Posted by 
On June 26th, 2016 I rode my bicycle down to Confederation Park to take part in yet another instalment of what was increasingly shaping up to be a heckuva year for the Ottawa Jazz Festival. I was onsite for just one act, Sharon Jones fronting her long-standing band the Dap-Kings, and with the Lady Saint of funky soul at the helm it was a turn-down-the-brain and turn-up-the-feet kind of night.
Once I had locked my bike to the iron fence that surrounds the park I went straight to the beer tent and then to the big tree beside the soundboard – a general meeting spot for Ottawa’s beer-gripping wide-smiling high-fiving neo-hippie jazzfest regulars and their slightly more respectable associates, of which I am regularly one (or the other) – where I joined several beer-gripping wide-smiling high-fiving neo-hippie jazzfest regulars and their associates with a wide smile and several beer-protected high fives.
And together we got down, using Sharon’s so-good-she-makes-it-look-easy soul to keep our feet shaking and our elbows raising as freaky friend after freaky friend (and their associates) joined or left our little grooving group.
Had I known that Sharon Jones (1956-2016) had less than six months left walking this Earth I might have forsaken the beer line and the hi-how-you-doing’s, buckled down and given the woman the undivided attention that she obviously deserved – not that I was disrespectful or anything; it’s just that I was justifiably feeling more “dance-party” than “respectful-sendoff” – but I didn’t, and Sharon soon died of cancer at the unfair age of sixty. I’d say “live and learn” but generally I don’t. Or rather: I do (so far) and generally I don’t.
Regardless, for some reason I opted not to hit the bustling aftershow tent. I’d like to think that perhaps I experienced a bout of psychic reverence and felt that Mrs. Jones at least deserved the musical last word for the evening, but it was probably just laziness.
Todd Man Out 