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On June 28th, 2018 I took in another great night of music at the Ottawa Jazz Festival. I started the evening at the First Baptist Church with a set by Scandinavian singer Mari Boine, someone I had never heard of before.
And not only was she great – a breath of fresh European air blowing easy wispy melodies past my ears – but I’ll never forget her drummer. He had his drums set up flat to the floor all around him, and he played by rocking from side to side with his arms outwardly extended in stiff arcs. Remember the Barrel of Monkeys toy, that little brown bucket that was full of colourful plastic primates who could lock arms? He looked a lot like one of those plastic monkeys (posture-wise), swinging back and forth. Oh, and he was great.
An hour later I walked out of the small church pleased that I had already caught a surprisingly great set of music, and things hadn’t even gotten started yet! Walking over to the mainstage I was further pleased to start running into friend after friend, though there wasn’t anything surprising about that. For this was one of those nights that my cohorts and I had been anticipating since the jazzfest lineup had been announced, an evening featuring banjo great Bela Fleck backed up by his original Flecktones.
For the uninitiated, Bela Fleck is the most outrageously talented banjo player imaginable, and not just because he has an eternity of great bluegrass chops up his sleeve (which he does). Rather, his genius lies in his ability to take his clichéd instrument on a journey around the musical planet far from it’s roots and then back again with seamless virtuosity, easily stepping from jazz to prog-rock to Bach violin partitas in a way that no banjo player has done before.
And when he does this with his long-time band the Flecktones he is flanked by one of the hottest living bass players and unquestionably the world’s greatest drumitar player (okay, he’s the world’s only drumitar player but he’s still pretty amazing) in the brother/brother team of Victor Wooten and Futureman.
I had expected to see saxophonist Jeff Coffin on stage with the Flecktones at this show – thinking incorrectly that he was one of the founding members of the band – but a friend at the show told me that he had been scooped up by The Dave Matthews Band. Instead, harmonica player and keyboardist (and one of the group’s actual founding members, as I was further informed) Howard Levy was back on tour with Bela, after having been absent from the band for so long that I had never seen him before.
It was a great show, and how could it not be? It was another one of those concerts so heavily stacked with instrumental talent that the musicians would have to work pretty hard to screw it up. Of course it wasn’t nearly as good as Jerry Douglas’ shockingly amazing (and admittedly very Flecktone-esque) set that I had seen two nights previous, but it was still pretty great.
Afterwards I ducked into the late-night tent and watched in shocked awe as Tanya Tagaq led her band through an hour-long nonstop improvisation that was guttural, primal, convulsive, animalistic, and very, very sexual. It was truly unlike anything I’ve ever seen before, including the times I’ve seen Tanya Tagaq before. The sounds and movements emanating from that small demure woman were both unbearably primal and impossible to look away from. In the end I found it so utterly intense I had to leave.
In my younger days I could easily handle that level of groundbreaking sonic shakeup but hey, by this time I was fifty years old. So I went home.
Todd Man Out 