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On June 19th the 2015 Ottawa Jazz Festival opened* with a mainstage set featuring Lisa Fischer. What, you’ve never heard of Lisa Fischer?!? Geez, the lady regularly sings her heart out on the wold’s biggest stages playing to sold-out 70,000-seaters and you’ve never heard of her? Holy…
Surely you’ve heard of Sting? Nine Inch Nails? The great Tina Turner? How about The Rolling Stones? Oh, you’ve heard of them, have you? Well, meet their backup singer, Lisa Fischer. Not just a backup singer, Fischer was also the star of a documentary about backup singers called 20 Feet From Stardom that was released not long before this concert. Name still doesn’t ring a bell though, huh? Of course not; she’s a backup singer.
Aside from aficionados nobody knows the names of the horn players from famous bands or songs, as important as they are. Go ahead, name the guy who played the sax solo on Pink Floyd’s Money** or the piccolo trumpet player who kicks off Penny Lane***. Then there are the string players. So many great songs by the likes of Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, and so many more are decorated with indispensable string parts – not to mention most of the great disco songs – and how many of us can name one of those brilliant players? Let me help you out here: none of us can.
My point is that there is no reason why any of us should know Lisa Fischer’s name, despite what she adds to so many of our concert experiences. Talented as she is, she’s an interchangeable bit player, as integral yet replaceable as the many local children’s choirs that The Stones utilized on their Bigger Bang tour for You Can’t Always Get What You Want. Sure they were great at supplying the familiar sound that was needed for the song in question, but notable artists they are not.
And Lisa Fischer proved all of this with her adequately-presented and well-played, pleasant, good rockin’, high-end cruise ship-style set of funky far-reaching vocal soul music backed up by a fun NYC Afro-Caribbean/fusion band called Grand Baton. She was great but there’s no way she’s selling many records.
Because in the end, songwriting is the thing. Which is why a talent like Lisa Fischer gets paid by people like The Rolling Stones and Sting.
*Turns out the festival actually opened the day before with a single, free afternoon set of music from Kaleidoscope Orchestra, a thrown-together group of local musicians that was basically a truncated version of Mike Essoudry’s Mash Potato Mashers with jazzfest programmer Petr Cancurra added on saxophone. The lightly-attended concert was performed around Confederation Park’s lovely fountain without any amplification whatsoever and it was really fun. I think it was also billed as a jazz open stage or had an improvised dancefloor or some other slightly wacky element, as if a mini-marching band playing around a fountain wasn’t wacky enough all by itself.
**Dick Parry.
***David Mason (not that Dave Mason, who did however record several tracks with Paul McCartney and Wings).
Todd Man Out 