062714 Ben Harper with Charlie Musselwhite/Five Alarm Funk/Lake Street Dive, Ottawa, ON

June 27th, 2014 was a beautiful summer’s evening in our nation’s capital, and there was no better place for me to be than at Confederation Park for another great instalment of the Ottawa jazz festival.

Clever guitar teacher that I was, I made a point of never working on Fridays.  I was happy to sacrifice my Monday-thru-Thursday evenings in pursuit of financial and karmic rewards but c’mon, Friday nights generally have something worth going to.  Because of this career-oriented forward-thinking I was able to make it to the festival site plenty early enough to catch a big fun band called Five Alarm Funk.  

I just sat here at my “typing desk” for a full three minutes wondering how to best elaborate on the band but really, I think “big fun band called Five Alarm Funk” pretty much says it all.  Oh, and they were from Vancouver, if that helps.  Anyway, they kept the beers flowing (or was that me?) and they were a more-than-adequate opening act for the evening’s headliner, Ben Harper with Charlie Musselwhite.

And I say “…more-than-adequate…” on purpose because the opening act was about as upbeat a band as you could find while Ben and Charlie’s sit-down blues set was dialled in pretty low.  One or Two Alarm Funk might have been a better match but whattya gonna do?

Anyway, both Ben Harper and Charlie Musselwhite were great, and when I say they were “sit-down” blues I don’t mean just the crowd in lawnchairs.  Of course Ben Harper generally sits down when he plays his Weissenborn lap slide guitar (an occupational hazard) and it would have looked odd to have blues maestro Charlie Musselwhite standing beside him so they were both literally sitting down.  And like I say, they were great, delivering just a superb pile of thoughtful, melodic blues.  They closed their set with a killer (and I mean killer) version of Zeppelin’s When the Levee Breaks that turned me into Beavis and/or Butthead; eyes closed, fist in the air, and head bobbing front-to-back along with every quarter note.

Okay…Butthead.

After a great double-shot like that you’d think I would be done but no, there was still Lake Street Dive and their Canadiana quasi-rock & roll in the late-night tent, but truth-be-told attending their set was more of an excuse to keep drinking with my pals than anything.  Which I surely did, and with reckless abandon, no less.  After all, I had the excellent foresight to always take Saturday’s off from teaching as well.