A beautiful dialect: late night jams at TD Ottawa Jazz Festival

The latest issue of DownBeat magazine is the publication’s 80th anniversary issue. A remarkable achievement for any magazine, let alone one targeted at such a narrow demographic as jazz fans. In it, rather than looking back at the past 80 years, they decide to look at the present and future of jazz, listing, in no particular order, “The 80 Coolest Things in Jazz Today.” Number 55 is “The Jam Session.”

This inspired me to finally check out the late night jams that happen every night at 10:30 as part of the TD Ottawa Jazz Festival. This year they are held in a bar at the Novotel Hotel and are co-organized by bassist John Geggie. John is a very busy bassist in Ottawa whom everyone in the jazz scene knows. He is also an instructor at the Crane School of Music.

The jams are open to all who wish to play, but the hope is that well-known touring musicians who have just played a set at the festival will stop by the jam. This past Wednesday seemed like a good night to see why this is such a popular nightly event. There were three players who had played earlier in the evening that I hoped might sit in for a tune or two. To my great delight, one of them showed up.

Dennis Mackrel is a veteran of the Count Basie band. In fact, he was the last drummer Count Basie hired before he died in 1984. He later went on to direct the band for years. I was lucky enough to interview Dennis back in October 2012 before a Basie Band concert in Brockville, Ontario. He had played earlier in the evening on the main stage in Confederation Park with the fantastic Toronto-based tenor saxophonist Kirk MacDonald. Bonus: Kirk showed up for the jam session too.

The whole band played great and communicated on a very high level, though they’d never played together in this grouping. It was a joy to hear, and reminded me for the thousandth time this week why jazz is so special. If music is the universal language, then the jam session is a dialect of that language that not everyone understands. But those who speak it, and those who hear it, know that it is a beautiful dialect indeed.

 

Tags: arts, jazz, Joel Hurd, music, ottawa jazz festival