Posted by On Saturday June 22nd, 2013 I kept my eye of the raining sky hoping for a break. I figured a touch of grey was all I was going to get so when the dark skies lightened even a little I headed out the door for an evening at the Ottawa jazz festival.
So it was a soggy field in which I stood, pulling on equally watery beers and trying my best to love the big band bebop orchestration of saxophonist David Murray’s fifteen-piece ensemble. After about twenty minutes of huge complex heads and cluster-chunked solos vocalist Macy Gray joined the group fulfilling the billing, which in the program read: “Macy Gray and David Murray Big Band”.
If you don’t know Macy Gray from her hit I Try then you probably don’t know her at all; I know I didn’t. Turns out she is a jazzy/pop singer and at this show she was trying her best to be a blues singer, even if she had more than a dozen crackerjack sheets-of-sound modal monsters behind her. I’m not sure if it worked but it definitely sounded pretty good.
Gray has a uniquely unique voice, which is to say she has arrived at a sound all her own but I can’t put my finger on a single thing that sets her apart from every other singer out there. And then there were all those heavy players behind her. And all that felled rain that was enveloping my sogged sneakers. Not to mention the flat-ish beers that kept falling down my throat at a hefty $6 a pop, though just did.
Overall I’d give the evening an optimistic B+, mostly because of Macy’s cover of Here Comes the Rain Again by The Eurythmics.
Todd Man Out 