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June 26th, 2014 was just an excellent night of good, fun times at Ottawa’s fantastic jazz festival.
First up was arguably the biggest treat of the day, a concert in the wide and majestic Dominion-Chalmers Church starring the incomparable Bela Fleck accompanied by a neo-classical string quartet called Brooklyn Rider. Though Fleck is known for his upbeat jazz-prog banjo pyrotechnics I have seen him play straight-up Bach partitas and other things that hint at his forays into the classical masters, and while this wasn’t that it was certainly something else.
Ethereal and perfectly executed, technical and emotional, disciplined and playful. harmonically complex and simply beautiful, the breathless ninety minutes of sonic feasting was a heavy warmup for the headlining act on the main stage out in Confederation Park. And so it was that after Fleck’s reverent concert many of us trudged across the street, grabbed a plastic cup or two full of suds and found a patch of grass upon which to dance off Bela’s cerebral offering. For the next act would attack not our musical brains but our shaking buttocks. Yes friends, I give you one of the most powerful funk groups ever to grace FM radio, Earth, Wind & Fire.
Yes, Earth, Wind & Fire! These guys don’t need an Oxford comma, they got the funk instead! Gosh, there must have been a dozen or more people on stage, and all of them slappin’ or blowin’ on ancient ’70’s grooves that never died. It was great.
And if that wasn’t enough, New Orleans’ iconic Dirty Dozen Brass Band closed out the night with a blaring set in the late-nite tent. When you hear the force of their playing the fact that there is notably less than a dozen players in the band is easily forgiven; if there were any more people on stage we’d all be deaf.
So yeah, another excellent evening at jazz fest. Live music is the best.
Todd Man Out 