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Following another killer Canada Day, on July 2nd, 2010 I hopped on my bike and rode through a pleasant Friday evening down to the Ottawa jazz festival. I bought myself a beer and joined a gaggle of friends beneath the jazz tree from where we all enjoyed a concert starring James Farm, a spanking-new quartet led by modern jazz sax phenom Joshua Redman (along with Aaron Parks, Matt Penman, and Ari Hoenig). It was a great show that I mostly paid attention to in between short snippets of whispered socializing and several trips to the beer line (and sometimes both simultaneously). But pay attention I did, as I was rather interested in this Joshua Redman fellow ever since my friend Dave donated a copy of Redman’s 1995 album Spirit of the Moment to my shared household. And then, after a hundred minutes of nonstop instrumental jazz quagmires delivered and solved by four skilled players (and a couple more beers) I somehow shunned Bonobo in the late night tent and booked it home.
Now, you’ve probably read a few of these ticket stories of mine by now. If so you probably recognize several elements of that last paragraph; the style, references to the weather, how I got to-and-or-from the venue, if and how I was interested in the artist in question…now let me tell you how I got there.
First off, if you think I remember the weather for each of the 1,200+ concerts I’ve been to then you’re crazy. Sure, I remember when it poured rain as David Byrne sang Burnin’ Down the House at the Ottawa jazzfest, I remember the distant lightning flashes over the city of Denver when I saw The Dead at Red Rocks, and I totally remember baking in the scorching sun during Phish’s afternoon set in Palm Springs, California. But Friday, July 2nd, 2010 at the Ottawa jazz festival? No way. I got that weather info from good old timeanddate.com, a website that I regularly use to help jar my concert memories. After just a few clicks I knew that July 2nd that year was a Friday, and that after a sunny afternoon the evening had maintained a high of 25°C with a slight breeze from the northeast. On sunny days I always rode my bike to the festival. I already knew that Canada Day had been killer – they always are – so there’s half of my first sentence right there. And if the weather was pleasant (and the internet tells me it was) I would pretty much always beeline it to the beer line and I would always-always-always go straight from the beer line to my spot under the big tree behind the soundboard. On any given night I could always count on the fact that if I knew anyone at the festival I would find them underneath that tree*.
My concert book tells me that I saw James Farm that night and when I wrote it down all those years ago I added Joshua Redman’s name in parenthesis. Bam, there’s the entire first sentence finished – and a long one at that. I’m on my way.
I think that I may have already admitted that I don’t remember this concert at all. In fact, any snippets of memory that may exist from this night that are bouncing around my head may very well be completely made up so I did next what I always do in that case: I check youtube for any live footage of the group, preferably from the same tour and ideally from the exact show that I was at. While I’m listening to whatever I manage to find I usually do a quick scan of the artist’s wikipedia page and I always check setlist.fm. I have the Ottawa Bluesfest and the TD Ottawa Jazz Festival** setlist pages bookmarked. It took me hours and hours but I finally finished adding every single concert I’ve attended to my setlist.fm profile and in doing so I added a whole whack of shows to their database along the way (username: velvet). The info I can access by having all of my shows in their database is remarkably helpful when I’m writing these things (even if the setlist.fm platform is woefully user-grumpy).
Oh, and of course I always check concert and festival programs if I have them. I’ve saved many of the programs I’ve gotten my hands on but overall I spend more time cursing myself for the ones I didn’t keep than actually utilizing the ones that I did. However it’s because of my festival program that I knew that Bonobo had played the late night tent on this evening, and given that I didn’t write “Bonobo” in my ticket book I know I must have skipped it.
Then I cap the paragraph with the presumption that I went straight home after the show. Sure that’s only a guess, but who cares anyway? It ties the paragraph together, and no harm done.
For the rest I just latch onto something – anything – that comes to mind when I think of the artist, which in this case is the distinct memory that my friend Dave McGillivary was all hot on discovering Joshua Redman and he left a copy of the CD at our place. It ain’t much but that’s all I had so I used it.
The “…instrumental jazz quagmires…” bit is just space-filling meaningless jive-talking; basically just soloing with syllables instead of scales. Passages or paragraphs (or even entire stories) that utilize such stylistic snippets aren’t meant to mean anything, they are crackers to slip the rozzer the droopsy in snide, they are comb in sin delti, they are the red wheel barrow…these are Rorschach tests; word blotches whose meanings come from the viewer rather than the creator. And the more you see of those the less you should presume that I remember about the concert or event I’m presumably writing about.
Which I suppose brings me to the final resource of we, the memory-challenged: creativity. I’m not saying I make stuff up about the shows – I don’t – but man, when I have to fill a page on a subject I can’t remember it forces me to get pretty creative. Which is why I write these thing, really. The fact that I didn’t write these concert memories as they happened is one of my sadder life regrets and I’ve realized that writing them retroactively in no way rectifies that wrong. In truth, these stories are nothing more than writing exercises, and in that regard the less I remember, the better.
And there, my friends, is your tour behind the curtain. I hope you’re not too disappointed.***
*I swear, if they ever cut that tree down I want to have a guitar made out of it. That’s some musical wood right there.
**You may have noticed that I never refer to it as the “TD Ottawa Jazz Festival”, preferring either “Ottawa jazz festival” or “Ottawa jazz fest” or some other non-name moniker, whereas with the Ottawa Bluesfest or the Festival international de Jazz de Montréal (and virtually all other fests) I always make a point of writing the festival’s full capitalized name. It’s because of the corporate sponsorship, of course. I just couldn’t bear to sit here typing “TD” all the time, so I don’t.
***And oh, the asterisks! They are the home of the tangent, the land of frivolous word counts, the sidebar for the vertically challenged, the saviour of a piece with no middle and the end of a piece with no end. Oh, how I love the asterisks****! They are like literary Get Out of Jail Free cards. Right?
Right?!?
****(Almost as much as I love the parenthesis [which most people tend to conflate with “brackets”].)
Todd Man Out 