten-year drought I saw the great Oscar Peterson for the first time on a June 29th. Precisely six years later I was back in Montreal for a killer MMW/DJ Logic show at Metropolis and two years later (to the day, of course) I shared an incredible moe./Willie Nelson/The Dead concert with two old and dear friends.
It was five years after that that the Ottawa Jazz Fest cavalcade began, offering me headliners Brad Meldau, Maria Schneider, Roy Hargrove, Paco de Lucia, and Bobby McFerrin (and tons of late-night shows too), all on different June 29th’s. And get this: I have seen the legendary Wynton Marsalis perform on the main stage at the Ottawa Jazz Fest twice on June 29th, once in 2016* and another time three years earlier. Which finally brings us to today’s excuse for typing…
On June 29th, 2013 I saw Wynton heading his Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and despite the long preamble (which is generally a dead giveaway that I don’t remember much about the event in question) I actually remember this show with relative clarity. As I say, it was orchestral jazz – with one of those cliché Hollywood-ish bandstands where the players sit behind colourful tombstone-shaped cutouts – and it was all so softly delicious. Not that the music wasn’t monstrous; it was. Every time someone stood up and took a solo the crowd was treated to another of the hottest young jazz cats in New York – and NYC is a veritable jazz clowder** – but the orchestration was certainly in a style that was guaranteed to keep the lawchaired masses stuck fast in their seats, and for once I couldn’t blame them.
Good show though. No surprise there; June 29th has generally been pretty good to me.
(Oh, and I really, really like peanut butter, more than most people like anything. But I don’t go around carrying pictures of peanut butter in my wallet. Okay maybe I do, but at least I don’t go around showing them to people at parties.)
*Near as a quick and lazy perusal can determine, I saw Wynton play the Ottawa Jazz Fest a third time in 2008 (on a different date) and I was also there when his brother Branford played the year before. The Jazz Fest must have the Marsalis family homestead on speed-dial. 1-800-GOT-JAZZ.
**I urge you to google it.
Todd Man Out 