Legendary U.S. tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins will open this year's Vancouver International Jazz Festival. (Pascal Guyot/AFP/Getty Images)
In many ways, jazz has hobbled through the first years of the new century. In Canada, big cities struggle to keep their few, full-time venues alive; once-venerable clubs have closed or started to explore new, non-jazz booking policies. In the United States, the genre hasn’t cracked four per cent of nationwide CD sales since the early 1990s.
But this isn’t the whole story. Over the past three decades, Canada has carved out an especially dynamic jazz-fest circuit, from Halifax to Kaslo, B.C., from sprawling big-city events to small, straight-ahead affairs, with its bookends — in small-town Quebec (Victoriaville) and Ontario (Guelph) — rated among the edgiest (and most forward-thinking) festivals anywhere on the continent. Taken together, Canadian jazz fests are a kind of national antidote to the genre’s creeping irrelevance.
So how do you rejuvenate a style slipping out of fashion? Break down barriers (world music, techno and pop long ago joined the “jazz”-fest roster), throw open city streets and parks and get a fabulous pool of players, domestic and foreign, criss-crossing the country. Canada’s touchstone events — Montreal and Vancouver, in most critics’ eyes — do something deceptively simple: they pose questions and they entertain. They’re musical laboratories and they’re parties. Their success is itself an argument: for how vital (and vibrant) this hybrid art, in all its 21st-century variations, can be.
Festival International de Jazz de Montréal
June 28 to July 8
Description:
Forget about just Canada — after 28 years, the FIJM has become one of the world’s irreplaceable music festivals. It’s an enormous undertaking in every way: from its budget (more than $20 million in 2007) to its crowds (approximately two million in each of the past two years) to its musicians (more than 2,500 this summer). When the streets around Place des Arts turn into a pedestrian mall, the only reasonable comparison becomes New Orleans’s Mardi Gras or Rio de Janeiro’s Carnival. Montreal may have been one of the first festivals to go beyond even the most liberal definition of jazz (Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Rickie Lee Jones and the Cowboy Junkies with Ron Sexsmith and ex-Band keyboardist Garth Hudson are among this year’s highlights), but serious musicians still revere the FIJM’s programming. For every jazz royal appearing in 2007 (from trumpeter Wynton Marsalis to bassist Dave Holland), there’s an obscure gem (guitarist David Torn) or a curatorial master stroke. Where else would you find nine concerts dedicated solely to ECM, Manfred Eicher’s German record label.
Memorable moment:
Just one? OK, how about guitarist Pat Metheny’s free performance for the festival’s 10th anniversary: a crowd of more than 100,000 packed into a three-block stretch downtown. Or in that same year, 1989, a series of eight concerts (with seven different groups) led by bassist Charlie Haden, including some of modern music’s most celebrated names, tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson, trumpeter Don Cherry, pianist Paul Bley and drummers Jack DeJohnette, Paul Motian and Ed Blackwell.
Website: www.montrealjazzfest.com
John Scofield (far left) joins the trio of, left to right, Billy Martin, Chris Wood and John Medeski at Toronto's jazz fest. (Danny Clinch/Toronto Jazz Festival)
TD Canada Trust Toronto Jazz Festival
June 22 to July 1
Description:
Despite its history of predictable and deeply conservative programming, the former Downtown Jazz Festival is still one of the country’s largest and most talked about events. And that hasn’t changed in 2007. Sure, it’s dipping into the city’s newest venues — Live@Courthouse and the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts — but it’s also going back to a series of familiar blue-chip headliners. Pianists Herbie Hancock (a last-minute replacement for Oscar Peterson, who is ill), Keith Jarrett and Dave Brubeck will perform at the Four Seasons Centre, Toronto’s new opera house. But the bulk of the action comes under the tent at Nathan Phillips Square, where the ever-present guitarist John Scofield returns (with a groove trio, Medeski, Martin & Wood, and a co-op, Trio Beyond, including Jack DeJohnette and keyboardist Larry Goldings). So, too, does singer Holly Cole. A city hall highlight might be the United Trombone Summit with Slide Hampton, Steve Turre, Wycliffe Gordon and Fred Wesley. While Toronto keeps to its comfort zone, it’s also thrown up a real jazz-fest oddity this summer: the arty singer-songwriter Sean Lennon, son of John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
Memorable moment:
Sixty-nine-year-old saxophonist Wayne Shorter’s quartet at Nathan Phillips Square in 2003. One of those extraordinary moments when the state of the art suddenly reveals itself, as it did during this exuberant (and large-scale) outdoor performance.
Website: www.tojazz.com
TD Canada Trust Vancouver International Jazz Festival
June 22 to July 1
Description:
Since its first full-blown international jazz festival in 1986, Vancouver has always combined the safe, solid acts of a big-city bash with the adventuresome improv of a small European event. Consider this year’s opening night, where you can choose between a fabled American tenorman (Sonny Rollins), an under-the-radar Berlin innovator (pianist Aki Takase), a classic jazz singer (Tierney Sutton) and a Montreal DJ (Amon Tobin). The VIJF is hefty — more than 400 shows this year and an overall attendance expected to top 500,000 — and spreads all over town. Each weekend there are free, self-contained mini-fests — in Gastown, Yaletown and Granville Island — with their own wild mix, from contemporary salsa to old-fashioned swing.
For the cognoscenti, however, it’s Vancouver’s peerless taste for European improv that sticks out. Dutch, British and Scandinavian musicians were programmed here long before other North American festivals. In 2007 Amsterdam’s ICP Orchestra returns; three days of performances and workshops have been built around pianist Misha Mengelberg’s seminal ensemble. Oslo’s Jazzland label is again featured (led by pianist Bugge Wesseltoft), plus the VIJF’s unique mix-and-match sessions with local and international improvisers.
Memorable moment:
June 27, 1986: one of the most bizarre, and talked about, moments in recent jazz history. During trumpeter Miles Davis’s performance at the inaugural VIJF, Wynton Marsalis arrived on stage, unannounced and uninvited. The two giants had been attacking each other in the press for years. When Marsalis started to play, Davis cut him off and demanded he leave. It was the only time they ever appeared on the same stage.
Website: www.coastaljazz.ca
Greg Buium is a Vancouver writer.
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