Posted by On June 21st, 2013 – the longest day of the year – I saw none other than the legendary Willie Nelson at the Ottawa Jazz Festival in Confederation Park. Now, there are many who would moan and complain that someone like Willie Nelson should never be included in a jazz festival but I’m not one of those moaners nor one of those complainers. And not just because I could simply point to Willie’s Stardust album and easily argue that someone who releases an album chock-a-block with cover versions of songs by such jazz luminaries as Irving Berlin, Hoagy Carmichael, Duke Ellington and George Gershwin and sees that album spend an unthinkable ten years on the Billboard charts is jazzy enough for any festival, thank-you very much*.
Neither would I refer to the salient fact that drawing upon a wider breadth of musical styles allows a festival to draw upon a wider breadth of music fans, leading to a festival that is more successful and thus in a better position to support and promote their genre-specific acts to a larger, more diverse audience. In other words, the best way a jazz festival (or a blues festival, or a folk festival, or a Norwegian black metal/knitting festival) can ensure survival is to draw non-jazz fans into the fold and expose them to what you’re actually selling.
No, the main reason I don’t partake in this particular form of moaning and/or complaining (though in the right situation I can moan and complain with great fluency) is because I understand both the artificial nature of musical pigeonholing and the necessity deviance plays in progress. Understand that musicians do not place themselves into specific genres; that disservice has consistently been brought to you by record company executives and record store owners. And these umbrella terms have always been meant to be very broad, lest we have a thousand different sections in our record stores. And the labels themselves are created after the music already exists, so they are all retroactive anyway. So when you boil it down, the terms “jazz”, “blues”, and “folk” are artistically irrelevant and were created essentially as a cataloging strategy, and they should be viewed as such.
When Johnny Cash began his recording career at Sun Records alongside early rockers like Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins he assumed he too was singing the new rock & roll and was surprised to find he was considered a country artist. Kurt Cobain was shocked and disappointed to be counted amongst the first of the new “grunge” style; claiming that he was just trying to write Beatles-esque pop songs. Jerry Lee Lewis probably said it best when he explained (and I’m paraphrasing here, I can’t find the actual quote) that he wasn’t playing rockabilly, country music or rock & roll, much less “the devil’s music” as he was often accused. “No sir, I play ‘Jerry Lee Lewis’ music!”
And what if promoters did stick with their genres when booking festivals? No Ravi Shankar at Woodstock, no electrified Bob Dylan anywhere, and no Willie Nelson at the Ottawa Jazz Festival. It’s these deviations from festival norms that helped to expand and propel the exact genres that the purists were trying to “protect”. Heathens.
Getting to the point, excluding Willie Nelson from the Ottawa Jazz Festival for any reason would have been a shame because it was a great show played for an appreciative audience, and made even greater by Willie’s guitar being turned way, way too loud in the mix. Or, as I would describe it: mixed perfectly. Though Willie Nelson became loved worldwide based on his singing and songwriting chops** a close listen will prove that he’s a stunningly talented guitar player too, and with ol’ Trigger cranked to eleven at this show it was easy to listen closely. Every string squeak blared out of the mains and bounced off the echoing buildings behind me and like I say, it was glorious. I frankly never heard him sound so good.
I’ll Fy Away, Good Hearted Woman, On the Road Again…Skiddlly-doo-wah-wah daddio, I tell you that hep cat kept the joint jumping and had us vipers swinging!
*(That said, despite Willie Nelson’s rather great reggae album Countryman I would find it odd to ever find him on the bill at a reggae festival. I wouldn’t mind at all of course, nor would I moan and/or complain about it, nope not one little bit. But yes, I admit that I would find it odd.)
**I first came to love Wille Nelson for none of these things. No, I first came to love Wille because of his long hair, which I could point to whenever my Willie-loving father told me to get a haircut, which was often. As a matter of fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if “…but Willie Nelson has long hair…” stood as the phrase I said to my father more than any other.
Todd Man Out 